Cab Calloway

Maryland Historical Society

Cab Calloway, pioneering jazz singer and bandleader, began his career in Baltimore. He was born in Rochester, New York, on Christmas Day, 1907, and died in Delaware on November 8, 1994. With his family, Calloway moved from Rochester to 1017 Druid Hill Avenue, Baltimore, around 1918. He began his musical training with Ruth Macabee and his mother, Martha Eulalia Reed, organist at Grace Presbyterian Church. He studied voice and music theory with Frederick Douglass High School.

Although his teachers prepared him to be a classical musician and discouraged his love for jazz, Calloway began his meteoric jazz career in Baltimore. He performed at the Regent Theatre on Pennsylvania Avenue and in night clubs around town. He also played basketball professionally with the Baltimore Athenians and briefly considered a career in sports. To earn enough money to buy a set of drums, Calloway worked as a newsboy, selling the Afro-American newspaper on the street. Through his sister, Blanche, who was starring in the show, he joined the cast of Eubie Blake's Plantation Days, which was touring on the T.O.B.A. (Theater Owners and Brokers Association, a chain of black-oriented vaudeville theaters) circuit in 1927.

By 1929 he was the bandleader for the Alabamians in Chicago and New York and the Missourians in New York. He returned to the stage that year as the lead in Connie's Hot Chocolates, by Fats Waller and Andy Razar. His superb musicianship, unwavering professionalism, and ability to attract extraordinarily talented musicians proved to be a recipe for success. Chu Berry, Milt Hinton, Cozy Cole, Mario Bauza, and Dizzy Gillespie were among the many distinguished musicians who played for Calloway.

In 1930, Cab Calloway and His Orchestra starred at the Cotton Club, replacing Duke Ellington. A year later, Calloway and his band cut their first records. His hit tunes, sexually suggestive and filled with sly references to drugs, ranged from "Minnie the Moocher," with its "Hi-De-Ho" refrain to "Kicking the Gong Around" and "Sunday in Savannah." Radio brought Calloway national renown. George Gershwin, a frequent visitor to the Cotton Club in the 1930s, modeled the character "Sportin' Life" in his opera Porgy and Bess on Calloway's stage persona. When Gershwin began casting for the premier, he asked Calloway to take the role. Calloway, too busy with the band and the Cotton Club, turned it down.

Calloway and his band played to enthusiastic audiences throughout the country. Touring in segregated, pre-civil rights America was difficult, even for nationally known bands. Calloway had to rent separate railroad sleeping and dining cars for his musicians and be careful not to give offense to authorities such as the Greenfield, Mississippi, policeman who threatened a member of Calloway's entourage for not addressing him as "Sir." Calloway soon quit touring through the South.

In 1935 Calloway and his band toured Europe. They played a command performance at the London Palladium in Piccadilly Circus for an ardent fan, the Prince of Wales, who had heard him perform at the Cotton Club. The band was welcomed everywhere in Europe.

Calloway sang in films, beginning in 1943 with Stormy Weather, and starred on Broadway. His films include The Singing Kid (1936), St. Louis Blues (1958), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), and The Blues Brothers (1980). In the 1950s Calloway finally starred in Porgy and Bess as Sportin' Life, the role Gershwin modeled on him. The show toured the U.S. and Britain, including a special performance at the White House at the invitation of Lyndon and Ladybird Johnson.

Calloway always maintained that he would never retire. In his autobiography, Of Minnie the Moocher & Me, he wrote, "Put me 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....Let me feel that the people out there have for just a moment understood that it is possible to follow your dreams and to live the way you want to live....Let the people know that there ain't no need to be afraid to catch ahold of life and live it to the hilt."

In the 1960s he appeared with Pearl Bailey in Hello Dolly! which ran for more than three years on Broadway. He also toured with the Harlem Globetrotters, performing for half-time audiences. In the 1980s he appeared on television and the stage in the United States and Britain. In 1993 Calloway received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from the University of Rochester, where he led 9,000 graduates and their guests in singing, "Minnie the Moocher."

Calloway Cab, and Bryant Rollins. Of Minnie the Moocher & Me. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1976.