McCall was from Bucks County, Pa. and had heard of Van Ronk but preferred to do it his own way. DJ, a surfer from Va. Beach, did some Ian and Sylvia and liked the Byrds. Joyner actually knew some Travis picking and E-minor chords on a banjo (arcane before it was common knowledge.) Then there was Ronnie, the local kid, who was in high school with Merle Watson and played a D-28 with the same mountain ingenuity he drove his Pontiac GTO with. And "Beethoven" Haynes, who had gotten kicked out of Emory for playing bongos and brought with him a desire to sing and a rarefied record collection of obscure music.

Though the sounds of the "folk movement" were filtering down from Cambridge and The Village; in the south, the blues (black and white), traditional mountain music and country had been happening all around us for years, and LIVE, not just on old 78s. Next door in Deep Gap, Clint Howard and Fred Price were performing regularly with another local guy, Doc Watson. At Beaver Creek high school, it's A. L. Woods and the Smokey Mountain Boys. In nearby Johnson City, TN, itinerant blues masters could still be heard playing on street corners while the First Church of God's choir provided sublime black Gospel.

Nevertheless, it was on vinyl, in Jim Kweskin's model, that we found a unity for our five disparate musical interests. And also from Samuel Charters' RBF Recording's The Country Blues and The Jug Bands, which showed us how the original sources had been, and could still be, rearranged. It was all music after all. And who was to say Blues, Bluegrass and the Beatles couldn't be "jugged?"

Somehow 6 guys (with instruments and Callahan) crammed into Haynes' baby blue VW bug (note: stickshift Beetle not Bus) and "road trips" were undertaken, gold-painted washtub roped to roof, from one coffee house to another over the following year.

After those halcyon days we went our separate ways but eventually regrouped within close proximity of Chapel Hill, N.C.

And still the music is the tie that binds. (Ain't it a gas folks how much life mileage you get out of that musical fuel?)

We continued to play (had our 30th anniversary in '96) but all the while strived to "make it new," adding some electricity, drums, and a few new members. But traditional roots are still the ground for our current incarnation Off The Road, whose CD: "Dixie Lane Detour" is entirely original material.

Our latest CD, Mother Vineyard's Jug Band and Friends, "The Missing Years," is an attempt to recapture our original band's sound and honors the classic canon of American jug, with a few folk traditionals thrown in and the help of 10 other musician friends.