Noah Lewis (September 3, 1890 or 1895 – February 7, 1961) was an American jug band and country blues musician, generally known for playing the harmonica.
Lewis was born a "woodcall" (no known father) in Henning, Tennessee, United States, his birth year being variously cited as 1890 or 1895. Lewis learnt to play harmonica as a child and moved to Memphis, Tennessee in his early teens. By the time he first met Gus Cannon in Memphis in 1907, he was already a respected original stylist on the instrument, noted for his liquid tone and breath control, which allowed him to generate enormous volume from the instrument. By then he was also noted for his ability to play two harmonicas at once – one through his mouth and one through his nose, a trick he probably taught to Big Walter Horton, who recorded briefly as a teenager with the Memphis Jug Band some 20 years later. Lewis developed his unusual levels of breath control and volume from playing in local string and brass marching bands on the streets of Memphis. At the 1907 meeting Lewis introduced Cannon to the 13 year-old guitarist and singer, Ashley Thompson, with whom Lewis had been playing in the streets of Ripley and Memphis for some time and the three of them worked together over the next 20 years whenever Cannon was in Memphis, and not away working medicine and tent shows. When Will Shade's Memphis Jugband recorded and became popular in the late-1920s, Cannon added a coal-oil can on a rack round his neck and renamed the trio (Cannon, Lewis and Thompson) Cannon's Jug Stompers, and it was this line-up that recorded for the first time on Victor Records in Memphis on 30 January 1928. The songs from that session included "Minglewood Blues", "Springdale Blues", "Big Railroad Blues" and "Madison Street Rag". By the time of the band's next recording on September 5, 1928, Cannon had replaced Ashley Thompson with Elijah Avery on banjo and guitar. However, by time of the band's third recording session, four days later, Avery had in turn been replaced with an old friend of Cannon's from the medicine and tent show circuit, the six string banjo player and guitarist, Hosea Woods, with the band's line-up remaining unchanged from then on.
With the Jug Stompers, on "Viola Lee Blues", Lewis sang lead vocal and played a melancholy harmonica solo.
Lewis recorded four solo tracks, and another four sides as the Noah Lewis Jug Band in 1930, the latter incorporating Sleepy John Estes (guitar) and Yank Rachell (mandolin)
He died in poverty of gangrene brought on by frostbite in Ripley, Tennessee, in 1961. Lewis is buried in a cemetery near Nutbush, Tennessee. After his death, several of his songs become part of the repertoire of the Grateful Dead, including "New, New Minglewood Blues", "Viola Lee Blues", and "Big Railroad Blues".
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"". By the time of the band's next recording on September 5, 1928, Cannon had replaced Ashley Thompson with Elijah Avery on banjo and guitar. However, by time of the band's third recording session, four days later, Avery had in turn been replaced with an old friend of Cannon's from the medicine and tent show circuit, the six string banjo player and guitarist, Hosea Woods, with the band's line-up remaining unchanged from then on" This is inaccurate. The best on all this is Sam Charters books and the interview with Ashley Thompson in the Memphis Library. Cannon purposefully ditched Thompson at the next recording session, told him the wrong time to take the train to Memphis and used Elijah Avery, a man Cannon has worked with for 10=-15 years in the medicine shows who played a magnificient chord rhythm on banjo guitar and guitar. Avery was not replaced in that session by Hosea Woods, Woods joined the session at the end playing Kazoo and probably Jug. This was not a band that ever performed anywhere, but a recording group that got together whenever Peer came to Memphis to record. Hosea Woods was Cannon's closest friend, roomate between Cannon's various wives, and was billed as the leader of whatever groups Cannon performed with in the medicine shows. It was a question of who had come back to Memphis when from the medicine Show. Cannon recorded his later work with Hosea Woods, who played guitar, piano, trumpet, fiddle, and banjo mandolin and was referred to as "Prof Woods." The real split was between Cannon, Avery, and Woods who were born in the 1880s and had all worked together in medicine shows for about 15 years, and all lived in Memphis by the time the recordings, and the much younger Lewis and Thompson who did not live in Memphis or work in medicine shows, The uptempo recordings of the first session with the brilliant singing and guiar of Thompson was NOT what Cannon was into. He liked the older ragtime pop songs and his versions of the blues were much slower. He dumped Thompson to work with the older musicians. Blues revivalists focus on the few recordings Cannon made with Thompson and the independent recordings Lewis made in 1930 after the Stompers ceased to be recorded, but Cannon's meat, and you can suggest Avery and Woods (several of the songs like Walk Right in were published as being by Woods or Cannon and Woods) was the older tunes like Walk Right In, or almost minstrely medicine show tunes like Whoa Mule Get up in the Ally, or Prison Wall blues, a pure Woods tune. The real meat of Cannon's was the lingering traces of ragtime in his banjo playing and the way the band worked. It can also be said that to function to play dances he needed more of the bottom Woods and Avery's guitar and guitar banjo provided than Thompsons guitar. It is a shame no one recorded Ashley Thompson and woods separately, Thanks
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