From Van Ronk’s autobiography “The Mayor of MacDougal Street”:
"As for the jug band, that came about more or less by accident. One weekend Max Gordon, the owner of the Village Vanguard, was in Cambridge for some reason, and he walked by the Club 47 and saw this huge line of people waiting to get in to see the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. In his mind's eye he transposed this queue to 7th Avenue South, where he had his room, and visions of sugarplums started dancing in his head. So when he got back to New York, he called [music critic] Robert Shelton and said, "Are there any jug bands around town?" Bob said, "Well, yeah, but what you really ought to do is get hold of Dave Van Ronk and have him put one together." So he did, and I did. I called up a bunch of friends, and we formed the Ragtime Jug Stompers. Sam Charters was back in town, so he was our Pooh-Bah and Lord High Everything Else—he sang, arranged, and played washtub bass, washboard, jug, and occasionally would lend a hand on guitar. Barry Kornfeld played banjo and guitar. Artie Rose was on mandolin, and also played some fine Dobro. Finally, Danny Kalb, who had been a student of mine, played lead guitar and some very nice harmonica. (We also made him sing bass on "K.C. Moan," because he was the youngest and none of us wanted to do it.) It was a very flexible band because the musicians were all good enough to double or triple on various instruments, plus it had all the possibilities offered by kazoos and that sort of thing, so it was capable of more than one kind of sound."
Van Ronk also told writer Elijah Wald that "We did not play much of the typical jug band repertoire, we were more of a string ragtime outfit with trad jazz overtones... We rehearsed a hell of a lot, we took it damn seriously, and we put together some intricate arrangements of classic rags, which we played very carefully and note for note, but the rest of our repertoire was blues and jazz."
The album contained music written by Clarence Williams, Fats Waller, Bertold Brecht & Kurt Weil, Sonny Terry and others. After the Jug Stompers ceased to exist Rose, Kalb and Kornfeld formed The Folkstringers and continued to mine the vein of rag and jug band treasures, producing one album for Prestige Records.
“Dave Van Ronk and the Jug Stompers” was issued on CD in Japan in 2003 and is now available for download on Amazon.
