Cab Calloway

Cabell Calloway III was born on December 25, 1907, in Rochester, New York, to Cabell Calloway Jr., a Lincoln University of Pennsylvania graduate, and Martha Eulalia Reed, a Morgan State College graduate who worked as a teacher, church organist, lawyer, and real estate professional. The family relocated to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1919, following which his father died and his mother remarried John Nelson Fortune. Calloway grew up in the West Baltimore neighborhood of Druid Hill, where he frequently skipped school to sell newspapers, shine shoes, and cool horses at the Pimlico racetrack, developing an early interest in racing and gambling. After being caught gambling on church steps, his mother enrolled him in the Downingtown Industrial and Agricultural School in 1921, a reform school in Chester County, Pennsylvania, operated by a relative on his mother's side.

Upon returning to Baltimore, Calloway worked as a caterer while continuing his education and began private vocal lessons in 1922. Despite his parents' and teachers' disapproval of jazz, he performed in Baltimore nightclubs, with drummer Chick Webb and pianist Johnny Jones serving as mentors. He joined his high school basketball team and, in his senior year, played professionally with the Baltimore Athenians in the Negro Professional Basketball League. After graduating from Frederick Douglass High School in 1925, he briefly attended law school in Chicago before leaving to pursue nightclub performing.

In 1927, Calloway joined his older sister Blanche Calloway on tour for the black musical revue Plantation Days, crediting her as his inspiration for entering show business. He subsequently enrolled at Crane College in Chicago, where he declined an opportunity to play basketball for the Harlem Globetrotters in order to focus on singing. Performing as a singer, drummer, and master of ceremonies at venues including the Dreamland Café, Sunset Cafe, and Club Berlin, he served as an understudy for singer Adelaide Hall at the Sunset Cafe, where he also met Louis Armstrong, who taught him to sing in the scat style. He left school to sing with the Alabamians band, relocating with them to New York in 1929, where they opened at the Savoy Ballroom on September 20 of that year. After the Alabamians disbanded, Armstrong recommended Calloway as a replacement singer in the revue Connie's Hot Chocolates, where he established himself singing "Ain't Misbehavin'" by Fats Waller. The Missourians then asked him to front their band.

By 1930, the Missourians had been renamed Cab Calloway and His Orchestra. The band was hired in 1931 to substitute for the Duke Ellington Orchestra at the Cotton Club in Harlem while Ellington's group was on tour, and their popularity earned them a permanent position there. The band also broadcast twice weekly on NBC radio, and Calloway appeared on programs alongside Walter Winchell and Bing Crosby, becoming the first African American to host a nationally syndicated radio program. During the Great Depression, Calloway was earning $50,000 annually at the age of 23.

In 1931, Calloway recorded "Minnie the Moocher," which became his most famous song and the first single by an African American artist to sell one million copies. The song earned him the nickname "The Hi-De-Ho Man." He performed the song and two others, "St. James Infirmary Blues" and "The Old Man of the Mountain," in the Betty Boop animated films Minnie the Moocher (1932), Snow-White (1933), and The Old Man of the Mountain (1933), providing voice-over work and serving as the basis for the characters' movements through rotoscoping. His band was among the jazz orchestras most frequently featured on film during the 1930s, and he appeared in a series of short films for Paramount. In these films, Calloway performed a gliding backstep dance move that some observers have described as a precursor to Michael Jackson's moonwalk; Calloway himself referred to it as "The Buzz." The 1933 film International House featured him performing "Reefer Man," and Lena Horne made her film debut as a dancer in Cab Calloway's Jitterbug Party in 1935. His first Hollywood feature film appearance came opposite Al Jolson in The Singing Kid (1936), which also featured his band and 22 Cotton Club dancers.

In 1938, Calloway published Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A "Hepster's" Dictionary, the first dictionary published by an African American, which the New York Public Library adopted as its official jive language reference. His orchestra during this era included trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie, Jonah Jones, and Adolphus "Doc" Cheatham; saxophonists Ben Webster and Leon "Chu" Berry; guitarist Danny Barker; bassist Milt Hinton; and drummer Cozy Cole. Calloway led one of the most popular dance bands in the United States from the early 1930s through the late 1940s and reached the Billboard charts in five consecutive decades, from the 1930s through the 1970s.

Calloway's stage, film, and television work extended across several decades. His film credits include Stormy Weather (1943) and The Cincinnati Kid (1965). On Broadway, Calloway performed from 1953 to 1973, starring in The Pajama Game and appearing in both Porgy and Bess and Hello, Dolly! The 1967 film version of Hello Dolly! also featured him. In 1980, his appearance in the musical comedy film The Blues Brothers brought a marked resurgence in his career.

Calloway received the National Medal of Arts from the United States Congress in 1993. He died on November 18, 1994. Posthumous honors include the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008, the induction of "Minnie the Moocher" into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999 and into the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry in 2019, and the selection of his home films for preservation by the National Film Registry in 2022 as culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant. He was also inducted into both the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame and the International Jazz Hall of Fame.