For forty years, George "Bongo Joe" Coleman beat his oil barrel drums and improvised songs to the delight of sidewalk audiences in Houston, Galveston, Fort Worth, and San Antonio. On the morning of November 22, 1963, he was playing at the infamous beatnik nightclub "The Cellar" in Fort Worth, and his music became part of the soundtrack of the Kennedy assassination. Rob Johnson's book includes never-before-revealed details of the assassination and an analysis of that event through the lens of the beatnik era, but in the end it tells an even more important unknown story--the remarkable life of Bongo Joe. As a fan once wrote on the side of his drum barrel, "Bongo Joe is Forever."
For forty years, George "Bongo Joe" Coleman beat his oil barrel drums and improvised songs to the delight of sidewalk audiences in Houston, Galveston, Fort Worth, and San Antonio. On the morning of November 22, 1963, he was playing at the infamous beatnik nightclub "The Cellar" in Fort Worth, and his music became part of the soundtrack of the Kennedy assassination. Rob Johnson's book includes never-before-revealed details of the assassination and an analysis of that event through the lens of the beatnik era, but in the end it tells an even more important unknown story--the remarkable life of Bongo Joe. As a fan once wrote on the side of his drum barrel, "Bongo Joe is Forever."
Did Beatniks Kill John F. Kennedy?: Bongo Joe's Requiem for the President
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Did Beatniks Kill John F. Kennedy?: Bongo Joe's Requiem for the President
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Overview
For forty years, George "Bongo Joe" Coleman beat his oil barrel drums and improvised songs to the delight of sidewalk audiences in Houston, Galveston, Fort Worth, and San Antonio. On the morning of November 22, 1963, he was playing at the infamous beatnik nightclub "The Cellar" in Fort Worth, and his music became part of the soundtrack of the Kennedy assassination. Rob Johnson's book includes never-before-revealed details of the assassination and an analysis of that event through the lens of the beatnik era, but in the end it tells an even more important unknown story--the remarkable life of Bongo Joe. As a fan once wrote on the side of his drum barrel, "Bongo Joe is Forever."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780993409929 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Beatdom Books |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2017 |
| Pages: | 132 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d) |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
George Coleman, a.k.a. "Calypso Joe," pushes a wheelbarrow to a stop on Galveston's Seawall in front of the Pleasure Pier, an amusement park built over the Gulf of Mexico. It's a summer day in 1957 and the Seawall is crowded with holiday tourists. Calliope music, the roar of the Mountain Speedway roller coaster, and the noises of cars cruising Seawall Blvd. float out over the Gulf. Sea- washed blocks of pink granite, placed at the concave base of the 17-foot-high Seawall to prevent erosion, glint in the sun. The Seawall is the longest sidewalk in the world, at 10.3 miles, but in Eisenhower's very orderly America Joe is the only street performer on its entire length, the only man who sees no reason why that lovely long wide sidewalk can't be a public stage.
Joe pushes his brightly-painted wheelbarrow to the edge of the sidewalk fronting the pier and adjusts his cargo — six large cans he's bought for fifty cents from a junkyard, painted green and mounted on the wheelbarrow. Tourists are already eyeing him with a mixture of caution and interest. He stands over six feet, a physically powerful, deeply black-skinned Negro dressed in a ragged t-shirt, cut-off shorts, and sandals split at the toe: he looks as if he has just washed up on the Galveston shore, the lone survivor of a shipwreck. He begins by tuning the "drums" with a crowbar, bending the metal rims and occasionally knocking a hole in the side of the can.
When a few curious tourists gather around, Joe begins finding a beat, concentrating deeply, taking his cue from the rhythm of the waves or the clattering of the wooden rollercoaster warping in the perpetual gulf humidity, then shifts into one of his numbers, a version of the gospel song, "This Old World is in a Terrible Condition." He's part preacher, clown, philosopher, and con man, playing the dozens while stroking his drums with sticks he's attached a child's rattle to, doubling the rhythm. Drivers on the Seawall occasionally honk their horns, adding to the music.
Yeah, sisters and brothers, he begins loudly in a high-pitched voice that sounds like raspy laughter.
