Crash Course Timeline, No. 25: Cab Calloway, So Much More than the "Hi De Ho Man"

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.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 24: The Cotton Club and The Duke

Hail, hail, the band's all here.

At some unknown date in 1923, but shortly after getting out of Sing Sing, a “prominent” bootlegger/gangster named Owney Madden bought a night club on the upper floor of a building on the corner of 142nd and Lenox Avenue in Harlem and renamed it the Cotton Club. It wouldn’t hit its prime for a couple years, but the venue would become synonymous with the Jazz era, and the glamor that surrounded it. For all the careers it launched and sustained - beyond counting, honestly, including the artist/legend featured in this post - life on the talent side of the stage looked very different from what audiences saw.

First, it’s easy to forget that the Jazz era coincided with Prohibition - a function of how many people ignored it, I imagine. Wikipedia’s entry on the Cotton Club notes that the authorities shut it down for selling liquor in 1925, but that’s the only hint that the authorities cared what went on inside. Madden plied the club’s well-to-do clientele with “his #1 beer” and a schedule of the biggest entertainers of the 1920s. It even hosted "celebrity nights" to give audiences a shot at something fresh, which expanded the baseline who’s who list to include (lifted straight from Wikipedia): Jimmy Durante, George Gershwin, Sophie Tucker, Paul Robeson, Al Jolson, Mae West, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, Langston Hughes, Judy Garland, Moss Hart, and Jimmy Walker, among others.

The regular programming at Cotton Club patrons were shows called “musical revues,” extended performances that featured singers, dancers, and comedians, all of it anchored with music by the house orchestra at the time. I imagine a space between vaudeville and the (early) modern variety shows aired on TV when I was a knee-high, only live and on stage. A guy named Andy Preer led the first orchestra, and for a while (1923-27), but the Internet recalls him only dimly. This was the musical revue's hey-day, when the hip and swell considered it a hot ticket, a detail that only makes the relationship between the entertainers and the entertained more coarse and distasteful. First, some framing:

“[The Cotton Club] reproduced the racist imagery of the era, often depicting black people as savages in exotic jungles or as ‘darkies’ in the plantation South. The menu depicts this imagery, with illustrations done by Julian Harrison, showing naked black men and women dancing around a drum in the jungle. Tribal mask illustrations make up the border of the menu.”

In keeping with that theme, the Cotton Club literally segregated the (largely? entirely?) black talent from its white clientele. The black singers, musicians and dancers - all of the latter cast to fit the “tall, tan and terrific” profile; “at least 5'6" tall, light-skinned, and under 21 years of age” - had to enter through a separate entrance and were barred from mingling with guests in the club itself. The superintendent’s basement at 646 Lenox was either offered or found as a place for the entertainers’ after-parties, “where they imbibed corn whiskey, peach brandy and marijuana.” Everything else reeked of spectacle and a cultural tourism bordering on outright exploitation. Wikipedia cobbled together a paraphrase of Langston Hughes’ contemporary notes: