Biography
The Cincinnati Jug Band operated under the direction of siblings Bob Coleman (1906-1966) and Walter Coleman (1908-1937), both longtime presences in Cincinnati’s George Street red-light district throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Bob Coleman became the first of the pair to enter a studio when he headed to Chicago in May 1928 alongside Sam Jones, better known as Stovepipe No. 1, cutting four sides for Vocalion. Returning to the same city the following January for a Paramount Records date, he brought along his younger brother Walter and possibly Jones as well, resulting in four additional tracks credited to the Cincinnati Jug Band. These sides rank among the most unadulterated and scarcest examples of jug-band recording; surviving original pressings remain eagerly sought by collectors. Two of the titles from that session oddly appeared under Bob Coleman’s own name. He later traveled alone to Richmond, Indiana, where he cut one further Paramount release, “Sing Song Blues” (correct title “Sing Sing Blues”), in June 1929. A September 1930 Gennett session issued under the name “Walter Cole” may represent another configuration of the Cincinnati Jug Band, though confirmation remains elusive. In February and again in June 1936 the brothers returned to Chicago and laid down seven selections for Decca, among them the George Street anthem “I’m Going to Cincinnati” together with raw, explicit numbers such as “Smack That Thing” (“Hey there Mama/You gotta work/you got fly specks on your underskirt”). Only months after the second of those Decca dates, Walter Coleman’s name appeared in the obituary columns of Cincinnati newspapers; no cause was given, yet at the reported age of twenty-nine the possibility of violence amid the hazards of George Street cannot be dismissed. Bob Coleman appears to have withdrawn from music thereafter, and by the time of his own death in 1966 the district itself had vanished beneath a newly completed interstate highway.