Seating will be socially distanced at this live show. For information on our policies and procedures to ensure your safety, and the safety of our staff and volunteers, please visit our Reopening page.

Played by men in top hats and derbies, the Busted Jug Band’s music is a festive romp through time featuring group vocals, swinging rhythms, and novel instrumentation. Inspired by Black music of the early 20th Century, the group features kazoos, washboard, mandolin, banjo-uke, washtub bass, harmonica, accordion, jug, rhythm bones, National guitar, slide whistle, bicycle horns, and rubber chickens. The group plays music of classic groups like the Memphis Jug Band and Cannon’s Jug Stompers, as well as a mix of swing, blues, and novelty music. The members of the Busted Jug Band appear in colorful period costumes and go by stage names such as “Pee Wee,” “Early Bird,” and “Kayola O’La.”

During the Jazz Age, musicians who couldn’t afford trumpets, tubas, and drums replaced them with homemade instruments, such as kazoo, washboard and jug. Thus the Jug Band sound, sometimes called “poor man’s Jazz,” was born. This was revived in the 1960s with groups like Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band. The Busted Jug Band pushes the Jug idiom beyond its historical confines. Homemade instruments are modified with modern techniques for maximum impact. Inspiration has come from the likes of Spike Jones & His City Slickers and Hoosier Hotshots. Vaudevillian sight gags, jokes, and colorful stage attire round out the show and fun reigns supreme.

The Busted Jug Band is also now a comic book! In response to the global pandemic, the Busted Jug band has sequestered themselves in the second dimension, appearing only in Busted Comics, written and drawn by Jeremy Lyons (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Pee Wee Hernando). For one night—and one night only—this zany bunch will reemerge for one show at The Music Hall!