Background
Lewis was born in Henning, Tennessee, his birth year being variously cited as 1890 or 1895.
Lewis was born in Henning, Tennessee, his birth year being variously cited as 1890 or 1895.
He learned to play harmonica as a child. He moved to Memphis, Tennessee, in his early teens. By the time he met Gus Cannon in Memphis in 1907, he was already a respected original stylist on the harmonica, 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 bands 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 lineup that recorded for the first time on Victor Records in Memphis on January 30, 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.
The band"s lineup 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, with Sleepy John Estes (guitar) and Yank Rachell (mandolin), in 1930.
Lewis died in poverty, of gangrene brought on by frostbite, in Ripley, Tennessee, in 1961.
He is buried in a cemetery near Nutbush, Tennessee. Several of his songs were included in the repertoire of the Grateful Dead, including "New, New Minglewood Blues", "Viola Lee Blues", and "Big Railroad Blues".
