JIM KWESKIN +THE DOWN HILL STRUGGLERS

Jim Kweskin is probably best known as a singer and bandleader. He also created one of the bedrock guitar styles of the folk revival, adapting the ragtime-blues fingerpicking of artists like Blind Boy Fuller to the more complex chords of pop and jazz. He has maintained a remarkably consistent musical vision since his jug band days, continuing to explore traditional folk and blues with the sophisticated sensibility of a jazz musician and jazz with the communal simplicity of a folk artist. He has recorded solo ventures, as a member of the U and I band, and with U and I bandmate Samoa Wilson, and continues to perform widely in various formats. In recent years he and Geoff Muldaur have often appeared as a duo, revisiting and expanding on their Jug Band repertoire. Tonight Jim will be accompanied by banjo, fiddle, and acoustic guitar—The Down Hill Strugglers.

“The rock historian Ed Ward went so far as to place the Kweskin Band alongside the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Byrds as that period’s most influential groups.” – Alex Ward, The New York Times

“When it came to jug band music, razzmatazz jazz, and swinging spins on Piedmont blues back in the ’60s, Jim Kweskin was top dog. Jim Kweskin’s famed Jug Band hot-wired an entire movement that still has a certain impact on the folk scene today.” – Jim Macnie, The Providence Phoenix

The Down Hill Strugglers ARE an old time string band based simultaneously out of Kentucky, Louisiana and New York. They have released an album on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and are featured on the soundtrack to the Coen Brothers film, “Inside Llewyn Davis” produced by T-Bone Burnett. The Down Hill Strugglers band formed while hanging out at the home of their mutual friend Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders, where they also met friend and mentor John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers.

By carrying the music of the old rural America forward The Down Hill Strugglers are extending the legacy of the New Lost City Ramblers by bringing archaic sounds into the present, and challenge audiences reject a dystopian future animated by disco beats and their ilk.

The Greek legend of Sisyphus is: “Sisyphus (/ˈsɪsɪfəs/;[1] Greek: Σίσυφος, Sísyphos) was a king of Ephyra (now known as Corinth) punished for chronic deceitfulness by being compelled to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this action forever.” The Down Hill Strugglers are the opposite, desperately struggling to keep a huge boulder from rolling down a hill.

The Down Hill Strugglers are:
Walker Shepard – fiddle, banjo, guitar, harmonica, voice
Jackson Lynch – fiddle, banjo, guitar, voice
Eli Smith – banjo, guitar, mandolin, harmonica, Jews harp, pump organ, voice
They are often joined by John Cohen – banjo, guitar, mandolin, voice, brain

Some Quotes About the Band:

“The Down Hill Strugglers are, to my ears, the very best interpreters of traditional material presently going.”

http://www.jimkweskin.com

http://downhillstrugglers.blogspot.com/p/press.html

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