The First Annual Great Northeast Jug Band Festival

“The real history of music is not respectable. Far from it. Neither is it boring. Breakthroughs almost always come from provocateurs and insurgents, and they don’t just change the songs we sing, but often shake up the foundation of society.”—Ted Gioia During the 1960s folk music craze, I studied guitar in Cambridge with Jim Kweskin, leader of his own crackling, tightly woven Jim Kweskin Jug Band. This revival group consisted of a rackety collection of folk players that featured, among others, the bluesy vocals of Geoff Muldaur and Maria D’Amato (who would become Maria Muldaur), plus the in-the-pocket jug and washtub bass of Fritz Richmond. Geoff Muldaur’s washboard sounded like somebody shakin’ a box o’ bolts. Among the “folkies,” the Kweskin band focused on something other than just coal miner strikes or English ballads to tear your heart out: they sat right down into the rhythm, the groove, the swing. They bought me my ticket into the jazz heartbeat. Kweskin gave me tablature for his finger-style technique, and when I finally got it, I felt I had turned into some kind of god. It was all about swing rhythm, which embodies resonance. Ask anyone who has strutted in a New Orleans “Second Line.” In the moment of resolution, there’s no past or future—no “afterlife”—just what’s happening, now. As Daniel Levitin has written, “The thought of a musical