Quick Take
Four bands including the Santa Cruz-based Trolley Drops come to Abbott Square on Aug. 17 for the Santa Cruz Jug Band Festival, highlighting an often overlooked genre in early 20th-century American folk music. It mixes traditional music with alternatives such as washboards, washtubs and, of course, jugs.
Jug-band music is a widely recognized genre of traditional American music. But it could just as easily have been called “washtub bass music” or “washboard music” or even “spoons music.”
On Sunday, Aug. 17, locals can dive into the genre with the first Santa Cruz Jug Band Festival, a free show at Abbott Square, featuring four accomplished jug bands.
The jug-band name, of course, applies to the unusual instrumentation of a style that dates back more than 100 years to the early 20th century. A jug in this context is what you think it is: a large earthenware or glass vessel that you can conceivably play — if you have the talent or the drive to practice — as a musical instrument, blowing into it much like you’d blow into a brass instrument.
Curiously, a jug is not necessarily required to play jug-band music. As a style, it refers to a certain gray area that falls between blues, jazz and ragtime, largely developed by African American musicians who used various household items in lieu of expensive horns, drums or stringed instruments. The style was repopularized in the 1960s and ’70s by such artists as Jim Kweskin, Maria Muldaur and even Jerry Garcia.
“Jug band music is two different things,” explained Peter Thomas. He is well known for his leadership in the Ukulele Club of Santa Cruz, but also plays with The Trolley Drops, one of the four bands playing at next weekend’s festival. “To some people, it’s just music played on toy instruments. And to other people, it’s a specific genre of music that came out of the 1910s and ’20s mostly around Memphis.”
The Trolley Drops have been performing locally and regionally for about a decade, said Thomas. The Drops focus on jug-band music in the second sense of the term: “We focus a lot on the repertoire rather than the instrumentation.”
Also performing at the festival is the Rivertown Skifflers, from the North Bay, and two groups from Oakland, the Quake City Jug Band and the Washboard Rhythm Co. Jug bands generally use traditional stringed instruments along with washtubs, washboards and jugs, and they are known to occasionally mix in even more unusual instruments like kazoos, toy pianos and musical saws.
Thomas said that jug bands largely began as Black musicians playing for largely white audiences at parties, and often contained risqué or salacious lyrics. Many contemporary jug bands pick up that tradition by including songs with mildly titillating double entendres.
“The front guy,” said Thomas, “usually sang and played the jug, too, because you had to have a really big voice to carry without amplification, and you had to have big powerful lungs to blow a jug.”
Santa Cruz’s Trolley Drops will mix banjo, guitar and mandolin with kazoos, washboards and spoons, as well as trumpet, trombone and clarinet, and the occasional accordion.
“When people come to our shows,” said Thomas, “they’re always happily surprised with how much fun they have, because fun is the key element from our point of view.”
The Santa Cruz Jug Band Festival takes place Sunday, Aug. 17, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Abbott Square in downtown Santa Cruz.
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