Last Chance Jug Band

About the Band

Formed in 1989 and Headed by musicologist David Evans, The Last Chance Jug Band is a modern-day incarnation of the jug bands that existed in the Memphis area during the ’20s and ’30s, namely The Memphis Jug Band led by Will Shade and Cannon’s Jug Stompers headed up by Gus Cannon. The band consists of Evans (vocals, guitar, kazoo), Elmo Lee Thomas (harmonica, background vocals, and jug), Ted Maclin (background vocals, jug, and washboard). 

David Evans

David Evans has been performing country blues (vocal and guitar) since 1962, having learned directly from many southern blues musicians of an older generation. Much of this learning was gained in the course of field research beginning in 1965. Evans is Professor of Music Emeritus at The University of Memphis and is the author of Tommy Johnson (1971), Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (1982), The NPR Curious Listener’s Guide to Blues (2005), and Going up the Country: Adventures in Blues Fieldwork in the 1960s (2022, co-authored with Marina Bokelman) along with many other publications. He has produced over 50 LPs and CDs of his field and studio recordings of blues, gospel and folk music. He has won two Grammy Awards for “Best Album Notes.”

Evans’ first musical partner was the late Alan Wilson, who went on to become a member of the blues-rock group Canned Heat. In the 1980s and 1990s he toured in the United States and Europe as a guitar accompanist to Jessie Mae Hemphill, Hammie Nixon, Johnnie Shines, and Jack Owens, and since 1988 has made over 50 solo tours in 22 countries of Europe, South America, and Africa, including many major festivals. He has also performed at many clubs, concerts, and festivals in the United States over the years, both as an accompanist and soloist, and has presented country blues guitar workshops, master classes, and lectures at many venues in the United States and abroad.

Evans has recorded Match Box Blues (Inside Sounds ISC-0514, 2002), Needy Time (Inside Sounds ISC-0532, 2007), Live at Alte Post (Blind Lemon BLR-CD1203, 2012), Under the Yam Yam Tree (Blind Lemon BLR-CD1401, 2014), and Lonesome Midnight Dream (Blind Lemon BLR-CD1801, 2018). The Last Chance Jug Band has also released Shake That Thing! (Inside Sounds ISC-0501, 1997), featuring Evans on vocals, guitar, and kazoo. He has also played guitar on records of Jessie Mae Hemphill and Hammie Nixon.

Elmo Lee Thomas

Elmo Lee Thomas has been performing the blues on Memphis stages and beyond for the past 47 years. In December of 2023 Elmo received The Lifetime Achievement Award from The Memphis Blues Society. This big voiced singer has been the driving force behind one of Memphis and the Mid South’s most popular and hardest working bands, Elmo and the Shades, since 1983. Elmo and the Shades have been a continuously working outfit performing in Memphis, The Mid-South, and beyond for over forty years and still going strong. The Memphis native has gained a reputation as a high energy blues shouter and soul screamer. Long recognized as one of the region’s top harmonica talents, (twice nominated for NARAS’s Premier Player Awards), he is equally capable of lighting up the stage with his roots inspired guitar approach. He is an accomplished songwriter and session musician. Elmo sings two songs on the 2013 major motion picture ‘Crackerjack” by executive producer Jeff Foxworthy. Elmo is also a member of The Last Chance Jug Band with David Evans and has performed on National Public Radio’s Beale Street Caravan on numerous occasions with the Shades and The Last Chance Jug Band. Elmo and the Shades released their debut recording “Blue Memphis” in 2009.

Elmo and the Shades are woven into the fabric of the City of Memphis culture with performances like, Welcome to Memphis Grizzlies Party, an appearance on Bud Light’s “Spotlight on Memphis” television commercial, performance at groundbreaking and Grand Opening party for the Fed Ex Forum, and for twenty-five years a performer at the Memphis Music and Heritage Festival. Elmo has regularly played up and down Beale Street since its resurgence in the early eighties and is currently in residence on the weekends at Alfred’s on World Famous Beale Street and on an eleven-year run as the Wednesday night band at Neil’s Music Room. Elmo toured Vietnam in 2015 under the auspices of the United States State Department, celebrating the 20^th anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries as a representative of Memphis Blues.

A hard-working musician and bandleader, Robert “Elmo” Lee Thomas has spent most of his professional career on the stage playing his eclectic mix of Blues, Rhythm and Blues and roots inspired music to all who will listen. He is an Entertainer par excellence’, a real deal Memphian and a “true blue” bluesman.

Ted Maclin

Ted Maclin lives in his family’s 1800s-era farmhouse in the blues heartland of West Tennessee. As a child he stayed awake at night listening to the sounds of the Tay-May Club in Keeling, Tennessee. He began playing music in New York at a local jam (the CasHank Hootenanny Jamboree) where jugs and washboards made regular appearances. In the early 2000s, he was a member of The Deryls and the Roughbark Candyroasters in Athens, Georgia. On returning to Tennessee, he joined the Last Chance Jug Band as jug and washboard player in 2014.

When he isn’t playing music, he works as a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Memphis.