Photo credit above: Bongo Joe in Alamo Plaza, San Antonio, 1968 (1 of 2). Arhoolie Foundation Digital Collections.

 

Below is an excerpt from “Down on the Corner; Adventures in Busking & Street Music by writer and music publicist Cary Baker. It’s full of interviews with street performers, big names and small, including some of my personal favourites (Billy Bragg and Grandpa Elliott).

I’ve been really enjoying the reading. If I had to pick a flaw, it would be that it’s not the best on the politics surrounding busking, but this isn’t a book about busking politics. It is, however, an interesting mix of history, biography and interviews, written in very readable prose, about some interesting people who’ve busked over the last 80 years or so.

The result is a celebration of the famous and not-so-famous street performers that have come before us.

Enjoy!

(And get your copy here)

 


 

George “Bongo Joe” Coleman: American Primitive

Where most street musicians we’ve profiled play guitar, banjo, harmonica, perhaps a wind instrument, George Coleman – known to his outdoor audience as Bongo Joe – sang, spoke, whistled, and bantered, all while accompanying himself banging on a 55-gallon oil drum.

Bongo Joe was born in Haines City, Fla. in November 28, 1923. Orphaned at an early age, he grew up in Detroit, where he first performed music – including a stint with Sammy Davis Jr.1 By the 1940s, he’d moved to Houston, where he played percussion in a local ensemble. In time, he took to the streets – of Houston, Galveston and eventually to San Antonio where he gained a following playing on the city’s RiverWalk, outside the site of HemisFair ’68, and near the now-defunct Joske’s department store. Along with his oil drum percussion, Coleman sang – it was more a precursor to rapping – with witty and frequently bawdy turns of phrase. He sang through a pickup microphone through small amplifier powered by car batteries.

Jim Beal, Jr., who would serve nearly a quarter century as music reporter for the San Antonio Express-News, a post from which he’s since retired, used to see Bongo Joe as a teenager. “He was outrageous, loud and sometimes reminded me of the classic rodeo clown with mismatched kind of clothing. He was a statement of something. He was a showman – and he was pretty darn good percussionist. One day, a guy who I was playing in a garage band with the time, said to me: ‘You know, Bongo Joe always whistles in a minor key.’ I hadn’t thought of that!”

Equally unusual was the way Bongo Joe arrived from his home, off of San Antonio’s Broadway, to his street shows – not by car or van but by bike. According to Beal: “He had all that stuff on a small motorcycle, almost like a moped. It wasn’t a Harley Davidson and it wasn’t a bicycle; it was somewhere between. And somehow he jerry-rigged his moped to carry his oil drums.”

“He lived in a tourist courts — you know, those stand-alone motels a kitchenette, in one of these wooden building of course is long gone where, but wasn’t far from downtown – maybe ten, 12, 14 blocks from where he lived to uh the middle of downtown where he, where he set up nightly” Beal remembers. “He was like a living tourist attraction almost like, uh you know, the guy with the parrots on Fisherman’s Wharf or, or the, the gutter punks on street in New Orleans with the boa constrictors.”

“But it wasn’t the kind of thing where you would go and hang around and listen to Bongo Joe play all night. You would encounter him on the way to a river block bar or tourists walking around, back and forth from the Alamo to their hotels, and that part of town was a big tourist attraction. So you would see him. He was just there.”

In an interview with San Antonio musicologist Larry Skoog for the Arhoolie Foundation’s website, Coleman – a man of few words, as the interview demonstrates – explained the origin of his unusual instrumentation in the early 1950s: “[I was] just trying to get a job as a drummer, and I couldn’t get the job unless I had my own drums. I tried to make a loan from several sources to buy drums….my first job, and couldn’t get the money so I got some cans and fixed them up like drums and started playing on street corners in Houston.”
And while he may have appeared the ultimate outsider artist, his jazz influences ran deep, revealing a lucid context for jazz. He listed his musical heroes in the Skoog interview as “Dave Brubeck, Stan Kenton, Erroll Garner, Fat Wallace, Chick Webb, Gene Krupa, Stan Kenton, Duke Ellington, Johnny Hodges, Flip Phillips, Dizzy Gillespie, and this Mexican guy…I can’t think of his name right now.”

It was in 1968 that Chris Strachwitz, founder of legendary blues, folk and roots music label Arhoolie Records, traveled to San Antonio to record what would be Bongo Joe’s only LP. AllMusic described it as “hilarious” and “edgy.”3 One track, “Innocent Little Doggie,” became an underground radio classic in both Texas and the U.K.

“Nobody took him seriously,” Arhoolie’s Strachwitz told the San Antonio Current in a 2022 feature. “He was just a street entertainer. But he was absolutely brilliant.”

Attesting to the album capturing what he’d heard on the streets of San Antonio, Beal says, “The melody line was his vocals. And he was just banging on the drums, and whistling and then some singing. What you heard on that here on that record is exactly what he did. He was what you might have called an American primitive.”

