found: New Grove dict. of jazz(Jug band)
found: Allmusic website, Oct. 9, 2012(under country subgenres and styles - Traditional Country: Jug Band. Although jug band music is often associated with the folk traditions of rural, predominantly white Appalachia, it was in reality performed mostly by African-Americans in urban areas. Jug bands united Appalachian folk with blues, ragtime, and very early jazz; they are best known, of course, for their novel, do-it-yourself instrumentation. The jug in question was usually a whiskey jug, and a player blew across the mouth of the jug to produce pitches in the bass register. Jug bands usually featured at least one stringed instrument from the Appalachian tradition -- guitar, banjo, and/or fiddle -- and used a wide variety of everyday, easily available household objects for rhythmic accompaniment. The most common were the washboard (whose slats were struck and rubbed in a way analogous to a snare drum) and the metal washtub bass, which was usually equipped with a broomstick and clothesline that produced the sounds. Other possible percussion instruments included spoons, gut buckets, bones, and saw blades; additional melodic accompaniment might have included a harmonica, kazoo, or even comb and tissue paper -- whatever was available and economical, really. Jug band music originated in Louisville, Kentucky at the dawn of the 1900s, but found its greatest popularity in Memphis, Tennessee during the '10s and '20s, eventually spreading to Ohio and North Carolina as well.)
found: Wikipedia, Oct. 9, 2012(Jug band. A Jug band is a band employing a jug player and a mix of traditional and home-made instruments. These home-made instruments are ordinary objects adapted to or modified for making of sound, like the washtub bass, washboard, spoons, stovepipe and comb & tissue paper (kazoo). The term jug band is loosely used in referring to ensembles that also incorporate home-made instruments but that are more accurately called skiffle bands, spasm bands or juke (or jook) bands (see juke joint) because they are missing the required jug player; jug band music; Early jug bands were typically made up of African American vaudeville and medicine show musicians. Beginning in the urban south, they played a mixture of Memphis blues (even before it was formally called the blues), ragtime, and jazz music; The first jug bands to record were the Louisville and Birmingham jug bands. These bands played popular dance band jazz, using the jug as a novelty element; The Memphis area jug bands were more firmly rooted in country blues and earlier African-American traditions)
found: Jug band music popular again, via Cybergrass website, Oct. 9, 2012(While bluegrass and country music are more commonly associated with Kentucky, another genre with deep roots in the state is jug band music. Many music historians cite Louisville, where jugs abounded due to the city's bourbon distilling industry, as the birthplace of this light-hearted musical form that spread up and down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers around the turn of the 20th century. ... Jug band music is played on a combination of instruments, both makeshift (whiskey jugs, washboards, washtub basins and kazoos) and traditional (fiddles, banjos and guitars). Originated by African-American street performers, jug band music gradually made its way from the streets of Louisville, Memphis and New Orleans to entertain upscale crowds at venues as varied as Churchill Downs, river-travelling steamboats and music halls and theaters as far away as Chicago, New York and Europe. Eventually, some of the top jug bands, such as the legendary Louisville Jug Band led by well-known performer Earl McDonald, made recordings that proliferated until the Great Depression of the 1930s and the negative impact of radio brought the original jug band era to a close. The sound influenced pioneers of blues music such as W.C. Handy of Henderson, Ky. and Jimmy Rogers. The infectious rhythms and homespun tunes of the original jug bands were resurrected in the 1960s by artists like Jim Kweskin, the Grateful Dead and others. Today, the music is popular in Europe, Australia and even Asia, where Japan's Old Southern Jug Blowers have recorded CDs memorializing the 1920s recordings of Earl McDonald.)
found: The new Harvard dict. of music, 1986(Jug band. (1) A small folk ensemble of the U.S. that includes various homemade instruments (e.g., washtub, washboard, and jug), along with a few conventional pitched instruments, particularly guitar and harmonica. (2) An ensemble of a type formed among black musicians in the southern U.S. in the 1920s and 30s, including a jug (played by blowing across its opening) and associated with the blues and some currents of jazz.)
