 |
| For those who first saw him in 1980. |
“Cab Calloway is hip-hop.”
- Jon Landis, Director (The Blues Brothers, among others)
I’m a big fan of Landis, that movie and several others, but…yeah, that feels like a bridge too far to an anachronism. Related, raise your hand if The Blues Brothers was the first time you saw Cab Calloway perform. [Raises hand.]
At the same time, those few words from Landis hint at how unique, innovative and just plain massive Cab Calloway was in his 1930s-1940s heyday. As much as he had to claw (and disappoint his solidly-middle-class parents) to get there, once Calloway took over the house-band at the Cotton Club after Duke Ellington (profiled earlier) departed in 1931, he wouldn’t more than glance back for the next two decades. He hosted a twice-weekly radio, appeared in movies, wrote a succession of books on slang (1938’s Cab Calloway’s Cat-alogue was the first jive language dictionary available for circulation in New York’s public libraries), and featuring in a Bettie Boop cartoons (e.g., “Minnie the Moocher,” “The Old Man of the Mountain,” and “Snow White”) with his own dance moves translated to celluloid by the miracle of rotoscoping. In between all that, he invented The Moonwalk (though, as he remarked, “it was called the Buzz back then.”)
Calloway made a splash in every media available to him at his peak and, though racial discrimination was very much alive and unwell at that time, the hip ‘n’ high-brow felt the change in the air. When he starred opposite the then-fading Al Jolson (profiled earlier) in 1936’s The Singing Kid, film critic Arthur Knight saw a passing of the torch:
“…when Calloway begins singing in his characteristic style – in which the words are tools for exploring rhythm and stretching melody – it becomes clear that American culture is changing around Jolson and with (and through) Calloway.”
To think, had a followed his parents advice and gone to law school, none of that would have happened.
He was born Cabell Calloway III in Rochester, New York, in 1907 to two college graduates, his father, Cab Calloway, Jr., a lawyer with a sideline in real state, his mother, Martha Eulalia Reed, a teacher and church organist. (Not everyone who grows up with music in the household becomes a musician, but a lot of musicians grew up with music in the household.) The family relocated to Baltimore, Maryland when Calloway III was 11…which put him close to Pimlico, which gets a little closer to where his story begins. He skipped school often to work, selling newspapers, shine shoes and, when he could get out to the horse track, cool down horses after a race. A taste for gambling followed like a chaser and, after someone caught Calloway III “playing dice on the church steps,” his mother and stepfather (Calloway, Jr. died shortly after the move) shipped him to a reform school called Downington Industrial and Agricultural School.
Calloway’s grades would recover enough to make law school a viable option, but gravitated to everything else at every opportunity. He played basketball well enough to join the Baltimore Athenians by his senior year in high school (and would later pass on playing for, but not with, the Harlem Globetrotters) and he studied music and took private singing lessons as part of his formal studies. Less formally, he started performing in Baltimore’s jazz clubs around the same time, places where he found mentors like Chick Webb (who I know) and Johnny Jones (who I do not). Through it all, his mother still hoped that he’d straighten go to law school - he even enrolled at Chicago’s Crane College - but much like she held out hope that Calloway’s older sister Blanche Calloway would become a nurse and a teacher, it didn't happen.
Blanche Calloway’s professional stage career had actually started in Baltimore in 1921 with a role in the Eubie Blake/Noble Sissie musical Shuffle Along. She landed her next role in 1923 in a play called Plantation Days, which toured nationally and ended in Chicago in 1927. Cab Calloway joined her that same year, ostensibly for classes at Crane, but he spent all the time he could at the famous Sunset Café where Blanche already had steady work. He played anywhere and anything they’d let him, starting as a drummer before graduating to emcee, but his sister out-earned him eight times over during this period. Cab Calloway’s Chicago years plugged him into one of America’s most vibrant jazz scenes and connected him to a fresh set of mentors - Louis Armstrong among them, who taught him how to scat. He worked as an understudy for Adelaide Hall, who went on to headline the Cotton Club’s biggest ever show and play with Duke Ellington’s orchestra during his time there.
By the time he left Chicago (and law school), Calloway fronted a band of his own called the Alabamians. [Ed. - Blanche Calloway looks like an illuminating story for her times and it looks like Spotify has enough for me to work with, so she’s next in the series.] They landed a debut at the Savoy Ballroom in September 1929, but broke up shortly thereafter. The then-free Calloway got connected to a musical revue called Bonnie’s Hot Chocolates where he made his name singing Fats Waller’s (profiled earlier) “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and impressed an entirely new band, the Missourians, enough to invite him to become a bandleader. They became Cab Calloway and his Orchestra and, after a stint as substitutes for Duke Ellington’s band when he toured, they became the Cotton Club’s full-time house band.
