“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 Moocher and Me, 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.    

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—**** —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 **** kid selling papers and hustling shoeshines and walking hots out at Pimlico—hell, I’m a **** 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.       

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 20^th 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.

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.”