Jim Kweskin

The Jim Kweskin Jug Band brought an upbeat spirit to folk music. Over their five-year run, the ensemble turned pre-World War II rural sounds into the foundation for lively, humorous shows. Jim Kweskin created the group after discovering the Hoppers, a folk act whose washtub bassist was John “Fritz” Richmond. While studying at Boston University, Kweskin regularly caught the Hoppers at Cafe Yana in Harvard Square and picked up guitar fingerpicking techniques simply by observing the players’ hands. Once Richmond entered the U.S. Army for duty in Korea and Europe, Kweskin began circulating through additional Cambridge and Boston folk venues and soon performed English and Appalachian ballads in local coffeehouses.

Although he briefly relocated to California, Kweskin came back to Cambridge with his wife Marilyn and dog Agatha to resume performing. A February 3, 1963, double bill with blues devotee Geoff Muldaur at Boston’s Community Church marked a decisive moment. After finishing their separate sets, Kweskin and Muldaur joined forces for several numbers. When Vanguard Records’ Maynard Solomon offered Kweskin a band recording session, Kweskin immediately contacted Muldaur. Together with Richmond and banjo-harmonica player Mel Lyman, they formed the original Kweskin Jug Band, which Vanguard promptly signed after early success.

During a two-week engagement at New York’s Bottom Line, fiddler-vocalist Maria D’Amato of the Even Dozen Jug Band saw the group, fell for Muldaur, and accepted an invitation to relocate to Cambridge and join the Kweskin ensemble. D’Amato and Muldaur married soon afterward. Shortly after the band’s March 4, 1964, appearance on the nationally televised Steve Allen Show, Lyman departed and was succeeded by banjo specialist Bill Keith, recently of Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys.

The Kweskin Jug Band kept delivering its distinctive folk approach to wider audiences through spots on The Roger Miller Show and The Al Hirt Show. Although Kweskin intended a move to California, the group switched from Vanguard to Reprise and added virtuoso fiddler Richard Greene. Just as commercial breakthrough seemed imminent, Kweskin—who had settled into Lyman’s Fort Hill commune in a rundown Boston neighborhood—shaved off his signature mustache and declared the band finished.

Following the breakup, Kweskin worked solo and assembled the U & I Band in the mid-1980s. By 2003 he led the Jim Kweskin Band, featuring vocalist Samoa Wilson, on the Blix Street album Now and Again; the same label issued his 2009 solo effort Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think), again with Wilson. Richmond established himself as a respected recording engineer and producer. Geoff and Maria Muldaur released several notable duo albums before divorcing in the 1970s; Maria Muldaur later became the best-known alumna through her solo work. Keith renewed his collaboration with guitarist-vocalist Jim Rooney; together they contributed to each other’s recordings and helped form the Woodstock Mountain Revue. Lyman, who operated his commune as a cult, vanished under circumstances that remain unexplained.

After limited recording activity in the 1980s and 1990s, Kweskin grew prolific again in the twenty-first century, returning to the studio for the 2003 collaboration Now and Again with Samoa Wilson. In 2010 he joined Geoff Muldaur, Maria Muldaur, David Grisman, and John Sebastian on Jug Band Extravaganza, taped at a concert celebrating the modern jug-band revival. Kweskin’s In the 21st Century appeared in 2015, and the live set Come on In, documenting a performance with Meredith Axelrod, followed in 2016. Later that year Kweskin and Geoff Muldaur reunited for the studio album Penny’s Farm.