Cab Calloway

Cabell Calloway III was born on the twenty-fifth of December 1907 in Rochester, New York, the second of six children of Cabell Calloway Jr. — a Lincoln University graduate who read law and dealt in real estate — and Eulalia Reed Calloway, a teacher and church organist. In 1919 the family settled in West Baltimore, and it was there, amid the churches and clubs of a striving Black community, that the boy's gift for performance took root. His elder sister, Blanche Calloway, became an accomplished bandleader before him and lit the path he would follow.

Drawn to nightlife over his mother's hopes of a legal career, Calloway sang, danced, and led bands in Baltimore and Chicago before arriving in New York. In 1931 he and his orchestra were engaged at Harlem's Cotton Club, standing in for Duke Ellington and soon becoming the venue's principal Black band. Radio broadcasts from the club carried his voice across the nation, and from 1931 to 1940 he reigned there as one of the most celebrated bandleaders of the swing era.

That same year he recorded "Minnie the Moocher," whose call-and-response "hi-de-ho" made him a household name and, it is said, the first African American to sell a million copies of a record. Resplendent in his white tails, he was a showman of boundless energy — a pioneer of scat singing whose exuberant vocal improvisation shaped the sound of American jazz. His band was a proving ground for greats including Dizzy Gillespie and Ben Webster.

His career spanned seven decades, from the Cotton Club to the stage of "Porgy and Bess," "Hello, Dolly!," and the 1980 film "The Blues Brothers," which introduced him to a new generation. He died on the eighteenth of November 1994. We honor Cab Calloway, whose joyous voice turned exuberance into an art and carried the spirit of a people onto the world's great stages.