I really hate to say
That our world is in a terrible condition
If you want to go to heaven when you D-I-E
Check your heart where you please
And bring your money to me
He nods at his "kitty," a box with a few coins in the bottom. The song is a standard Negro spiritual, sometimes sung as a Jeremiad to bring back the flock, but George turns it into a send-up of religious hypocrisy set right there in Galveston:
I gotta gal
She's alright
She lives on Post Office Street
And all my beloved church friends turned me down
Hadn't been for her I wouldn't have had a bite to eat
I declare, this old world is in a terrible condition
He drums without words for a spell and changes tack, letting the rhythm help him develop his theme. He makes the old spiritual topical, playing on the "space race" and the Cold War he's been reading about in popular science magazines and Time in the cool of the Rosenberg public library.
Off I go into Arctic
Seeking for Mars
The most beautiful of all the stars
When you hear a peculiar noise
Don't be scared, it'll be me
Off to orbit
A-men
Cause this old world, the planet earth
Is in a terrible condition
He signs off at the end of the lengthy, improvised number:
Tune in every night
Same station
Get to hear Father G. O. Dough Coleman
65000 on your dial
This is station WBUL Galveston
Joe laughs maniacally, barks, and spits like a cat — and makes one more plea for some money.
Sisters and brothers
The only difference between me and your Baptist preacher
He's inside and I'm out of doors
He knows the basic principles and ethics
But I know the score
The only difference between his dollar and my dollar
Is the serial number
Can ya all say 'dat'?
How to do
Who to do
And out
That was your Reverend.
After the number, Joe lets a small child hit on his drums as the kitty rattles a few donations. If he's a success, he can make as much as ten dollars on a weekend day.
Later that afternoon, he sees three skinny white teenagers, rock and rollers, walking towards him intent on causing trouble, or at least he can see such thoughts in their eyes. He keeps playing the rhythms on his metal drums. The teenagers stop and form a semi-circle around Joe and his drums and he can see them softening their aggressive stance: they start to listen to the music in spite of themselves, their Chucks keeping the beat. After a while they turn away and head down the Seawall. One teen guiltily hangs back and tosses some money at Joe.
That night, June, 1957, Joe plays well into the evening. His last listener of the night is a policeman, Officer C. W. Henson. "Joe," the officer tells him matter-of-factly, "There's been some complaints about the noise you're making. You're going have to come with me. Disturbing the peace." Joe stands his ground politely. "Officer, I always held my place with anybody and do my best not to offend. Ask anyone around here. You can't hear my music half a block away over the music coming from this pier," Joe says, gesturing to the starry colored lights and racket of the carnival behind him. But Officer Henson's not listening, or can't.
Officer Henson books Joe for disturbing the peace at 10 pm Sunday night. Monday morning, a judge sets the fine at twenty-five dollars, but Joe only has two dollars to give. It's money Joe needs for his rent on R1/2 street in the Negro section of Galveston, so he elects to work off the fine with an 8-day jail stay.
In Texas in the 1950s, a black man learns to be philosophical.
A few days into his jail stay, a reporter from The Galveston Daily News stops by, having heard there is an interesting character behind bars. Fred Wortham sees and makes note of Joe's brightly colored wheelbarrow and drums stashed in the corner of the drab jail.
"Calypso Joe," Wortham begins. Joe has lifted his name from a movie of the same title, currently playing a nearby drive-in. In the movie, Calypso Joe's band helps a young TV producer woo his white girlfriend back from the arms of a swarthy South American millionaire, alleviating the audience's fear of miscegenation. "Why'd they bring you in, Calypso?"
"They said I was disturbing the peace, but the thing I can't quite understand is who made the complaints against me and why." He is genuinely puzzled and let down by the human race, not the first nor last time. "I always stopped before the Pleasure Pier music stops every night. It's disappointing. But the Lord knows what he's doing, so I'll have to take it as it comes."
Wortham can tell he has an interesting interview on his hands and settles in a chair inside Joe's cell to listen. "What's your real name, Calypso Joe, if you don't mind stating it for the record. And how did you pick the pier for your 'concert hall'?"
Joe tells him his story.
