f50 “G
eoff Muldaur and I had already split the bill on a concert called ‘The Bittersweet Blues of Geoff Muldaur and the Goodtime Music of Jim Kwe- skin’, so I knew he was an excellent blues singer. I don’t sing blues really, so I needed somebody
to sing blues in the jug band because, if you form a jug band, at least part of your repertoire has to be blues, and so I asked Geoff. I needed a banjo player and Bob Siggins, who was the banjo player with the Charles River Valley Boys, which was a local bluegrass group, became the first banjo player on The Jug Band. Fritz Rich- mond was in California at the time and I called him up and I said ‘Hey Fritz we’re forming a jug band, you’ve got to come back to Boston, play the tub and learn how to play the jug’. And he did. He became a great jug player. He was an amazing washtub bass player, probably the best I’ve ever heard. And then Bruno Wolf – his real name was David Simon – was a friend of mine who played the har- monica, so that was the original line-up, that was the first band.”
“Vanguard Records was in New York so we went down there and recorded for them in 1963. Maynard Solomon acted as the producer, not that he knew anything about jug band music. I mean, we didn’t know anything about making records, so we were like fish out of water! But it worked out. We got great reviews and it sold pretty well. I was surprised how well people liked it. I had no idea when we made it whether anybody would buy it or even like it because we definitely weren’t a folk act, weren’t like the Kingston Trio or the Journeymen or any of those other folk acts. And we weren’t country music so it was hard to fit into that world. Luckily, in those days, folk encompassed a lot of different forms. The umbrella of folk music went all the way from Chicago blues to bluegrass and a lot of other musical forms. So a jug band fitted in folk clubs as well as any of them.”
By the time of the second album, released in 1965, the band had settled into its classic line-up with the addition of Maria D’Amato (Muldaur) on vocals and violin and Bill Keith on banjo. Keith was actu- ally replacing Mel Lyman, who had replaced Bob Siggins (who had left to pursue his career as a physicist). Mel Lyman contributes banjo to a couple of tracks and writes sleeve notes to the second album.
“Mel Lyman was in the band for about two years. He was a really
great banjo player but jug band was not his style of banjo, he played completely amazing old-timey banjo. Mel was both the harmonica and the banjo player and then, after about a year, he came to me and he said ‘… happy to be in the jug band but I really don’t enjoy playing banjo in this band, I’d much rather be the harmonica player.’ So, it was just fortunate that just at that time Bill Keith had just left Bill Monroe. I didn’t think there was a chance in hell, I mean, he was already a world famous bluegrass player, why would he join a jug band, but no harm in asking and, by God, he did. And he was with The Jug Band for the rest of the duration. He was our banjo player.”
“Manny Greenhill of Folklore Productions was our manager and agent for the first couple or so years, and then we started to feel like we could do better, get better gigs, so we switched to Albert Gross- man, who at the time was Dylan’s and Peter, Paul and Mary’s manag- er. He wanted us, so we went with him. Not so sure it was a good thing to do. On one hand we did get some pretty impressive gigs, he got us on television and he got us some big concert halls and he got us booked with all other acts, but people were starting to have expectations that we’d be some kind of act. All we wanted to do was play music, to have fun – we didn’t think of ourselves as a showbiz act. We didn’t have comedy routines, set patter and uniforms and all this other stuff. I saw people like Peter, Paul & Mary and the
The Jug Band at Newport in the mid-1960s – Mel Lyman, Maria Muldaur, Geoff Muldaur, Jim Kweskin, Bill Keith
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