“Times Ain’t Like They Used To Be”
♪♪★The JERICHO ROAD Show★♪♪
Bill Steber
Bill Steber is a multi-instrumentalist from Grinder’s Switch, TN. Hailing from a long line of Tennessee preachers, bootleggers and musicians, Steber’s passion for American music has deep roots in all forms of the Southern folk tradition.
Steber developed a love of singing both in the rural congregational churches of his youth and family gatherings. He soaked in
everything he heard, from gospel to hillbilly to his mother’s early rock and roll 45’s to his father’s blues albums.
Steber wrote his first song at age 7 and soon picked up harmonica and dulcimer, discovering that music came to him quickly by ear. Other instruments followed, including guitar, mandolin, tenor banjo, ukulele and musical saw.
Over the years Steber’s passion for authentic music has taken him from the hollers of Appalachia to the Carolina Sea Islands to the state of Mississippi where he has spend more than 20 yrs. documenting and learning from the musicians who created blues culture.
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Since 2004 Steber has devoted himself to championing and performing Southern roots and blues music with his all acoustic jug band, The Jake Leg Stompers, who play something they call Chicken-Fried, Pre-War, Hokum-Billy Jug Band music. The Stompers have been played often on XM/Sirius satellite radio and have just released their 4th CD, “Up to No Good.”
Steber is also a founder member (along with Rambling Steve Gardner of Toyko and Washboard Chaz of New Orleans ) of the international roots and blues band Jericho Road Show. JRS have released 2 CD’s, garnering a top ten album of the year honor from WWOZ radio in New Orleans for their 2009 release “Walking the Dog.”
Over the past few years, Steber has played his music in rural delta juke joints in Mississippi, honky tonks in Nashville, the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, Symphony Hall in Vienna Austria, an orphanage in rural India, concerts in Tokyo Japan and numerous festivals, opulent theaters, dive bars, dance halls, and all manner of gathering throughout the world where people enjoy Southern American roots and blues music.
A few of the tunes that Bill Steber will be playing on the “Times Ain’t Like They Used To Be” Acoustic House Party & Traveling Road Show 2014: Big Road Blues, Stop Breaking Down, In the Jailhouse Now.
♪♪ ★Press Quotes & Reviews★♪♪
“There is a swagger to the Jake Leg Stompers. They play their version of old timey music and make it relevant to this day and age. It may be old timey, but it’s not elderly. This is party music from the last century to this current one.
-Offbeat magazine
“The Jake Leg Stompers are the beacon of light that the music world needs to prove that musicianship is not dead.”
-Cookeville Times
"The Jake Leg Stompers continue their finger-licking, jug-hugging love affair with all things prewar on 2013's Up to No Good- another sparkling, bathtub gin-soaked audio fun wheel that is not to be missed."
-Living Blues
The Jake Leg Stompers resurrect the rent-party vibe of music in feast-or-famine America between the World Wars, perform[ing] with joyous abandon. JLS sing and swing traditional songs on traditional instruments—washboard, banjo, trombone et. al.—and guzzle tradition like vintage port from a Bama-Jelly jar. Well-worn tunes like “Cocaine Blues” and “Viper’s Drag” get painted with a broad brush but bear no weight of paint-by-numbers construction, giving the rest of us a reason to recollect our musical inheritance in all its vital glory.”
- Nashville Scene
It’s easy to get mushy when romanticizing the bygone past, but the Jake Leg Stompers and their hill country gypsies do so in a way that the lost decades retain their dignity as well as their mystery, demonstrating that the spirit in many of those old George Mitchell field recordings and dusty 78 r.p.m.’s is still very much alive and well. Hill Country Hoodoo is essential.”
-Living Blues
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