George "Calypso Joe" Coleman is born on November 28, 1923 in Haines City, Florida, near Orlando. The Coleman family roots, though, are in the Bahamas, islands Joe sometimes wistfully sings about in his improvised songs. His father dies before he is born, and his mother, a churchgoing woman who teaches him a little piano, passes when he is seven. For a time, he and his sister live in a Florida orphanage. There's a piano in the orphanage, and Joe teaches himself music — he never learns to read it — by first playing the black keys. He's a natural-born musical talent and multi-instrumentalist: saxophone, clarinet, percussion, any musical instrument he can get hold of. He leaves the orphanage at the age of 14, odd-jobbing his way across Depression-era America, and eventually rejoins his sister, who has moved to Detroit. Detroit in the early 1940s has a thriving jazz, blues, and vaudeville scene, and 18-year-old Joe's musical talent lands him in a number of bands playing whatever is needed — drums, piano, horns. He develops a sophisticated ear, appreciating the big band music of the times as well as the revolutionary hot jazz, bebop jazz. Jazz makes its mark on Joe and is reflected in his spontaneous compositions and the off-key chords he whistles during his Seawall performances.
In Detroit, in 1941, he gigs as a backup musician for the Will Mastin Trio, featuring phenomenon Sammy Davis, Jr. Davis, who has been singing and dancing since the age of 3, is a soft shoe master in tux and tails, and performs in the vaudeville act with his father and uncle. He has toured the United States twenty-three times by 1941, when Joe meets him and they become friends. That year, at Detroit's Michigan Theater, Davis also meets Frank Sinatra for the first time when the Will Mastin Trio fills in for "Tip Tap Toe," the opening act for The Tommy Dorsey Band. Sinatra, whose talent as Dorsey's singer is already overshadowing Dorsey himself, is wowed by sixteen-year-old Davis' performance and finds him backstage: "I'm Frank Sinatra." After the War, Sinatra goes out of his way to hire the Will Mastin Trio for lucrative opening act bills at the Capitol Theater in New York. They make four times their weekly salary in one night. Sinatra himself introduces the Mastin Trio and publicly embraces Sammy Davis, Jr. on stage — an almost unheard of gesture in 1946 by a white performer.
In later years, according to a close friend of Joe's, he is called on by Sammy and his crowd to play late-night, after-hours parties when they are performing in Texas cities. Joe plays blues piano brilliantly and shares a sense of the past with these men.
During World War II, both Joe and Sammy entertain troops as part of the Entertainment Corps (Sammy enters the Army in 1942, Joe in 1943). Davis has largely been sheltered from racism in America and is shocked by the treatment he receives from white soldiers. He fights back mainly, he says, the only way he knows how: "My talent was the weapon, the power, the way for me to fight. It was the one way I might hope to affect a man's thinking." Joe performs stateside in Officer's Clubs and PXs, driving a truck by day. The musical equipment is topnotch and in later years he often dreams of being able to play the service-issue drums again. "Man, I could go on those hides," he tells the Daily News reporter. A picture from those years shows him tap-dancing dressed in top hat and tails with a cane, performing routines he learned on the vaudeville circuit.
At the end of the war, in 1946, he separates from the military in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, spends some time on the road in Oklahoma, and in 1949 lands for a short period of time in Beaumont, Texas, a petrochemical town near the large southern city of Houston. Soon, Joe finds his way to Houston.
Thousands of blacks along the gulf coast come to Houston after the war hoping for work in the oil industry, and by mid-century Houston has one of the largest populations of blacks in any Southern city. They bring with them unique musical talents. Street musicians gather downtown in front of Jackson's Shoe Repair Shine Parlor at Milam and Prairie, where cab drivers get a shine and downtowners pause for the entertainment. Joe finds his way into this downtown sidewalk symphony. "Just trying to get a job as a drummer, and I couldn't get the job unless I had my own drums," he explains to the reporter from his jail cell in 1957. "I tried to make a loan from several sources 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." He's a multi-instrumentalist but says, "I always did like the rhythmic-type music, such as xylophone, piano, drum. Anything you bang on, that's what I always liked." To Joe, a piano is the same as a drum — you bang on it.
