Culture
Mid-Ohio Valley Blues, Jazz, and Folk Music Society presents 30th River City Blues Festival this weekend
By: Emily Votaw
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MARIETTA, Ohio (WOUB) – Doug MacLeod didn’t talk for a very long time. The abuse he’d endured as a child and a debilitating stutter he was born with made him afraid to.
Everything changed when he saw a blues performer at a club in St. Louis.
“I heard the blues and […] I felt it speak to me,” he recalls. “… that’s how it started, with the blues and me.”
Over the course of the next 60-or-so years, MacLeod would become known for his voice. He’s won multiple Blues Music Awards, toured internationally playing the blues, and Southeast Ohio’s own Jorma Kaukonen (Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna) has even described him as “one of the great blues artists… period!”
MacLeod is also one of the artists slated to play this weekend’s River City Blues Festival, opening tomorrow at the Lafayette Hotel (101 Front Street). The Mid-Ohio Valley Blues, Jazz, and Folk Music Society (BJFM) has organized the festival nearly annually for 30 years, only missing two years thanks to the pandemic. The festival is a part of the volunteer-run organization’s mission to preserve and promote blues, jazz, and folk music — the kind of music that had the power to change MacLeod’s life.
Bill Steber plays the festival Saturday afternoon with pre-war roots band the Jake Leg Stompers.
He grew up hearing country music on the radio and digging through his parent’s record collection, which he says was “pretty awful for a kid, you know, […] the easy listening of the ’60s and all that kind of stuff.”
“[But] then I found […] some early jazz records, and I was like, oh, this is different,” Steber said.
From there, Steber fell in love with a wide variety of traditional music, and not only because of how it sounded.
“[There is] a kind of transgressive element to some of it, which lent some appeal,” he said, referencing Harry “the Hipster” Gibson’s 1944 controversial tune “Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine.”
The band’s name, “The Jake Leg Stompers” is a reference, in part, to this rebellious element.
“The Jake Leg Stomp” was a colloquial term for paralysis caused by ingesting Jamaica ginger extract (commonly called “Jake”), a late 19th century patent medicine that became very popular during Prohibition thanks to its high alcohol content. To meet criteria developed by the Treasury Department intended to curb the recreational use of patent medicines, some Jamaica ginger extract manufacturers started adding a plasticizer, triorthocresyl phosphate (TOCP) to the medicine, believing that doing so was harmless. As it turns out, TOCP is a neurotoxin, and ingesting it left thousands of people permanently paralyzed.
“[…] researchers and doctors could not figure out where this Jake leg condition was coming from,” Steber said. “They didn’t even have a name for it yet.”
A part of what brought to light the connection between the condition and the patent medicine was the fact that such a connection was referenced in several blues songs from the period.
“And sure enough, they did some analysis, and that’s what they figured out,” Steber said. “So it was a blues singer that helped diagnose a medical phenomenon that was sweeping the nation.”
The River City Blues Festival opens tomorrow. Find the full line-up below.
Event Schedule
March 17-18, 2023
Friday
5 p.m. High Schools That Rock (Free and open to the public.)
7:30 p.m. – doors open
8:00 p.m. – 9:30 p.m. Doug MacLeod
9:45 p.m. – 11:15 p.m. The Nighthawks
Saturday afternoon
12:30 p.m. – doors open
1:00 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. Paul Rishell and Annie Raines
2:30 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. Jake Leg Stompers
4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. Mississippi Heat
Saturday evening
7:30 p.m.- doors open
8:00 p.m. – 9:30 p.m. Ghost Town Blues Band
9:45 p.m. – 11:15 p.m. John Primer and the Real Deal Blues Band