“For the second set of sessions, I said: ‘Let’s do something different than the original. Let’s bring Jimmy Kweskin down here’.”
Geoff Muldaur did just that.
“Kweskin was a hero of Bruton’s; that’s how he got started,” he explains. “When he heard Jimmy start to pick, Stephen’s face lit up.”
That’s the nickel version of how Kweskin came to record in Austin, a town that’s paid homage to him over the decades in bands from the Waller Creek Boys with Janis Joplin and Powell St. John to Greezy Wheels, the Asylum Street Spankers, and White Ghost Shivers. You could even connect the Jim Kweskin Jug Band to the 13th Floor Elevators via the titular instrument.
In 1963 on the Cambridge-Boston folk circuit, Kweskin’s vision of music was radical and irreverent to purists. Rural blues, Appalachian folk, Southern country, ragtime, string band music, all of it funneled through the Jug Band’s free-spirited performances into a sound that became one of the bases of Americana roots music. Their first LP, Unblushing Brassiness for Vanguard Records, can be considered a hallmark in the history of folk.
Kweskin headed up the Jug Band, whose members shifted around over the years but largely focused on him, Geoff Muldaur, and a sweet-voiced young singer named Maria D’Amato, who soon married Muldaur and took his name. They were joined by a charismatic banjo player named Mel Lyman, whose cultlike philosophy and Boston commune worked its way into the Jug Band’s demise in the late 1960s.
Kweskin today performs by himself, with Muldaur, and with other friends. He also teaches finger-picking guitar techniques via YouTube, an appropriately irreverent venue for Kweskin the rebel folkie.
Kweskin Teaching Guitar via YouTube
Kweskin Performing With Muldaur
This article appears in February 19 • 2010.