He first plays the Seawall in Galveston, about thirty miles south of Houston, in the summer of 1954. On weekends during the summer months, the Texas Gulfliner passenger train runs every half hour until midnight from downtown Houston to Galveston beach and back, twenty-five cents for a round- trip ticket. Joe sits in the black's only passenger section: you can tell which section you are in by the thickness of the seat cushions. The Gulfliner crosses Galveston Bay on a brave bridge lapped by the green sea chop and Joe disembarks on Galveston Island at the Atcheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe Depot, with its vaulted ceilings, marble columns, and mahogany benches. Joe is penniless in this splendid setting, taking it all in as crowds of tourists part around him, but he walks happily outside the station through a grove of oleanders, past the Henderson House restaurant, and onto 25 Street. He follows the sound of the surf to the Gulf and sets foot on the Seawall for the first time: it's the same gulf breeze of Florida he breathes in familiarly, and he's never seen such an inviting long sidewalk stage. Soon he's scavenged some cans and brings his Houston street-corner routine to the Seawall. When he's arrested in 1957 for disturbing the peace he is living behind Menard Park in a boarding house owned by a prominent black businessman, Gus Allen. It's only three blocks from the Seawall and The Pleasure Pier.
The showplace of the Gulf Coast sits on The Pleasure Pier, the Balinese Room, a nightclub and gambling parlor built by mobster Sam Maceo, who controls vice in Galveston for decades. Frank Sinatra plays there in 1950. No longer a teen idol and now suffering through a divorce from Nancy Sinatra, Sinatra can only find work in mob-controlled casinos. He's known Maceo since the late 1940s when Maceo visited his Palm Springs home. Maceo pays him a standard singer's fee to perform at the Balinese and Frank slums it at the Towers Motel and eats chili and beans at the Speedway Café, next to The Pleasure Pier's rollercoaster.
Joe never plays joints like the Balinese.
"Wouldn't you rather be playing in a nightclub then, rather than on the Seawall, Joe?" Wortham asks him, somewhat skeptically.
"No, I was looking for a place where there was a good clean atmosphere and where the people who wanted to listen to me could, regardless of their likes and dislikes insofar as a nightclub or other type of business house. I guess I could make more money in a nightclub or something, but this way those who want to hear me can and I like the beach very much. Through the 'kitty' made up by the listeners every night, the Good Lord has seen I've got a place to stay and food in my stomach."
What he doesn't tell the reporter is that his choice of career as a street performer also keeps him out of the control of mobsters, like Sam Maceo, and helps him avoid the humiliation of playing segregated southern nightclubs and concert halls. Even Sammy Davis, Jr. can't get a room in the Vegas hotels where he performs until Sinatra appeals to his mob bosses in 1960.
The county jailer, George Lundy, has been listening in on the interview and interrupts Wortham to verify some of Joe's claims: "Fred, I tell you what, I used to promote some acts over in La Porte, and I seen this man, and he's a one- man band and a first-class entertainer."
They are both looking at Joe, appraisingly.
"Where are you going to go when you get out, Joe?" Wortham asks.
Joe shrugs. "As long as there are open-minded folks who want to listen to my parables on truth and honesty and want to hear my music, call it calypso or bongo or whatever, I'll make out fine and be happy. Unless there is something real wrong, me and the drums will go back out to the Seawall for a while."
"From Wail to Jail" runs in the The Galveston Daily News on the 21 of August, 1957. On Wednesday morning, a Galveston promoter named Jack Sayre reads the story about Joe's inconveniences and pays the remaining twenty-three dollars of his fine. Sayre owns property on Stewart Beach and invites Joe to play there, safe from police harassment. "I can't help it, but I will always help the little man who is down. Coleman can set up here on the property and play as long as he wants to," he says.
Fresh out of jail and back on the beach, Coleman breathes in the free gulf breeze and says in a follow-up story in the News, "This is where a man belongs. Where it's clean, cool and wholesome. I'm indebted to Mr. Sayre and all the other friends who've helped me and the drums will prove it." Claude Allen, operator of the Pleasure Pier's Golden Garter Tavern, also offers to help out Joe. Two people had complained about Joe according to police. They will not identify the callers.
The following night, Joe plays conga drums at the Blue Room Teen Club. He never fails to make a lasting impression on his young listeners in Galveston. Houston-raised record producer, Billy Bentley, says decades later that the first concert he ever saw was Calypso Joe on the Seawall in 1957. Joe impresses him as much as seeing Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Did Beatniks Kill John F. Kennedy?"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Rob Johnson.
Excerpted by permission of Beatdom Books.
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