Around 1890, rural southern musicians started playing songs on homemade instruments, starting a craze called “jug music,” which is a mixture of blues, ragtime, and Appalachian music. Jug bands are usually made up of a jug player who blows in to empty liquor jugs (”the poor man’s tuba”), and a mixture of traditional and homemade instruments, such as the washtub bass (”gutbucket”), washboard, stovepipe, tin cans, pots, pans, spoons and combs with tissue paper (kazoos). In the early days of jug band music, guitar and mandolins were sometimes made from the necks of discarded guitars fastened to large gourds, and banjos were often made from a guitar neck and a metal pie plate.
The history of jug bands is related to the development of the Blues, and the informal and energetic music of the jug bands contributed to the development of rock and roll, especially the San Francisco sound. Many Bay-area bands, such as The Grateful Dead, Country Joe & The Fish and Mungo Jerry started out as jug bands.
In the mid 1970s, some of the members of Commander Cody’s Lost Planet Airmen and Country Joe & The Fish, as well as Dan Hicks and other San Francisco area musicians, formed the Monday Night Wild Turkey Jug Band. The jug-jam sessions were about creating new tunes, new lyrics, or just new grooves with an acoustic, backwoods, jug sound.
In late 1977, they performed a Christmas Eve show as as The Three Wise Men +4 -1 Jug Band, and it became an annual tradition. In 1987, they released their first album, “Mistletoe Jam” (on green vinyl) and the group officially became The Christmas Jug Band. In 2002, they released “Uncorked,” which features the off-color song “Santa Lost a Ho.” This innuendo-laden ditty gives us a possible unwelcome insight into Santa’s off-duty activities.
LISTEN TO SONG:
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The_Christmas_Jug_Band_-_Santa_Lost_A_Ho.mp3
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