During the folk revival of the late '50s and early '60s, there was a somewhat staid nature to much of the music being played. While the Kingston Trio brought a youthful exuberance to the folk of that era, most artists had a somewhat serious approach to preserving traditional songs.

Not so of Jim Kweskin and his Jug Band, which exemplified the "good-time" approach carried on today by artists such as Tom Ball and Kenny Sultan.

It's a style also carried on by Kweskin himself, still going all these years later and appearing Saturday with his former Jug Band lead guitarist, Geoff Muldaur, at the Acoustic Music San Diego series in San Diego's Normal Heights community.

But if Kweskin and his band were unusual in both their instrumentation (a real honest-to-God jug as well as a kazoo) and the no-holds-barred approach to playing, Kweskin said there was no larger point being made.

"I was just into the music I loved," Kweskin said by phone last week. " 'Good-time' wasn't a thought I had. I loved that kind of music. I was into early traditional jazz and the Fats Waller/Louis Armstrong/Jelly Roll Morton style of jazz. And I was also into folk music."

Still, he admitted that the music he performed was different from the folk music that came before.

"When I was starting to get into folk, the popular stuff was Harry Belafonte, Burl Ives," he said. "The Kingston Trio had a hit with 'Tom Dooley,' and that kind of kicked folk music into a higher gear."

Even by the standards of the 1950s, Kweskin's teenage interest in music was pretty far removed from the mainstream. Having access to his father's collection of old 78s, Kweskin developed an appreciation for the early jazz that would shape the rest of his life.

"I fell in love with traditional jazz at a very early age," Kweskin said, remembering nights spent listening to records by trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke or Cab Calloway in his bedroom.

His friends, presumably more into sounds like Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry, "thought I was a little weird."

As his interest in music grew, and he began spending more time playing shows around town in Cambridge, Mass., in the early 1960s than in attending classes, his parents grew concerned, Kweskin said.

"They didn't want me to have to depend on being a musician for my livelihood," he said. "They were very worried -- they said the usual things, 'Get a steady, usual job you can depend on, then you can play music if you want to.'

"It wasn't until my jug band was successful, being on TV and selling lots of records, that they finally accepted my being a professional musician."

But Kweskin said it wasn't that his parents didn't support him -- it was more that, having lived through the Depression, they felt a keener sense of financial insecurity.

"Anybody from my parents' generation was going to worry about how you are going to be able to make a living."

On the other hand, Kweskin apparently had little compunction about dissolving the successful Jug Band in 1969, after a half-dozen LPs on Vanguard Records.

But as Kweskin explained things, he'd never really set out to form the Jug Band in the first place.

"I was doing regular gigs at Club 47 in Cambridge, and as always when I did a gig, even though it was my name on the program, I always had many guys come up and play with me. Every gig was a jam session. There were lots of good musicians in town.

"One night I was up onstage, we were having a great jam. Maynard Solomon was in the audience, and came up to me after the gig and asked, 'How'd you like to make a record with that band? '

"I told him it's not a band; give me three, four months, and I'll get a band."

Solomon was the co-founder and co-owner of Vanguard, and within a few months Kweskin had assembled that first Jug Band and they went into the studio to record. A few years later, a young fiddle player named Maria D'Amato joined the band. She and Kweskin's lead guitarist, Geoff Muldaur, fell in love and were married.

But by the late '60s, Kweskin had decided to dissolve the band.

"More than anything else, it was time to move on," he said. "I was just kind of tired of kazoos. I was starting to head in a different direction in my life. I wanted the music to be a little more personal. I just didn't like the direction we were heading in. It was a little too silly for me."

He kept busy as a solo artist through the 1970s, but in the 1980s and '90s picked up work in construction as well.

While the former members of the Jug Band had stayed in touch, it was the recent passing of John "Fritz" Richmond that got Kweskin and Geoff Muldaur playing together again, he said.

"Basically we got back together when Fritz died. We got together for a couple of memorial things, and we clicked again. We hadn't seen each other much in a long time."

Saturday's show will consist of both Kweskin and Muldaur playing solo sets, then also sitting in with each other. As for the material, Kweskin said the audience shouldn't expect any shocks.

"The newer stuff is still old stuff. … I do a version of 'Lulu's Back in Town' and 'Alexander's Ragtime Band.'

"There's nothing new about the music I sing -- the songs are just new to me."

Jim Kweskin & Geoff Muldaur

When: 7:30 p.m. Dec. 15

Where: Acoustic Music San Diego, 4650 Mansfield St. (Normal Heights United Methodist Church), San Diego

Tickets: $20

Info: (619) 303-8176

Web: www.acousticmusicsandiego.com