Memphis Jug Band › Similar Artists

Uncle Dave Macon - 82% match to Memphis Jug Band

David Harrison Macon, 7 October 1870, Smart Station, Warren County, Tennessee, USA, d. 22 March 1952, Readyville, Tennessee, USA. Macon’s family moved to Nashville when his father, a Confederate captain in the Civil War, bought the city’s Broadway Hotel. Macon learned to play the banjo and acquired songs from the vaudeville artists who stayed at the hotel. He marri Read more

Henry Thomas - 75% match to Memphis Jug Band

1874, Big Sandy, Texas, USA, d. c.1930. One of the oldest black folk artists to record during the 20s, Thomas’ highly individual repertoire of rags, breakdowns, church songs and ballads is of considerable importance to musicologists seeking to document the milieu from which the blues developed. Born to ex-slaves on a sharecropping farm in east Texas, Thomas was more tha Read more

Buell Kazee - 72% match to Memphis Jug Band

29 August 1900, Burton Fork, Magoffin County, Kentucky, USA, d. 31 August 1976. Kazee, a banjo-playing minister, has been described as ‘the greatest white male folk singer in the United States’. Charles Wolfe considered him the ‘epitome of the Kentucky mountain songster... a high, tight, ‘lonesome’ voice, accompanied only by a banjo ‘geared’ Read more

Dock Boggs - 62% match to Memphis Jug Band

Moran Lee Boggs, 7 February 1898, Norton, Virginia, USA, d. 7 February 1971. Boggs was known for his unusual banjo style, which he learned from a black musician in Virginia. The technique involved a lower tuning of the banjo. Despite Boggs’ interest in music, his devoutly religious wife frowned on music as a profession, so he continued playing as a hobby. Boggs had reco Read more

Blind Boy Fuller - 60% match to Memphis Jug Band

Fulton Allen, 1908, Wadesboro, North Carolina, USA, d. 13 February 1941, USA. One of a large family, Fuller learned to play the guitar as a child and had begun a life as a transient singer when he was blinded, either through disease or when lye water was thrown in his face. By the late 20s he was well known throughout North Carolina and Virginia, playing and singing at count Read more

Sleepy John Estes - 59% match to Memphis Jug Band

John Adams Estes, 25 January 1899, Ripley, Tennessee, USA, d. 5 June 1977, Brownsville, Tennessee, USA. This influential blues singer first performed at local house-parties while in his early teens. In 1916 he began working with mandolin player Yank Rachell, a partnership that was revived several times throughout their respective careers. It was also during this formative pe Read more

Tampa Red - 56% match to Memphis Jug Band

Hudson Woodbridge aka Whittaker, 8 January 1904, Smithville, Georgia, USA, d. 19 March 1981, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Tampa Red was raised in Tampa, Florida, by his grandmother Whittaker’s family, hence his nickname. By the time of his 1928 recording debut for Vocalion Records, he had developed the clear, precise bottleneck blues guitar style that earned him his billing, Read more

Victoria Spivey - 55% match to Memphis Jug Band

15 October 1906, Houston, Texas, USA, d. 3 October 1976, New York City, New York, USA. Spivey was recording at the age of 19, and enjoyed early hits with ‘Black Snake Blues’, ‘Dope Head Blues’ and ‘T.B. Blues’, all sung in her unmistakable nasal, acidic tones. She worked as a songwriter for a St. Louis based publishing company in the late 20s, a Read more

Frank Stokes - 53% match to Memphis Jug Band

1 January 1888, Whitehaven, Tennessee, USA, d. 12 September 1955, Memphis, Tennessee, USA. Stokes was raised in Mississippi, taking up the guitar early in life. He worked on medicine shows, and in the streets of Memphis in the bands of Will Batts and Jack Kelly. By 1927, when Stokes and his fellow guitarist Dan Sane made their first records as the Beale Street Sheiks, they w Read more

Furry Lewis - 52% match to Memphis Jug Band

Walter Lewis, 6 March 1893, Greenwood, Mississippi, USA, d. 14 September 1981, Memphis, Tennessee, USA. Furry Lewis was a songster, a blues musician, a humorist and an all-round entertainer. Raised in the country, he picked up the guitar at an early age and moved into Memphis around 1900 where he busked on the streets. After he ran away from home, he had experience working o Read more

Mississippi Sheiks - 52% match to Memphis Jug Band

This musical combination flourished between 1930 and 1935, during which time they recorded more than 80 tracks for various ‘race’ labels. The Sheiks was a string band made up of members and friends of the Chatmon family, and included Lonnie Chatmon aka Lonnie Chatman/Lonnie Carter (guitar/violin), Sam Chatmon aka Sam Chatman/Sam Carter (10 January 1897, Bolton, Mis Read more

Bascom Lamar Lunsford - 50% match to Memphis Jug Band

Memphis Minnie - 49% match to Memphis Jug Band

Lizzie Douglas, 3 June 1897, Algiers, Louisiana, USA, d. 6 August 1973, Memphis, Tennessee, USA. Raised in Walls, Mississippi, Memphis Minnie learned banjo and guitar as a child, and ran away from home at the age of 13 to play music in Memphis; she worked for a time with Ringling Brothers Circus. When in Mississippi, she played guitar with Willie Brown, and in the 20s made a Read more

Blind Blake - 47% match to Memphis Jug Band

Bukka White - 45% match to Memphis Jug Band

Booker T. Washington White, 12 November 1906, Houston, Mississippi, USA, d. 26 February 1977, Memphis, Tennessee, USA. White learned guitar and piano in his teens, and hoboed from 1921, playing blues with artists such as George ‘Bullet’ Williams. In the mid-30s White was a boxer and baseball pitcher. He recorded for Victor Records in 1930, a largely unissued sessio Read more