“Put me in the spotlight,
give me two or three thousand people and a decent group of men behind
me with instruments, and you can’t give me more.”
—Cab Calloway
Born December 25, 1907 in Rochester,
New York, Cabell Calloway III’s luck was established even before birth.
This Christmas baby would go on to front one of the sharpest Big Bands
of the 1930s-1940s era, and pioneer a musical style Hip-Hop MCing would
draw great inspiration from a few years later. 15 years ago to the date,
this inimitable genius, Cab Calloway, passed away; but the legacy of
his music and magic couldn’t be more pervasive in an era when Hip-Hop
artists are increasingly turning to orchestral support to spruce up
their stage shows. In the grandest tradition, Cab Calloway is the original
Hip-Hop MC.
With a mother who played the
organ at church and an older sister, Blanche Calloway, who led a band
of her own, music was destiny for Cab Calloway. But the road from Rochester
to Harlem wasn’t no cakewalk. Like many young Black men his age faced
with unflattering domestic conditions, he wasn’t too impressed with
schooling, and thus acted out. In his memoir, Of Minnie the
published 1976, Cab recounts how much he “played hooky, hung out in
the streets, hustled to make money, and was always in and out of trouble.”
In turn, he was sent to a “reform school” run by a granduncle in
Pennsylvania. But that hardly changed him.
He loved to hustle—newspapers,
that is. Cab spent day and night selling newspapers across town, making
enough money to put some kind of food on the table his family ate on.
Lacking a father figure for some of his earlier years, rebellion, as
is most often with kids that age, set in. He tells the story of a day
he was shooting dice not far away from home on a Sunday morning, and
suddenly a hand reached across from behind to the top of his shoulders;
only it wasn’t just any hand: It was his mother’s. “Boy, what
are you doing here, shooting dice on the Lord’s Day! I thought you
went to Sunday school this morning. Get yourself up and get on home,”
she furiously castigated him. Still, at that age, nothing seemed to
be getting across to him—nothing but the street life.
It took many years—not until
Junior High and High School—before Cab Calloway would come to terms
with the benefits of a quality education. Junior High would be a turning
point of sorts, as even with “few books or supplies” he was swarmed
by teachers who never ran out of “love and understanding.” Didn’t
matter that they were still stern. “They pushed us to learn,
but they were sensitive to each child so that nobody ever felt left
out or uncared for.” This “closeness and understanding,” he posited,
is a “fundamental” element missing in urban schools these days.
Tupac’s Version of “Minnie The Moocher” f/ Chopmaster J
It also helped that in High
School, the historic Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore, Cab
developed a fondness for basketball, and found out, alongside those
who ever crossed him on court, that his talents might just lead him
professionally. It was also in those mid-teen years that he picked up
a new passion—singing. Picking up where he left off, Cab again turned
to hustling—playing basketball in the day and singing vaudeville acts
in the night, earning enough money to own a car at such young age (even
more rare for a Negro of the times).
The whole world might owe it
to Cab’s momma, though, who, soon after hearing him harmonizing with
a couple of boys down the street, outright ordered: “Cabell, you have
such a nice strong voice. You’re going to take voice lessons.” Thus,
he was put in the care of Ruth Macabee, “an ex-concert singer,”
who taught him the fundamentals of music and singing, how to manipulate
sound vocally, and, most importantly, how to enunciate clearly enough
to provide the audience with precise polyrhythmic pleasure. This technique
would prove highly useful throughout Cab Calloway’s career, as lyrical
virtuosity became his strongest ally.
And while blessed with a good
voice, Cab knew his limitations. He was Black—Negro—N#####—and
had to accept it—even if, to some, he looked anything but. “The
only difference between a black and a white entertainer is that my ass
has been kicked a little more and a lot harder because it’s black,”
he admits. But he never once wavered: “I’ve always known, from the
days when I was a n##### kid selling papers and hustling shoeshines
and walking hots out at Pimlico—hell, I’m a n##### and proud of
it.”
Cab’s first big break came
through his sister, Blanche, a legend in her own right, who, after much
badgering and a commitment by Cab to enroll into College once the gig
was up, landed him a spot in the late 1920s hit-Broadway Plantation
Days which she was also starring in. The experience, consisting
of a twenty-five member cast and a sixteen-piece orchestra, would be
life-changing for the budding star. Blanche knew the shadowy skeletons
of show business all too well and tried to discourage her young brother
from taking the same route; she reminded of how much his mother still
wished he pursue Law School. But the felicity of success, or “the
pleasure of being in the spotlight and being admired,” was too raw
to resist. And for one so talented, it was only a matter of time before
he set up shop in Chicago—initially to enroll in Crane College—and
began making a name for himself in the whorehouses and “low-life”
nightclubs of the Windy City.
Outkast: Listen to the influence of Cab Calloway in ‘Kast’s “The Mighty O”
While still attending college,
he was able to assemble a small band known as The Alabamians, which
soon embarked on a nationwide tour that would end one chapter in Cab
Calloway’s life and begin a new one. Even as they traveled throughout
the Midwest, the band’s eye only twinkled for one city—New York.
All bands of the 1920s and 1930s era knew national success wasn’t
worth a lick without New York’s approval—a strange, but ironic,
reality Hip-Hop has never been comfortable confronting, much less admitting.