In addition to – or more likely as a result of – intrigue surrounding his Arhoolie album, Bongo Joe did occasionally perform outside of San Antonio, notably performing for nine years at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival – once accompanying Dizzy Gillespie…as a pianist. Beal remembers attending JazzFest one year, surprised to see the local musician. “What the heck,” he recalls thinking, “I travel all the way from San Antonio to New Orleans. And there’s Bongo Joe playing at New Orleans JazzFest!”

In 1976, he performed several stops along the Gerald Ford presidential campaign.

Two years later in 1978, Bongo Joe helped local authorities capture an alleged shoplifter. According to a story by Josh Baugh in the December 3, 2017 edition of the San Antonio Express-News which references an April 1, 1978 article from the same newspaper:

“’Bongo Joe apprehends suspect in strange way,’ explains that Bongo Joe helped in the arrest of an alleged shoplifter. According to the story, the suspect stole some jewelry and sunglasses and then threatened a store worker with a knife. As the suspect fled, he ran past Bongo Joe, who pulled up on his moped next to a patrol car and asked the officer why that man had run past him. The cops told Bongo Joe the man was a suspect in a robbery. The cops told Bongo Joe the man was a suspect in a robbery. “With that information, Joe moved up alongside the breathless suspect and asked if he could give him a ride. The breathless person nodded ‘yes’ and he, too, climbed on the bike,” the story said. “Joe said he told the man he looked like he needed a cup of coffee and would buy him one.” The story continues, saying that patrol officers pulled up next to the bike and inquired if everything was OK. Joe apparently gave the officers a wink. ‘Finally, at Fourth Street and Broadway, Joe ploughed to a halt and got off the sagging moped,’ the story said. ‘The trailing officers immediately closed in and apprehended the suspect as he tried to get away.’ Later that night, Bongo Joe was back at his spot near Alamo and Commerce streets, banging on his drums.”

That incident wasn’t Coleman’s only display of street extemporization. In 1987, a heckler brandished a knife at the street percussionist. In self-defense, Coleman shot the heckler in the shoulder. Beal likens the incident to an infamous incident in which Texas Outlaw country singer Billy Joe Shaver shot a man in self-defense. According to Baugh’s San Antonio Express-News story:

“In the mid-1980s, Bongo Joe found himself on the wrong side of the law after he shot a heckler at point-blank range with a .44-caliber handgun. In April 1983, Bongo Joe was playing to a crowd of about 30 people, including the heckler. According to a police sergeant quoted in a newspaper article about the incident, the heckler “made a threatening motion which Joe interpreted as an attack,” the story said. The victim apparently walked to the nearby McDonald’s after he was shot and was then transferred to Medical Center Hospital and was treated for a bullet wound to the chest, the story said. Bongo Joe was jailed overnight on a third-degree felony charge and then was released on his own recognizance, according to one newspaper article. Another report said someone posted a $5,000 bond for him…Ultimately, Bongo Joe received five years’ probation to the incident.”

Coleman’s home along the San Antonio River was threatened with demolition, and he quite nearly left San Antonio for his former home of Corpus Christi. By then, however, he had become a significant enough phenomenon that a group of San Antonio supporters were able to find him new living quarters within the city.

As Coleman said in San Antonio filmmaker George Nelson’s 20-minute 1972 film documentary about the musician titled Bongo Joe: “If a thing is not elevating or progressing, it ain’t alive,” Coleman said the 1972 film. “You ain’t living if you ain’t doing…and if you ain’t progressing, you ain’t living. And, of course, if you ain’t doing, you’re dead. You’d be surprised at the walking dead we stumble across daily.”

Coleman’s career came to an end in the early 1990s when he was diagnosed with diabetes and kidney disease. In 1999, he passed away at age 76.

He is fondly remembered by Texas country singer Gary P. Nunn, who gave a shout-out to Bongo Joe in his 2008 song “What I Like About Texas.”

Busking remains allowed in many public places in downtown San Antonio. According to city’s website:

All City of San Antonio controlled downtown public pedestrian spaces on sidewalks in public right of way and City owned parks will be available for busking with the following exceptions: River Walk, Alamo Plaza, (bounded by Alamo Street from Commerce to Houston, and east to Crockett and Blum – to include sidewalks on both sides of the street and the Plaza itself), Main Plaza, and the outdoor spaces owned and controlled by the City of San Antonio…The City shall, if needed, adopt further regulations and restrictions to protect the free flow of vehicular and pedestrian traffic and to preserve the historic and aesthetic ambiance of City of San Antonio resources.

“After Bongo Joe, a couple of local singer songwriters were trying to get busking legalizing and they did it,” says Beal. While he relishes the development, feeling it’s enlivened the city’s public spaces, he cautions: “This ain’t Royal Street in New Orleans where you can make a living, you know.”