Mother Mc Cree's Uptown Jug Champions (album) - The Jug Band Tapes

The Jug Band Tapes

Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions was a jug band. Jug band music is a type of folk music that uses traditional musical instruments such as guitar, mandolin, and banjo, combined with home made instruments, including washtub bass, washboard, kazoo, and, eponymously, a jug, played by blowing into it as if it were a brass instrument. Jug bands were popular in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1960s, jug band music enjoyed somewhat of a resurgence as part of the American folk music revival. Jug bands of the 1960s often played popular music from the earlier jug band era, along with more contemporary folk and blues songs, as can be heard on the Mother McCree's album.

The performances on the album were recorded by Stanford University students Pete Wanger and Wayne Ott. They played the recordings on the folk music show "Live from the Top of the Tangent", which was broadcast on Stanford's FM radio station KZSU. The tapes were thought to be lost to history until Pete Wanger and his brother Michael found them in their mother's house in 1997 after she died and they were going through their things in the attic. They found enough material there for a whole album. The recordings were subsequently mastered for CD by Grateful Dead recording engineer Jeffrey Norman. Michael Wanger was a boyhood friend of Bob Weir, and wrote the liner notes for the CD.

Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions includes several songs that were later played in concert by the Grateful Dead — "Overseas Stomp" (also known as "Lindy"), "Ain't It Crazy" (a.k.a. "The Rub"), "On the Road Again", "The Monkey and the Engineer", and "Beat It On Down the Line".