Ragtime Blues Minglewood Cannon's Jug Stompers Recorded in Memphis on January 30, 1928
Minglewood Blues___Cannon's Jug Stompers ___ No
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Gus Cannon (
September 12, 1883 --
October 15,
1979) was an
American blues musician who helped to popularize jug bands (such as his own
Cannon's Jug Stompers) in the
1920s and
1930s. There is doubt about his birth year; his tombstone gives the date as 1874.
Born on a plantation at Red
Banks,
Cannon moved to
Clarksdale, Mississippi, then the home of
W. C. Handy, at the age of 12. Cannon's musical skills came without training; he taught himself to play using a banjo that he made from a frying pan and raccoon skin. He ran away from home at the age of fifteen and began his career entertaining at sawmills and levee and railroad camps in the
Mississippi Delta around the turn of the century.
While in Clarksdale, Cannon was influenced by local musicians
Jim Turner and
Alex Lee.
Turner's fiddle playing in W. C. Handy's band so impressed Cannon that he decided to learn the fiddle himself. Lee, a guitarist, taught Cannon his first folk blues, "
Po' Boy,
Long Ways from
Home", and showed him how to use a knife blade as a slide, a technique that Cannon adapted to his banjo playing.
Cannon left Clarksdale around 1907. He soon settled near
Memphis and played in a jug band led by Jim Guffin.He began playing in Memphis with
Jim Jackson. He met harmonica player
Noah Lewis, who introduced him to a young guitar player named
Ashley Thompson. Both
Lewis and Thompson would eventually become members of Cannon's Jug Stompers. The three of them formed a band to play parties and dances. In
1914 Cannon began touring in medicine shows. He supported his family through a variety of jobs, including sharecropping, ditch digging, and yard work, but supplemented his income with music.
Cannon began recording, as "
Banjo Joe", for
Paramount Records in
1927. At that session he was backed up by
Blind Blake.After the success of the
Memphis Jug Band's first records, he quickly assembled a jug band featuring Noah Lewis and Ashley Thompson (later replaced by
Elijah Avery). Cannon's Jug Stompers first recorded at the Memphis
Auditorium for the
Victor label in
January 1928.
Hosea Woods joined the Jug Stompers in the late 1920s, playing guitar, banjo and kazoo, and also providing some vocals.
Modern listeners can hear Cannon's Jug Stompers recording of "
Big Railroad Blues" on the compilation
album The Music Never Stopped:
Roots of the Grateful Dead.
Although their last recordings were made in
1930, Cannon's Jug Stompers were one of
Beale Street's most popular jug bands through the 1930s. A few songs Cannon recorded with Cannon's Jug Stompers are "
Minglewood Blues", "Pig Ankle
Strut", "
Wolf River Blues", "
Viola Lee Blues", "
White House Station" and "
Walk Right In" (later made into a pop hit by
The Rooftop Singers in the
1960s, and later a hit rock/pop version by Dr.
Hook in the
1970s). By the end of the 1930s, Cannon had effectively retired, although he occasionally performed as a solo musician.
He returned in
1956 to make a few recordings for
Folkways Records. In the "blues revival" of the 1960s, he made some college and coffee house appearances with
Furry Lewis and
Bukka White. He also recorded an album for
Stax Records in
1963, following the chart success of "Walk Right In", with fellow Memphis musician
Will Shade, the former leader of the Memphis Jug Band.
Cannon can
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