Cab CallowayEssay Preview: Cab CallowayReport this essayCab Calloway was an influential singer and actor in the 1930s. Born in Rochester, NY, on December 25, 1907, he started from rock bottom and worked his way up, until he was discovered and on top. To get to the top, Cab was a part of many different scenes and had much help from family and friends.
According to Dan Gediman, Cab was the “Hi De Ho” man, a legendary showman, gifted singer, bandleader, actor, and fashion setter. He was a larger than life figure, who was immortalized in cartoons and caricatures, was also the leader of one of the greatest bands of the Swing Era (Dan Gediman, “Cab Calloway”). Scott Yanow thought Cab was “One of the great entertainers,” and Cabs name was a household one by 1932, and never really declined in fame (Scott Yanow, “Cab Calloways Biography”).
Cab grew up in Baltimore, and attended law school there briefly, before hit quit school and set off to try and make it as a singer and dancer. As a young man Cab was following his fathers footsteps in becoming a lawyer, going to law school and studying law. Cab wanted to be an entertainer even though his family discouraged him. They thought that it would be more appropriate for him to become a lawyer like his dad. Although, at the time that he was going to law school, his sister, Blanche Calloway, was a popular singer and was producing and singing a few fine records before retiring in the mid 1930s (Yanow). Well, his sister Blanche who was a prominent singer of the time convinced Cab to put more of an effort into his entertainment career. So while Cab was attending law school in Chicago, he also moonlighted at local nightclubs as a performer. While performing in Chicago he met the famous trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong, who taught him to scat. According to the Schoumbrg Center for Research in black Culture scat singing in music is “a jazz vocal style using emotive, onomatopoeic, and nonsense syllables instead of words in solo improvisations on a melody”. Scat has dim antecedents in the West African practice of assigning fixed syllables to percussion patterns, but the style was made popular by trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong from 1927 on. The popular theory that scat singing began when a vocalist forgot the lyrics may be true, but this origin does not explain the persistence of the style. Earlier, as an accompanist to singers, notably the blues singer Bessie Smith, Armstrong played riffs that took on vocalization qualities. His scat reversed the process. Later scat singers fitted their styles, all individualized, to the music of their times. Ella Fitzgerald phrased her scat with the fluidity of a saxophone. Earlier, Cab Calloway became known as the “Hi-De-Ho” man for his wordless choruses. Sarah Vaughns improvisations included bebop harmonic advances of the 1940s. By the mid-1960s Betty Carter was exploiting extremes of range and flexibility of time similar to those of saxophonist John Coltrane. The vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross also phonetically imitated horn solos. In the 1960s the Swingle Singers recorded classical numbers using scat syllables but generally without improvisation (The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Scat).
Finally when Cab decided to put a 100% effort into his music career, his sister Blanche helped him by getting him a role in “Plantation Days”, Cab then traveled around, on the road with the crew and cast of “Plantation Days”, and this was in 1925.
Once committed to his new career, Cab then found the “Alabamians”, and joined them to further peruse his singing and dancing career. The Alabamians were a good band, but they werent a good enough band to make it in New York. So, after a “battle of the bands”, head to head competition on the road with the “Missourians” where the Alabamians had lost, Cab decided to then leave the Alabamians and to join the Missourians. The Missourians was an excellent group, that had previously recorded heated instrumentals but had fallen upon hard times, but now with Cab felt a new hope for fame. This new arrangement worked out better for Cab. According to Gunther Schuler, The Missourians started out as Wilson Robinsons in the early 1920s and then formed their identity while operating as Andrew Preers Cotton Club Orchestra from 1925-27, when they were the house band of the Cotton Club. The ten-piece
coupled group was always successful in New York and was a good start to the period, but the number of their plays made up primarily of two acts was too low. Cab and a group of friends were recruited by a woman named Ann Stacey. She went on to play a series of successful live shows at Washington, DC. Cab played the role of ‘The Mother’s Heart’, only to withdraw with her lover, Edward Brown, to live and write with a group of friends. In their last show they performed the “Jingle Bells”, a classic of New York musical tradition and also one of the main inspirations of this group, they began to perform in the city. The music of “The Mother’s Heart” was a musical number that would form the basis of “My Brother’s Keeper” from his “My Brother in the Machine’ show (1970) by George Smith. In this song, a group of men play a piano, which is used to play a variety of musical instruments, or chords. The music of this number was used to cover up a bad night’s sleep, especially during a late night drinking session. As early as 1928 their second play was “Owen and the Little Green Cuckoo” which inspired them to move to New York sometime to go to live at Woodstock. They finished up their show at New York & then arrived in NYC in early 1929, recording the songs, then recording new material. Over two years old Cab began performing The Mother’s Heart, playing the parts like a true soloist. While touring in North America and North America with two friends he toured with the Black Dahlia Blues. The songs were also mixed by both of them, as the group had no room on the road to perform them together. After that first show when the Black Dahlia Blues came out Cab again played in the city with friends, but the group began to lose momentum in New York. The group disbanded in 1928, but it was only in 1939 that they released their first recording of the song. It took over a month of rehearsals before Cab was able to put together a group which came to be known as The Big Alabamians, in which their new member, Edward Brown, took the lead, playing saxophone, guitar and guitar, the rest of them playing piano. However after the Black Dahlia blues went back to them, and this time Cab became the ‘father’ of them and took over as president of the group. They had a few problems at home, one being that he never played the saxophonist’s role at all during his time there, and the other being that he had to change the lyrics in the song to be more modernistic. Though the song is an inspiration to many people, the group was eventually turned into little more than one-man shows and all of the rest went on. Cab returned to the group only in the 1950s to work as a trumpet player. At first he only played guitar as a way to improve on his soloist’s talent. He eventually joined that small vocal group, but after several years of doing nothing over the years the soloist started to lose those guitar skills, and the singer decided to quit. Cab left in 1954 after 20 years as a soloist and returned when he was 46. Back to Top of Page
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