Biography
Music history contains its share of unfortunate omissions, and the absence of any Barbecue Joe stands among them. Barbecue Bob and Bongo Joe exist on record, yet enthusiasts of grilled fare and everyday coffee must settle for those figures alone. Barbecue Joe served merely as a studio alias attached to a fabricated frontman whose Hot Dogs ensemble cut multiple sides for Gennett during a 1930 session in Richmond, Virginia. The name concealed an actual musician, trumpeter Wingy Manone, celebrated both for landmark early jazz performances and for navigating a career with only one arm. Manone lost his right limb at age ten in a streetcar mishap yet handled his prosthetic with such fluid stagecraft that audiences rarely detected the limitation. He also sang convincingly and had already spent roughly six years leading combos under his own name when he arrived in Virginia under the Barbecue Joe guise. No single explanation accounts for the adopted identity, and archivists have never settled on one. Manone frequently fronted groups that bore other titles, among them the Cellar Boys and the Harmony Kings. In Never Sell a Copyright: Joe Davis and His Role in the New York Music Scene, 1916-1978, author Bruce Bastin proposes that Decca later revived the Gennett pseudonym when licensing material, writing that “Clearly, the original Gennett pseudonym of Barbecue Joe & His Hot Dogs was assumed by Decca to mask a black band!” The same session yielded “Tar Paper Stomp,” whose central riff resurfaced, slightly reworked, as the backbone of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood,” the defining commercial success of the swing era. Miller’s version, however, was not the first adaptation; Horace Henderson had already recorded a related piece titled “Hot and Anxious.” Debate persists over the precise chain of borrowing. Some trace Miller’s inspiration to “Wingy’s Stomp,” while others point to bandleader Edgar Hayes, who is said to have taken the figure from Henderson, who in turn is said to have lifted it from Barbecue Joe—though no such person existed. The very tangle of attributions supplies ample incentive for listeners to revisit the original 1930 recordings.