Cab Calloway

Cabell Calloway III was born on the twenty-fifth of December 1907 at Rochester, New York, the second of six children of Cabell Calloway Jr. — a Baltimore-trained lawyer and real-estate agent — and Eulalia Reed Calloway, a music teacher and church organist who had taken her degree at Morgan State. The family moved to Baltimore when he was six. He took his early musical education from his mother and the elocution training that would inform his later stage presence from his father. He completed Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore in 1927 and was admitted to Lincoln University with the intention of becoming a lawyer.

He left Lincoln at the end of his second year for full-time work with the Alabamians dance band in Chicago. He moved to New York in 1929 to take over leadership of the Missourians orchestra and renamed the band the Cab Calloway Orchestra. In April 1931 the Orchestra succeeded the Duke Ellington Orchestra as the house band at the segregated Harlem Cotton Club — the engagement that established Calloway's national career.

His decisive recording was "Minnie the Moocher" of March 1931 — the first record by a Black artist to sell more than a million copies on the American market. The "hi-de-ho" call-and-response chorus he developed for the song became the signature of his stage performances and remained associated with him through the remaining sixty-three years of his career. He continued to lead the Calloway Orchestra through the swing era of the 1930s, employing across the period the young Dizzy Gillespie, Ben Webster, Chu Berry, Milt Hinton and Cozy Cole — the orchestra was one of the principal incubators of the bebop generation of jazz instrumentalists.

He played Sportin' Life in the 1952 international revival of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess at the Stoll Theatre in London — the role had been written for him by Ira Gershwin during the original 1935 Boston tryout. He played in The Cincinnati Kid (1965), The Blues Brothers (1980) — for which the new generation discovered him — and appeared on tour and in cabaret through to the late 1980s.

He died of complications of a stroke at Hockessin, Delaware, on the eighteenth of November 1994, at eighty-six.

He is honored here as the master of the Cotton Club orchestra.