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| 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.
- 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.
