Monkey Joe

The amount of real information known about Jesse "Monkey Joe" Coleman, who recorded extensively in the 1930s for Lester Melrose in Chicago and who was still playing clubs in the Windy City in the 1960s and 1970s, is astonishingly small. He was born sometime around or before 1906, probably in Mississippi, and seems to have played the juke joints in the area around Jackson in the early 1930s, as well as New Orleans, where he cut his first session for RCA-Victor's Bluebird imprint in 1935, in tandem with Little Brother Montgomery. Coleman first used the "Monkey Joe" name sometime...