St. Louis has its share of musical claims to fame, and our latest is also one of our greatest: St. Louis is home to one of the top Irish bluegrass bands on the planet.
We're talking about JigJam, the renowned four-piece band that formed in Ireland in 2012. The band that combines traditional Irish music with American bluegrass; the band that made its Grand Ole Opry debut last March, sharing the stage with Garth Brooks and Steve Earle; the band that plays to uproarious crowds on tours around the U.S. and lands premium spots on some of the country's biggest festivals, including the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Colorado and, later this year, Merlefest in North Carolina and Delfest in Maryland.
So what are they doing here? Out of everywhere in the U.S., why would a band of JigJam's stature within the Irish music community settle in St. Louis? After all, on any list of the most Irish cities in America, St. Louis is nowhere near the top.
The answer is a startlingly simple one: JigJam's relocation to St. Louis came down to John D. McGurk's, the celebrated Irish pub in Soulard. "Honestly, it's mainly because of McGurk's," JigJam singer/guitarist Jamie McKeogh tells me. "We've been in a lot of Irish bars around the States, and this definitely tops them all, you know? It's the real deal."
McKeogh and I are sitting at McGurk's main bar about an hour before JimJam is set to take the stage on a Thursday night, part of a five-night-per-week residency at the bar that is set to last a full five weeks. As we talk, Johnny "Lucky" McAteer, who has been tending bar at McGurk's for 30 years, brings me a perfectly poured Guinness, which McKeogh insists on putting on his own tab. McKeogh is tall, handsome and reddish-headed. He is also unfailingly polite and speaks in a charming Offaly accent; when I ask his age, he says that he is "turty one."
"The pictures on the wall tell the story, really," McKeogh says, referring to the framed photographs of Irish musicians that line the walls behind and around the stage at McGurk's. "I didn't realize the first time I was here the amount of Irish musicians that have played here. Fellas like Jackie Daly and Joe Burke. You see them all around the walls, and they've all spent time here, and after you play here, you realize why."
Indeed, McGurk's makes JigJam feel at home. McKeogh and JigJam banjoist Daithi Melia were raised in the town of Tullamore, which McKeogh describes as "your run-of-the-mill small Irish town, slam-bang in the center of Ireland," best known for its famous export, the whiskey Tullamore Dew. Raised by a music-teacher mother who emphasized traditional Irish music and a father who turned him on to the American classic rock of Bruce Springsteen and the Eagles, McKeogh was blending musical influences early on, playing mandolin and tenor banjo alongside his sister Ciara, a fiddler.
JigJam started in 2012 with the siblings, along with Melia and friends, playing at parties and pubs around Tullamore on weekends, "making a little pocket money playing covers" while McKeogh was still in high school. Eventually, McKeogh moved to Dublin to study physical therapy at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, keeping the band going by finding fans of traditional music. "Traditional Irish music always has a strong pocket in Ireland," he says. "The really traditional stuff doesn't have a massive following, but the following that it does have is very strong, very dedicated."
After graduating from college, he worked as a physical therapist for four years while still keeping JigJam going, but eventually music took over everything. "The band got busy enough, and I got the opportunity to come over here to the States," he says. "So I put the PT on the back burner for a while and haven't really seen it since."
With some personnel changes — his sister Ciara left the band and Tipperary-born mandolinist and banjoist Gavin Strappe joined on mandolin and tenor banjo — JigJam toured throughout Ireland and the UK and recorded a series of well-received albums that mixed traditional Irish tunes with the band's own originals. Eventually JigJam crossed the pond, landing stateside in 2015 for its first U.S. tour.
The band made some important discoveries in America. First, they fell in love with American bluegrass music, which they started to work into their own sound, building on the historical connections between Irish music and bluegrass. "That's what we discovered when we started putting it all together, that bluegrass started from Irish music really," says McKeogh. "The Irish immigrated to the States years and years ago, and that helped kind of kick off bluegrass and American folk music."
Stylistically, the band has adopted many of the techniques of modern bluegrass pickers, which has helped McKeogh's own guitar-playing evolution. "I look up to all those fast bluegrass guitar players," he says. "I didn't grow up playing bluegrass guitar. I grew up playing Irish traditional guitar, mainly as an accompanying instrument, so [bluegrass guitar] is new to me. It's a different language. But I had the flatpicking aspect from tenor banjo and mandolin, and the last few years I've incorporated that technique into guitar. So I'm probably a bit of a hybrid."
