Biographies

Gus Cannon: 1883 - 1979

During the jug band rage of the late 1920s Gus Cannon Jug Stompers surpassed all competition. Cannon full-range repertoire of musical traditions, from string band, ragtime, and country folk, to blues and pop ballads dictated the spirit. He was also a multi-talented instrumentalist, particularly fluid on fingerpicked banjo. The Stompers trump card was harmonica ace Noah Lewis blowing powerful, melodic rushes full of bluesy innovation. Their sound was bursting with frolic and feeling. Indispensable for any collection of rural traditional music.  Gus Cannon was born in Red Banks, Mississippi, the youngest of ten sons to sharecroppers. The Cannon boys were raised with fiddle and banjo music and brother Tom taught Gus some basics on both instruments. At the age of twelve, Gus and Tom moved to Clarksdale to pick cotton at a time when the Delta blues was beginning to take shape. Gus first took to the fiddle and the playing of Jim Turner, a part-time member of W.C. Handys local band. His first banjo was a makeshift instrument from an old guitar neck and a bread pan. He began by mimicking local musicians and learned to finger pick from a banjo player named Bud Jackson. Working in the fields by day and performing music at plantation dances at night, Cannon steadily refined his playing skills and repertoire of blues, minstrel, and string band songs. When the farming season wound down he took work with traveling minstrel and medicine shows, honing his craft and meeting other musicians like Jim Jackson and Robert Wilkins along the way. On one of his travels he met a teenage boy wailing on   harmonica on the road. His name was Noah Lewis, from Henning, Tennesse. Lewis powerful harp skills impressed Cannon immediately. When Cannon expressed an interest in playing together Lewis introduced him to a thirteen-year-old guitar player named Ashley Thompson. Lewis and Thompson had already been playing local dances and picnics with some success. They formed a string band trio and played small towns around Tennessee until 1913 when Cannon returned to the medicine show circuit. Cannon had always used Memphis as a stop off point, but during the 20s he began frequenting Beale Street music bars and saloons more regularly. Beale Street was a bonanza for jobs, musicians, songs, and all the excitement and debauchery a man could wish for. It was also the cradle of development for jug band ensembles. Jug band music had escalated since the turn of the century, with dashes of jazz, country, and pop, it  roots dipped in ragtime, the sound was still evolving by the mid-20s and meshing with blues. Men like Will Shade, Charlie Burse, Jack Kelly, and Cannon became band organizers. A Beale Street pool hall, owned by one Howard Yancy, was a headquarters for musicians to assemble and practice. Yancy usually acted as a booking agent. A bustling live music scene developed and jug band music branched out from Beale Street bars to neighborhood juke joints, city parks, private parties, store openings, and medicine shows. The music became popular with whites and blacks and encompassed a growing range of instruments. The requisite guitar, jug, and harmonica were intermixed or switched with such instruments as mandolin, banjo, piano, kazoo, and washboard. Will Shade Memphis Jug Band were the first Memphis outfit to become popular and secure a recording contract in 1927. By then Gus Cannon was veering more towards blues-based material and had already made some recordings that same year with Blind Blake under the moniker Banjo Joe and featuring the first example of bottleneck slide on a banjo. Based on the success of the Memphis Jug Band, Victor recording scout Ralph Peer approached Cannon about starting his own jug band. Cannon wasted no time in contacting his old string band mates, Noah Lewis and Ashley Thompson. As Lewis blew furious blues harp and Thompson handled guitar and vocal chores, Cannon plucked brightly on five-string banjo likewise blowing decorously into a paraffin can rigged by harness around his neck. In January of 1928 Cannon’s Jug Stompers recorded four sides: Minglewood Blues, Big Railroad Blues, Springdale Blues, and Madison St. Rag. With Lewis unexpected blues influence anchoring their good-timey ambience, the Jug Stompers had one up on the other jug bands in Memphis. Their initial sides sold well enough that they were asked to record again in September that year. Thompson never made it to the session and a guitarist named Elijah Avery was asked to fill in for the next ten sides. But Cannon was probably happier when he ran into an older colleague and guitarist Hosea Woods, from his medicine show days. Woods replaced Avery for consequent recordings and with his singing abilities and similar background in minstrel material the Jug Stompers ably continued recording until 1930. Some of their most novel and enduring music came from this line-up, including Walk Right In, Mule Get Up in the Alley, and Prison Walls Blues. By then the Great Depression had thrown a pall over the recording industry and the popularity of jug bands was diminishing. The Jug Stompers career ground to a halt. While the other Stompers withdrew to normal rural lives, Cannon played solo in and around Memphis for some years and supplemented his income with manual labor jobs. In 1956 he reappeared with an album for the Folkways label. Happy to oblige the demand for traditional folk and blues in the 1960s, he resumed performing at festivals and clubs. In 1963, a folk-pop group called the Rooftop Singers made Cannon Walk Right In a number one hit song. The Grateful Dead also paid homage with several versions of Jug Stompers songs, most notably, Minglewood Blues. Gus Cannon was ninety six years old when he passed away in 1979.

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