I got all tied up in the world
Sometimes the world got tangled up in me
but there was always this old music
the rocking of the song
sing loud & strong & you just can’t go wrong
-Maurice Greenia, Old Lost Jug Band Song, for Tim Knoll, from the Poetic Express
I was recently falling down a Mimi & Richard Farina rabbit hole online & I just could not get the gorgeous song “Pack Up Your Sorrows” out of my head. Where did I learn that song, though, not from them. I learned that song in the late 1980s from a local Jug Band in my feral bicycle-riding, cheap-apartment & group house & pre-Wayne State gap years in Woodbridge & the Corridor in the heart of Detroit.
You know, I love all the “I got to old-time & folk through punk rock” narratives, & I sometimes like to pretend I am part of it, because I kinda traced it with my mind, watching crusty travelers bust out banjos & fiddles & such back in the late 1990s & early 2000s. But if I am honest, I never entirely left folk music & never wanted to.
Even if my earliest roots were more Joan Baez & John Denver than my later passions for Utah Phillips & Ani diFranco or even later getting older, the folk was always in me, with later discoveries of songs hunted by Harry Smith & Alan Lomax, not to mention church camp campfires, molded later into drunk stoner campfires, everyone busting out their acoustic guitars somewhere along the way. Roots music (which includes folk but also gospel & blues) is my river & my ocean, with rock & pop & everything else coming from there ultimately, from some much deeper source.
There’s this one folk music junk drawer that I am only recently reminding myself of, with an old wheezy & warbly cassette tape, one profound folk music moment for me was simultaneously surrounded on all sides by punk & psychedelic, by garage & metal, by world beat & ska, as my Detroit neighborhood spawned such a diverse & creative cauldron.
But the Cass Corridor I moved to in the late 1980s was a portal, a visionary village, gritty bohemian enclave inside a larger decaying & not-yet-gentrified city. There upon arrival at 20-years-old, I had a particular taproot between the Food Co-op where I worked stocking produce & shelves & ringing at the register, at Cass & Willis (formerly & later Cobb’s Corner), & at the Unitarian Church, a few blocks north.
The Unitarian Church had a sprawling attic loft that doubled as a caretakers’ collective where the building & custodial staff successfully bartered their labor for reduced rent, taking good care of some basic chores around the building. That was a whiff of heaven, a wild & weedy scene, from all I remember & it forever got its hippy aura & aroma in me. Like any boho outpost on our continent, they had the old-time music thing that loves to crop up in weird ways. The Don’t Look Now Jug Band were the Unitarian Church & Food Co-Op “house band,” that we would also find at our delicious neighborhood street fair the Dally In The Alley.
When I wrote about the Jug Band in a rambling free-form psychotropic essay-review of the 1988 Dally, I saw their purely acoustic unplugged performances as a kind of statement about the primitivist aesthetic I was simultaneously learning from the neighborhood’s anarchist environmentalist crowd & our protests against the trash incinerator being built in our community. One of the only old Jug Band flyers I could find was one I made from a benefit for our civil disobedience defendants, the Evergreen 19, an all night affair hosted by the Community Concert Series, our neighborhood's convergence of all ages, all genres, & all flavors of local freaks.
Putting on the weary old cassette, I am reminded that they introduced me to really important parts of the American songbook. I first heard all of these truly iconic American songs, some whose lineage I would only discover much later, performed live around the neighborhood & on that cassette by the Jug Band:
“Mole In The Ground” by Bascom Lamar Lunsford
“Pack Up Your Sorrows” by Mimi & Richard Farina
“Euphoria” by the Holy Modal Rounders
“Plastic Jesus” by Ed Rush and George Cromarty
The Don’t Look Now Jug Band always had a large lineup & it rotated significantly over the years.
In my earliest encounters with the Jug Band, I always considered the late Tim Knoll the ringleader & curator, but in some of these pictures I dug up, no Tim. Eden Winter, Maryann Angelini, & James Knoll were hardcore regulars. Surrealist pamphleteer & folk artist Maurice Greenia would join. My friends such as Mary Richards & Karin Friedemann would play fiddle. Then I see one with Ralph Koziarski on clarinet. There is another jug band lineage with early member Bill Carney who is still active today in the NYC jug band scene. Cobbling this together, I welcome any & all additions & corrections!
I am also seeking more photos & old flyers & a copy of their CD that came out in the early 2000s that I am not sure I ever heard! Or tips or reminders or recordings of other adjacent Corridor folk music!
There’s not a lot extant regarding the unique Detroit contributions of Don’t Look Now Jug Band on the internet, & I realize the larger American jug band tradition is something much more vast we could talk about, with deep southern roots in places like Memphis. I was able to find a few old YouTubes of the Don’t Look Now Jug Band that surely brought me back, & I have ripped a sampling of songs from that old wheezy cassette!
By their own description in the 1988 Dally program, they were an:
"all-acoustic band playing any music fit for a juggy mood: traditional American folklore, blues, country, bluegrass, R&B, cajun, zydeco, & pop songs, & even yes indeed originals. The 15 member (size varied from show to show) provides a rich acoustic big band sound led by a vigorous rhythm section made of the traditional jug band 'instruments' such as washboard, washtub-bass, & jug, backed by bones & triangle..."
Listen:
Mole In The Ground in Don't Look Now Jug Band - Live In The Attic
Watch:
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