Monkey Joe

Blues singer and pianist, who recorded for Bluebird in New Orleans 1935, and for Vocalion in Chicago 1938-1939. He recorded again in 1961 as a member of Mississippi Sheiks. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, perhaps in the first decade of the 20th century, and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, halfbrother of pianist Coot Davis. Coleman also played trumpet, trombone, and drums, cracked jokes and tap-danced, according to Johnnie Temple. He is believed to have died in 1966.

More detail:

Jesse "Monkey Joe" Coleman (b. January 26, 1906 in Shelby County, TN, d. November 16, 1967 in Chicago, IL) was a country blues pianist and singer, who recorded sporadically from the 1930s into the 1970s.

Coleman was born in Shelby County, Tennessee. He worked locally in Jackson, Mississippi, in juke joints in the 1930s, and recorded with Little Brother Montgomery in 1935 on Bluebird Records. He began using the moniker "Monkey Joe" during that decade. Late in the 1930s he worked as a session musician for Lester Melrose, and recorded under his own name with Charlie McCoy, Fred Williams, Big Bill Broonzy, and Buster Bennett as backing musicians. Coleman also appears to have worked under several other names, such as "Jack Newman" at Vocalion Records and "George Jefferson" as an accompanist on recordings for Lulu Scott. He also recorded on Okeh Records for a time. Little is known of Coleman's whereabouts, aside from recording credits, from before the 1960s. He worked often in Chicago blues clubs in the 1960s, and he became the subject of some interest due to the blues revival in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He worked again with Little Brother Montgomery in the 1970s on an album entitled Crescent City Blues.

Document Records released a two-volume CD set of Monkey Joe's works in 1996.

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By Bruce Eder

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 in the 1930s. He later turned up in Chicago as part of Lester Melrose's stable of bluesmen, and had his next session there in 1938 backed by guitarist Charlie McCoy and drummer Fred Williams. He seems to have worked variously under the names Jack Newman at Vocalion and George Jefferson elsewhere, as accompanist to singer Lulu Scott. He cut further sides for Melrose, including a group of sides on which he was billed as "Monkey Joe and His Music Grinders." He also recorded for the Okeh label.

Not much is known of Monkey Joe's exact activities between the 1930s and the 1960s, only that he was a fixture at the clubs in the Chicago area in the 1960s and beyond. He is presumed to have died sometime after the early 1970s. One album, Crescent City Blues, coupling him with Little Brother Montgomery, surfaced in the early 1970s.