Calloway’s prime years followed from there and would last until the end of the 1940s. I’ve flagged some of the highlights above, but the few (i.e., paltry) online sources I read speaks of Calloway as borderline transformational - something backed up by the sampler. To add to his list of accomplishments, he was the first black American to host his own syndicated radio show and he took home $50,000/year in 1933, the Great Depression’s first trough. Even before his screen work with Jolson, he performed on radio opposite major white personalities of the era like Bing Crosby and Walter Winchell - the latter due Calloway’s influence on pop culture as a whole. Wikipedia - which is where I virtually all of this - includes his full list of credits, e.g., the follow-up jive dictionaries (1939's Professor Cab Calloway’s Swingformation Bureau), the parody gossip column for Song Hits in the mid-1940s, and even a role in 1943’s Stormy Weather, a legitimate milestone in the movies for black America. He was a force of nature in his time; the above opportunities came in part because saying “no” to Cab Calloway made no sense. Blackpast.org’s(too brief) bio noted his accomplishments and downfall in one short paragraph:
“Calloway’s Orchestra was arguably the most popular band during America’s swing era of the 1930s and 1940s. However, after World War II the public began to favor small bebop combos over large swing-style bands, and Calloway was forced to disband his orchestra in 1948.”
“Forced to disband his orchestra” might be putting it nicely: Wikipedia puts it down to bad business decisions and gambling debts. There’s no question that he had one hell of a run. Despite that one time, when Dizzy Gillespie stabbed him in the leg after Calloway (wrongly) accused him of shooting spitballs during an onstage brawl, his tours sounded like a blast - e.g., he also formed baseball and basketball teams from his orchestra and played charity games against semi-pro teams. Like Duke Ellington, he sometimes booked his own rail-cars for tours to avoid the indignity of white bigotry, but he remained popular enough through it all for the USO to have him perform in front of the troops before they shipped during World War II. He even wrote a few jingles for the war effort, including, “Doing the Reactionary,” “The Great Lie,” and “My Lament for V Day.” [Ed. - Couldn't find most of his WWII jingles.]
More than anything else, I hope all this translates. To circle back to the beginning, I had no real concept of who Cab Calloway was when I watched his star-turn in The Blues Brothers, but, because the other legends who made cameos (e.g., Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin), I sensed he must have been a big deal at some point. And now I know how big.
About the Sampler
Unlike some of the bands/artists I’ve reviewed so far, Cab Calloway doesn’t have a great avalanche of popular songs. “Minnie the Moocher,” recorded in 1931, was his signature song - one worthy of at least a couple more that traded off its fame (e.g., “Hi De Ho Man” and, one of my favorites, “Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day”) - but Calloway recorded a slew of songs that come from such a unique and, based on everything I’ve heard to this point, utterly novel style and point of view, that I’m not sure I’ve heard either successfully recreated or even re-imagined. Full of word-play - e.g., “What’s Buzzin’ Cousin” and “Everybody Eats When They Come to My House” - and with Calloway firmly at the center of them all, he stands out as the swing era’s rare bandleader/front-man. By the latter I mean I haven’t seen another bandleader from the swing era sing their own songs; so far as I know, nearly all of them called in performers - e.g., Bing Crosby and, later, Frank Sinatra - to do that. To borrow one more quote from Wikipedia’s entry, a music journalist named Timothy White offered this take:
“No living pathfinder in American popular music or its jazz and rock 'n' roll capillaries is so frequently emulated yet so seldom acknowledged as Cabell ‘Cab’ Calloway. He arguably did more things first and better than any other band leader of his generation.”
Apart from noting that the risqué(?) “Reefer Man” probably counts as Cab Calloway’s second biggest hit, I’ll close by listing the rest of the songs I dumped into the 20-song sampler. In the order the appear (and by no other logic) - and some of these are re-workings of earlier popular songs(*):
“St. Louis Blues*,” “Are You Hep to the Jive? (Yas, Yas),” “The Jungle King (You Ain’t a Doggone Thing)” (a riff on the “signifying monkey” bit remembers from his youth, fwiw), “St. James Infirmary*,” “The Honeydripper,” “Jumpin’ Jive,” “Blues in the Night” (which I first heard by Julie London), “You Rascal You,” “Kickin’ the Gong Around,” “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” “Jitter Bug,” “Mama, I Wanna Make Rhythm,” “The Calloway Boogie,” and “Roomin’ House Boogie.”
That’s all for this chapter. Looking forward to learning more about his sister/guiding light in the next chapter. Till that one...