The band was in for a rude
awakening once it hit New York. The stubbornness of some members had
refused Calloway’s input to switch up to a jazzier, more flamboyant
style to capture the essence of the city with big lights. It turned
out Cab was right after all. An embarrassed Cab eventually left the
band and, with the help of Louis Armstrong—the greatest performer
to emerge from the 20th Century—landed a gig, in 1930,
as lead singer for Connie’s Hot Chocolate, a huge Broadway
hit.
Cab was gaining national acclaim
for his prolific performances and, before long, confronted with the
opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream—front a Big Band. This dream
was a longtime coming, and though it took a while before assembling
a band with such towering legends as Benny Payne, Dizzy Gillespie, Jonah
Jones, and Milton Hinton, The Missourians in no time had attracted a
following.
It didn’t take long before
the mob took notice of this young man in his early 20s whose stage presence
far outrivaled even the most self-assured performers. Cab might not
have been the suavest of that era, but with his wide collection of wide-brim
hats, zoot suits, pearl-gray gloves, and spotless white shoes, he was
hard to beat. In 1930, he was proposed an offer by the mob to come play
The Cotton Club—perhaps the most recognized jazz spot of the ‘30s
and ‘40s—seeing as the great Duke Ellington was leaving his post
to star in several film projects. The young Cab had no choice but to
accept the offer—which he couldn’t refuse even if he wanted
to.
The Cotton Club, for all its
splendor and majesty, held strictly to segregationist policies, and
even Cab admits that “the idea was to make whites who came to the
club feel like they were being catered to and entertained by black slaves”—slaves
as widely renowned as Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Duke Ellington,
and Louis Armstrong. But Cab Calloway makes a strong case in favor of
Negro musicians who still played regardless: “It shouldn’t have
happened then. It was wrong. But on the other hand, I doubt that jazz
would have survived if musicians hadn’t gone along with such racial
practices there and elsewhere.” Maybe. Maybe not.
A year later, Cab Calloway
was a household name, and it came time to establish a theme song. Every
band had one. And thus arose to life the timeless classic, “Minnie
The Moocher.”
She was a red-hot hoochie
coocher/
She was the roughest,
toughest frail/
But Minnie had a heart
as big as a whale/
Before “Minnie,” Cab Calloway
and His Cotton Club Orchestra had made use of “St. James Infirmary
Blues,” the famous tale of a quite self-centered widower-to-be who
pays visit to his dying wife in an infirmary. The rhythm, tempo, and
even some arrangements from “St. James” were used in creating “Minnie,”
Cab admits: “If you listen closely … you’ll hear some of the same
changes and harmonies.”
His signature sound, “Hi-De-Ho,”
perhaps most recognizable by the Hip-Hop generation, actually came by
accident. The legend goes that Cab was singing one of those days, swept
up in the hysteria of the band and the audience, that he forgot his
lyrics, and suddenly, as taught him by the incomparable “Satchmo,”
began scatting, filling up the gaps in memory with “Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-ho
… Hi-de-ho-de-ho-de-hee.” That single instance might have been most
responsible for the rugged improvisation and vocal experimentation Hip-Hop
MCs from the 1970s onward made into an art-form that would change the
world.
Dirty The Moocher: ODB’s version of “Minnie The Moocher”
Calloway also did something
especially remarkable around 1931. He founded Cab Calloway, Incorporated,
an agency which began managing his 14-piece orchestra, and from which
he took 50% of the profits annually. This practice is yet to be broadly
adopted within the Hip-Hop artist community, but there’s hope yet.
And even when faced with deep
discrimination in the deep South—including a lynching threat that
almost came through (!)—Cab Calloway kept playing. He demanded 100%
from his band, and saw to it that every member played with unfettered
excellence. And the country—and world—reacted accordingly. Cab would
go on to earn more than $10 million in his 60+ years as an entertainer,
touring the world, breaking down many color barriers—even getting
his white audiences to do more than just sit there and look pretty—that
sought to keep Negro musicians in “their place.” With an unbreakable
dedication to musical craftsmanship, he was able to star in more than
10 movies, sell out hundreds of halls, and spawn numerous hits—many
originals, many interpretations, including “Reefer Man,” “The
Scat Song,” “The Viper’s Drag,” “The Lady With The Fan,”
“Kickin’ The Gong Around,” “Ain’t Got No Gal In This Town,”
and “Zaz Zuh Zaz.”
Cab Calloway’s influence
on Hip-Hop music and culture can’t be overstated. His cool and sensual
calm can for instance be traced transparently in a Snoop Dogg or Big
Daddy Kane. His knack for witty, street tales resides on the pens of
modern day storytellers like Slick Rick and The GZA. His unmatchable
skill with scatting is seen in the adlib abilities of Mos Def and Black
Thought. And the high bar of performance set which no musician of his
era came close to reaching is admired in contemporaries like Busta Rhymes
and Public Enemy. The centrality of the body in music performance—his
loose, dark hair flapping like eagle wings, his waist twirling with
intensity so as to create circles with the tails of his zoot suit, while
still maintaining an unimpeachable elegance guarded by self-respect—is
a Cab Calloway original.
In Wilmington, Delaware, Calloway’s
legacy lives on in the Cab Calloway School of the Arts, a magnet school
tailored after his strong appreciation for the arts and engaging academic
curriculum.
On this anniversary of his
passing onto glory, we remember Cab Calloway as the original Hip-Hop
MC who loved nothing more than “making people happy, making them feel
the fullness of life as I feel it and as I’ve lived it.” A Historical Retrospective of Cab Calloway – A Taste Of Genius:
Hi-De-HoMinnie The Moocher