It's a hybrid that runs throughout JigJam. Melia has mastered Scruggs-style five-string banjo picking and is as slick and inventive a banjo ace as you are likely to find anywhere on the newgrass scene these days. On the other hand, Strappe is a phenomenal four-string tenor banjo player of Irish traditionalism. On certain songs, both Melia and Strappe will simultaneously play their respective banjos for a truly original melting-pot of styles that the band calls "iGrass" for its blend of Irish and bluegrass idioms.
Having been on the bluegrass festival circuit, JigJam has been able to meet and play with jamgrass all-stars like the Infamous Stringdusters, Greensky Bluegrass and others. "We played with Billy Strings and his band out in Colorado," McKeogh says. "We were able to pick up some tricks from them because we didn't grow up playing that music. We see what they do, where one song goes on for 10 minutes."
Still, no matter how much JigJam experiments with progressive bluegrass or extemporaneous jamming, they remain first and foremost an Irish band. "That's why we still have a job here in the States," McKeogh laughs, pointing to the universality of Irish music. "Our songs are very much upbeat and feel-good. Our motive is to bring people together for the two hours that they're at our show and to make sure we can include everybody, and it doesn't matter if you've never even heard Irish music. You can still tap your foot to it no matter what your background is and no matter what your beliefs and views are."
The other discovery in coming here was the realization that the U.S. was going to be their most fertile market. If anything surprised McKeogh about America, he says, it was "how big of a passport the Irish passport is when you travel around the States. No matter where you go, they've all heard of Ireland, and they've all heard of Irish music in some shape or form. There's a lot of Irish culture over here in the States. For a small country, we make quite a bang."
That bang translated into enough successful American tours that JigJam knew they needed to relocate here to make the U.S. their base of operations. "We'd do our tour and we'd all fly home [to Ireland]. Then we'd do another tour and we'd fly home. If we had a base here, it would make it easier to tour and we could pick up other shows along the way."
And that's where McGurk's came into play. When the band was looking for an American city in which to drop anchor, their friend, Irish banjo player Pio Ryan, suggested McGurk's. "If we didn't have a busy enough tour and had a month or two with no gigs, we could set up shop here and do a residency," he says. "So it made sense for St. Louis to be home base when we weren't touring." All three Irishmen now make their homes in Soulard just down the street from McGurk's, where they play their nightly gigs without any planned setlists, tapping into their vast repertoire of original songs, traditional tunes and a seemingly endless number of covers.
"Audiences have been great here," McKeogh says. "It's a bar gig, but at the same time, they are a listening crowd. They want to listen to our own music." Still, JigJam knows that crowds get younger and rowdier on the weekends, so they modify their sets as they read the room. "If a bachelorette party comes through, and they want 'Country Roads' or Taylor Swift, we can give them that, too."
The move to St. Louis also created the opportunity for another important step in the band's evolution: the addition of local fiddler Kevin Buckley. As a versatile force on the St. Louis music scene, Buckley is a mainstay of McGurk's and the leader of the excellent Americana rock band Grace Basement. As a fiddler, he is a natural fit for JigJam. "Kevin has been a breath of fresh air," McKeogh says. "Musically, personality-wise, he's been brilliant. The beauty of Kevin is that not only does [our fiddle player] have to be able to play Irish music, they have to be able to play bluegrass and whatever else we throw in. You can find a bunch of great American bluegrass fiddle players, but to find one that plays bluegrass, Irish music and all the other stuff is rare, and Kevin has all those things, which is fantastic."
JigJam's first full album after moving to the States — recorded here with Buckley — will be out March 1. Three singles from the record are already out, including a song the band wrote about their new home away from home. "John D. McGurk's (The Heartbeat of St. Louis)" is a rousing call-and-response number, and its accompanying video was filmed, of course, on location in their favorite pub.
"We've been playing the McGurk's song every night," McKeogh says. "People have latched onto it already. There's a call-and-answer part, so the crowd can get involved, and that's been quite popular for us so far."
The new album is called Across the Pond, a title that McKeogh says gets to the heart of what JigJam is all about. "It's the first album that captures what we do as cohesively as possible, in regard to song choices, the writing process, instrumental choices," he says. "It's about all the Irish in America, and how they paved the way in the States, making a living and bringing their songs and music and culture, and how the Irish music and bluegrass go hand in hand. The whole album tells that story."
JigJam will hit the road for a U.S. tour in March that will culminate in St. Louis with a show on March 29 at Off Broadway, which the band is treating as an album release party. "It will be a celebration of our album, a good representation of what we've been doing for the last year," he says. "It's going to be a high-energy show, a chance for people to have a few drinks and have a good time and just forget themselves for a few hours."
In the meantime, if you're looking for JigJam, you know where you can find them. The Guinness pairs excellently with the iGrass.
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