The Memphis Jug Band

The Memphis Jug Band ranks among the most influential ensembles working in the jug band idiom throughout the 1920s and the opening years of the 1930s. Its shifting roster at various points included Will Shade, Will Weldon, Hattie Hart, Charlie Polk, Walter Horton, and additional musicians. Guitarist and harpist Will Shade assembled the Memphis Jug Band in Memphis’s Beale Street district during the middle of the 1920s. Several years after the ensemble’s inception, Shade secured a recording agreement with Victor Records in 1927. Across the following seven years, he and the group cut nearly 60 sides for the company. In that span, Big Walter Horton, Furry Lewis, and Casey Bill Weldon each moved through the lineup. Shade supplied consistent leadership amid every change in personnel. The band’s performances mixed blues, ragtime, vaudeville, folk, and jazz into an exuberant, good-humored whole. That buoyant character sustained both the musicians and their releases in the public ear through the early 1930s. Although the group’s appeal declined steeply by the mid-1930s, Shade kept directing successive versions of the Memphis Jug Band until his death in 1966.