Music like R. Crumb and His Cheap Suit Serenaders

R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders are an American retro string band playing songs from, and in the style of, the 1920s: old-time music, ragtime, "evergreen" jazz standards, western swing, country blues, Hawaiian, hokum, vaudeville and medicine show tunes. Underground cartoonist Robert Crumb was the band's frontman and album cover artist. Other members of the band include fellow cartoonist Robert Armstrong and filmmaker Terry Zwigoff (who directed the 1995 documentary Crumb).

Crumb and Armstrong, who knew each other from the underground comics scene, realized that they both enjoyed listening to — and playing — music from the 1920s and '30s. Bringing in Armstrong's old friend Al Dodge, the trio began playing together for fun. On a subsequent trip through Milwaukee, the group met with underground publisher Denis Kitchen, who offered them the chance to cut a 78 rpm record under the name R. Crumb and his Keep on Trucking Orchestra (a reference to Crumb's famous Keep on Truckin' comic strip, which itself was a riff on the Blind Boy Fuller song "Truckin' My Blues Away").