One sultry July night in 1993, Jimbo Mathus and Katharine Whalen threw a potluck dinner. Jimbo had recently shacked up with Katharine in her dilapidated house outside of Durham. They had met a couple of years before when they were working at Pyewacket, a Chapel Hill restaurant; they were both dishwashers. Most of the folks coming to dinner they knew from working in restaurants. Jim and Kat told them that whatever else they were going to bring, they should come with an instrument, too.

Mathus' old band, Metal Flake Mother, had recently fallen apart after making a pretty good alternative-rock record. But Mathus wasn't interested in rock anymore. He had been focusing on Robert Johnson for a while, and then an unlabled blues cassette somebody had given him. He'd spent close to a year with that tape, figuring out the chords to songs whose names he would never even know. Katharine was a little intimidated. "I went through a few months of it being, 'Wow, this is intense,'" she says, "living with a musician all of a sudden." She was listening to stuff like Fred Astaire Dance Party! and records by Billie Holiday, but she had never picked up an instrument in her life. That would have to change.

"When this band started it was just to get Katharine involved in a musical... lifestyle, I guess," Jimbo says. I ask him what he would have done if she hadn't been musically inclined. He hadn't considered it. "I sort of had her on the six-week crash course, How To Have Been A Musician All Your Life." Jimbo had in his possession a kind of family-heirloom banjo, and it so happened that Katharine had always admired the jazz banjo.

Her debut was the dinner party. Chris Phillips was there, and Don Raleigh, who played bass. Ken Mosher, who had produced Metal Flake Mother's demos, brought barbecue. Sour mash was consumed, and everyone was amazed at how easy this music came. More parties followed, and then these parties became practices, and then pretty soon the band were playing at a bistro. Taking their name from an old-time candy bar, this loose confederation of friends became Squirrel Nut Zippers.