- Jon Landis, Director (The Blues Brothers, among others)
I’m a big fan of Landis, that movie and several others, but…yeah, that feels like a bridge too far to an anachronism. Related, raise your hand if The Blues Brothers was the first time you saw Cab Calloway perform. [Raises hand.]
At the same time, those few words from Landis hint at how unique, innovative and just plain massive Cab Calloway was in his 1930s-1940s heyday. As much as he had to claw (and disappoint his solidly-middle-class parents) to get there, once Calloway took over the house-band at the Cotton Club after Duke Ellington (profiled earlier) departed in 1931, he wouldn’t more than glance back for the next two decades. He hosted a twice-weekly radio, appeared in movies, wrote a succession of books on slang (1938’s Cab Calloway’s Cat-alogue was the first jive language dictionary available for circulation in New York’s public libraries), and featuring in a Bettie Boop cartoons (e.g., “Minnie the Moocher,” “The Old Man of the Mountain,” and “Snow White”) with his own dance moves translated to celluloid by the miracle of rotoscoping. In between all that, he invented The Moonwalk (though, as he remarked, “it was called the Buzz back then.”)
Calloway made a splash in every media available to him at his peak and, though racial discrimination was very much alive and unwell at that time, the hip ‘n’ high-brow felt the change in the air. When he starred opposite the then-fading Al Jolson (profiled earlier) in 1936’s The Singing Kid, film critic Arthur Knight saw a passing of the torch:
“…when Calloway begins singing in his characteristic style – in which the words are tools for exploring rhythm and stretching melody – it becomes clear that American culture is changing around Jolson and with (and through) Calloway.”
To think, had a followed his parents advice and gone to law school, none of that would have happened.
He was born Cabell Calloway III in Rochester, New York, in 1907 to two college graduates, his father, Cab Calloway, Jr., a lawyer with a sideline in real state, his mother, Martha Eulalia Reed, a teacher and church organist. (Not everyone who grows up with music in the household becomes a musician, but a lot of musicians grew up with music in the household.) The family relocated to Baltimore, Maryland when Calloway III was 11…which put him close to Pimlico, which gets a little closer to where his story begins. He skipped school often to work, selling newspapers, shine shoes and, when he could get out to the horse track, cool down horses after a race. A taste for gambling followed like a chaser and, after someone caught Calloway III “playing dice on the church steps,” his mother and stepfather (Calloway, Jr. died shortly after the move) shipped him to a reform school called Downington Industrial and Agricultural School.
Calloway’s grades would recover enough to make law school a viable option, but gravitated to everything else at every opportunity. He played basketball well enough to join the Baltimore Athenians by his senior year in high school (and would later pass on playing for, but not with, the Harlem Globetrotters) and he studied music and took private singing lessons as part of his formal studies. Less formally, he started performing in Baltimore’s jazz clubs around the same time, places where he found mentors like Chick Webb (who I know) and Johnny Jones (who I do not). Through it all, his mother still hoped that he’d straighten go to law school - he even enrolled at Chicago’s Crane College - but much like she held out hope that Calloway’s older sister Blanche Calloway would become a nurse and a teacher, it didn't happen.
Blanche Calloway’s professional stage career had actually started in Baltimore in 1921 with a role in the Eubie Blake/Noble Sissie musical Shuffle Along. She landed her next role in 1923 in a play called Plantation Days, which toured nationally and ended in Chicago in 1927. Cab Calloway joined her that same year, ostensibly for classes at Crane, but he spent all the time he could at the famous Sunset Café where Blanche already had steady work. He played anywhere and anything they’d let him, starting as a drummer before graduating to emcee, but his sister out-earned him eight times over during this period. Cab Calloway’s Chicago years plugged him into one of America’s most vibrant jazz scenes and connected him to a fresh set of mentors - Louis Armstrong among them, who taught him how to scat. He worked as an understudy for Adelaide Hall, who went on to headline the Cotton Club’s biggest ever show and play with Duke Ellington’s orchestra during his time there.
By the time he left Chicago (and law school), Calloway fronted a band of his own called the Alabamians. [Ed. - Blanche Calloway looks like an illuminating story for her times and it looks like Spotify has enough for me to work with, so she’s next in the series.] They landed a debut at the Savoy Ballroom in September 1929, but broke up shortly thereafter. The then-free Calloway got connected to a musical revue called Bonnie’s Hot Chocolates where he made his name singing Fats Waller’s (profiled earlier) “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and impressed an entirely new band, the Missourians, enough to invite him to become a bandleader. They became Cab Calloway and his Orchestra and, after a stint as substitutes for Duke Ellington’s band when he toured, they became the Cotton Club’s full-time house band.
