Gus Cannon stood out for his ability to handle a five-string banjo and jug at once, linking early blues to the minstrel and folk idioms that had come before. The ensemble he fronted in the twenties and thirties, Cannon's Jug Stompers, reached the peak of jug-band expression. Numbers they cut, above all the raggy “Walk Right In,” later became fixtures of the folk songbook, and Cannon himself kept recording and appearing in public through the 1970s.
He developed his technique without lessons on a homemade device fashioned from a frying pan and raccoon hide, absorbing material in the 1890s from older players, chief among them Mississippi’s Alec Lee. In the opening years of the twentieth century he worked the Memphis circuit with songster Jim Jackson and formed a lasting alliance with Noah Lewis, whose harmonica mastery anchored the Jug Stompers’ sound. From 1914 onward he traveled with a string of medicine shows that lasted into the 1940s, further refining both his style and his stock of songs.
His studio work opened with Paramount dates in 1927. Through the thirties he continued to record as a soloist and with his striking trio, which paired Noah Lewis with guitarists Hosea Woods or Ashley Thompson. Extra projects brought duets with Blind Blake and the earliest captured examples of slide banjo. Although he often had to take non-musical jobs, he kept performing, chiefly around Memphis. In 1956 he resumed recording with Folkways sessions and later joined other Memphis survivors such as Furry Lewis. Age gradually reduced his schedule in the seventies, yet he still made occasional appearances, sometimes seated in a wheelchair, until shortly before his death.
