Good Time Music For Hard Times

I’m a huge fan of Maria Muldaur’s 1960s work with the Even Dozen Jug Band and Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band—- here, she’s back in the jug mode, and the results are pretty great. Her voice isn’t the high, razor-sharp thing it was decades ago—it’s pretty gravely and gruff, actually—but she makes it work. Each track is about as good as another.

1) * Upbeat jug band music. Nice washboard-centered percussion center. Midtempo. Not too surprising, but there’s a great breakdown at the bridge, punctuated with what sounds like a hotel-lobby-type bell being rung. Perhaps a little too goofy.
2) More of a ragtime/country blues beat. Midtempo. Guitar and jug stand out—really nice jug playing.
3) Oh, this is an even better arrangement. Fiddle, and heavy washboard. Midtempo. Fun mid-song scat, but could stand to be a little quicker.
4) An Emmett Miller song, with an appropriate Dixie brass backing. (Including the clarinet, which really makes a Dixieland band.) Quicker than midtempo. Terrific instrumental break at 3:00. Muldaur does a little yodel at end, nice to hear.
5) Less “jug,” more smooth folk. It’s nice smooth folk (and really, Muldaur’s voice these days is better for a smooth folk ballad than a jug stomper), but kind of bland. Saved by good scatting in fade-out.
6) *** Fiddle and jug, a spare jug band arrangement. That’s more like it. Slightly slow, but catchy. The song better accentuates Muldaur’s low register than the old stuff—yeah, her voice is pretty great here.
7) *** Duet with Dan Hicks, whose voice is a little too syrupy-slick for jug band. I don’t think it really works. Pleasant, but not much more. WAIT! It goes uptempo at 3:10, and it’s suddenly awesome! Muldaur and Hicks scat, ostensibly imitating animals (repeat: second half, awesome.).
8) Good midtempo jug band groove, heavy on the jug and fingerpicking. Mostly forgettable, but a good groove.
9) Uptempo. Another good jug arrangement—a little fuller here.
10) Exactly like the old Kweskin take, except she’s three octaves lower, and a little less energy on the fiddle breaks. Good, sure, but doesn’t compare to the Kweskin.
11) Slow delta blues dirge. Pre-FDIC tragedy.
12) ** Traditional country blues tune, retrofitted to sound pretty damned contemporary. (It’s the first jug song with an Obama reference, at any rate.)