Charley Galloway was a barber and guitarist working the dance-hall circuit of 1890s New Orleans, a city where barbershops doubled as informal clubhouses for its Black musicians. By late 1894 he led his own string band and had begun bringing in a teenage cornetist, Charles "Buddy" Bolden, to fill it out at dances and parties. The arrangement ran backward within a year: Bolden's extroverted stage manner and, as historian Ben Sandmel put it, his "loud, aggressive cornet playing style," pulled the crowd away from its founder, and Galloway ended up a sideman in the band he'd started, playing behind the teenager he'd once hired. One uncorroborated blog account puts his birth around 1863 and says he was later replaced on guitar by Jefferson Mumford; neither claim is confirmed elsewhere, and no source records when Galloway died, or who taught him to play.