Calloway’s prime years followed from there and would last until the end of the 1940s. I’ve flagged some of the highlights above, but the few (i.e., paltry) online sources I read speaks of Calloway as borderline transformational - something backed up by the sampler. To add to his list of accomplishments, he was the first black American to host his own syndicated radio show and he took home $50,000/year in 1933, the Great Depression’s first trough. Even before his screen work with Jolson, he performed on radio opposite major white personalities of the era like Bing Crosby and Walter Winchell - the latter due Calloway’s influence on pop culture as a whole. Wikipedia - which is where I virtually all of this - includes his full list of credits, e.g., the follow-up jive dictionaries (1939's Professor Cab Calloway’s Swingformation Bureau), the parody gossip column for Song Hits in the mid-1940s, and even a role in 1943’s Stormy Weather, a legitimate milestone in the movies for black America. He was a force of nature in his time; the above opportunities came in part because saying “no” to Cab Calloway made no sense. Blackpast.org’s(too brief) bio noted his accomplishments and downfall in one short paragraph:
“Calloway’s Orchestra was arguably the most popular band during America’s swing era of the 1930s and 1940s. However, after World War II the public began to favor small bebop combos over large swing-style bands, and Calloway was forced to disband his orchestra in 1948.”
“Forced to disband his orchestra” might be putting it nicely: Wikipedia puts it down to bad business decisions and gambling debts. There’s no question that he had one hell of a run. Despite that one time, when Dizzy Gillespie stabbed him in the leg after Calloway (wrongly) accused him of shooting spitballs during an onstage brawl, his tours sounded like a blast - e.g., he also formed baseball and basketball teams from his orchestra and played charity games against semi-pro teams. Like Duke Ellington, he sometimes booked his own rail-cars for tours to avoid the indignity of white bigotry, but he remained popular enough through it all for the USO to have him perform in front of the troops before they shipped during World War II. He even wrote a few jingles for the war effort, including, “Doing the Reactionary,” “The Great Lie,” and “My Lament for V Day.” [Ed. - Couldn't find most of his WWII jingles.]
More than anything else, I hope all this translates. To circle back to the beginning, I had no real concept of who Cab Calloway was when I watched his star-turn in The Blues Brothers, but, because the other legends who made cameos (e.g., Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin), I sensed he must have been a big deal at some point. And now I know how big.
About the Sampler
Unlike some of the bands/artists I’ve reviewed so far, Cab Calloway doesn’t have a great avalanche of popular songs. “Minnie the Moocher,” recorded in 1931, was his signature song - one worthy of at least a couple more that traded off its fame (e.g., “Hi De Ho Man” and, one of my favorites, “Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day”) - but Calloway recorded a slew of songs that come from such a unique and, based on everything I’ve heard to this point, utterly novel style and point of view, that I’m not sure I’ve heard either successfully recreated or even re-imagined. Full of word-play - e.g., “What’s Buzzin’ Cousin” and “Everybody Eats When They Come to My House” - and with Calloway firmly at the center of them all, he stands out as the swing era’s rare bandleader/front-man. By the latter I mean I haven’t seen another bandleader from the swing era sing their own songs; so far as I know, nearly all of them called in performers - e.g., Bing Crosby and, later, Frank Sinatra - to do that. To borrow one more quote from Wikipedia’s entry, a music journalist named Timothy White offered this take:
“No living pathfinder in American popular music or its jazz and rock 'n' roll capillaries is so frequently emulated yet so seldom acknowledged as Cabell ‘Cab’ Calloway. He arguably did more things first and better than any other band leader of his generation.”
Apart from noting that the risqué(?) “Reefer Man” probably counts as Cab Calloway’s second biggest hit, I’ll close by listing the rest of the songs I dumped into the 20-song sampler. In the order the appear (and by no other logic) - and some of these are re-workings of earlier popular songs(*):
“St. Louis Blues*,” “Are You Hep to the Jive? (Yas, Yas),” “The Jungle King (You Ain’t a Doggone Thing)” (a riff on the “signifying monkey” bit remembers from his youth, fwiw), “St. James Infirmary*,” “The Honeydripper,” “Jumpin’ Jive,” “Blues in the Night” (which I first heard by Julie London), “You Rascal You,” “Kickin’ the Gong Around,” “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” “Jitter Bug,” “Mama, I Wanna Make Rhythm,” “The Calloway Boogie,” and “Roomin’ House Boogie.”
That’s all for this chapter. Looking forward to learning more about his sister/guiding light in the next chapter. Till that one...
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