'I was always a searcher': Jackson and the Janks to bring New Orleans inspired 'garage gospel' to Calgary

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In his early 20s, Jackson Lynch decided he needed to live in New Orleans if he wanted to make a go of a music career.
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It wasn't as if he was living in the boonies before that. He was a New Yorker who would attend all-ages, hardcore punk shows in the underground clubs of the Lower East Side. But on his frequent trips to the Big Easy, he felt a new world opening up musically. It had the same fierce DIY spirit as hardcore, even if it didn't much sound like it.
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'I was in my early 20s and was like, 'Damn, if I'm going to take music seriously for my life, this is where I gotta be,' ' he says. 'So I picked it all up and went down there and was there for many years. It was the brokest I've ever been in my life, but I was the richest I've ever been in my life creatively.'
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Initially, he would busk every day in the French Quarter. It put him in touch with fellow musicians. That included future Grammy winner and 2025 Calgary Folk Music Festival headliner Sierra Ferrell. He met up with ragtime band Tuba Skinny and the members of Hurrah for the Riff Raff.
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'I would bring my fiddle out every day,' he says. 'I was so broke, man. I would go out at 9 a.m. every day, and I would play the fiddle in front of this cafe. I would make like $40. And I was like, 'Hell, yeah! I'm good for the day.'
Later in the day, he would jam with jazz bands on Royal Street.
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'I really cut my teeth,' says Lynch, whose band Jackson and the Janks will be making its Canadian debut on Saturday as part of East Town Get Down in Calgary.
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Lynch is back in Brooklyn these days, but New Orleans is where Jackson and the Janks were born. Lynch eventually picked up an electric guitar and began creating a distinct 'garage gospel' sound that brought in various musical threads from New Orleans. The band's self-titled debut was recorded over several years in New Orleans and released in 2023. It has three originals by Lynch, but most of the material is old gospel standards and obscurities that the Janks re-envisioned in the studio.
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That includes a Kinks-like run through Give an Account, which Lynch first heard as an old field recording by sisters Dorothy Lee, Norma Jean and Shirley Marie Johnson. Sleep On, Mother, a song that originated with an a cappella group called the Silver Leaf Quartette of Norfolk that performed spiritual music in the 1920s and 1930s.

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