Tom Paley and John Cohen, two of the founding members of 
the influential New Lost City Ramblers, were the first-ever dual recipients of the Brown Jug award in recognition of their significant contributions to old-time music in the
Paley (now 80) and Cohen (now 75) formed the New Lost City Ramblers, along with Mike Seeger, in mid-1958 and presented their first concert on Sept. 13 of that year – exactly 50 years to the day of their performance at the Park Slope Jamboree. The vocal and instrumental urban folk group helped to popularize and spark renewed interest in traditional string band music and played a major role in the 1960s folk revival. The New Lost City Ramblers not only based much of their music on the old-time cultural stylings of the 1920s and 1930s, but they also helped introduce traditional performers from the rural south to urban audiences and influenced a number of other musicians – including the Byrds, Ry Cooder and Bob Dylan.
“I listened to the New Lost City Ramblers. Everything about them appealed to me –their style, their singing, their sound,” writes Dylan in Chronicles. Their songs ran the gamut in styles, everything from mountain ballads to fiddle tunes and railroad blues. All their songs vibrated with some dizzy, portentous truth… I couldn’t listen to them enough.”
During their heyday, the New Lost City Ramblers recorded a number of albums for Folkways Records and played colleges, coffeehouses and notable clubs across the country, as well as the very first Newport Folk Festival in 1959. Paley left the group in 1962 to resume teaching.
The Brown Jug award was the brainchild of James Reams, a New York-based bluegrass musician and bandleader, who conceived of it as a way to recognize people in the Northeast whose impact on the music deserved to be honored but who might be less likely to be recognized by national organizations since for some of them (unlike this year’s recipients), their impact was only regional in nature. In addition to such notables as the late singer-songwriter and musician John Herald, Bill Knowlton (who was named Broadcaster of the Year by the International Bluegrass Music Association a number of years ago), Stephanie Ledgin (an award-winning folk and bluegrass music photojournalist and author) and Citizen Kafka (a NYC-based radio personality and onetime leader of the Wretched Refuse String Band), previous Brown Jug recipients have included such otherwise unsung behind-the-scenes musical heroes as Allen and Emily Cohen (who ran a bluegrass festival in the New York City borough of Staten Island for more than a decade) and the late Doug Tuchman (a bluegrass promoter who was instrumental in bringing Bill Monroe and other bluegrass music greats to play venues in the city).
Honorees receive a real (albeit small) brown jug, the kind that moonshiners used for their product. Reportedly, something is put into it to give it the “taste” of the real thing. The Brown Jug has been presented annually since the inception of the Park Slope Bluegrass & Old-Time Jamboree in 1998.
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