Cab Calloway

The infamous jazz band leader, composer and singer Cab Calloway, a.k.a. Cabell Calloway III, was born on Christmas day in 1907, in Rochester, New York. He inherited musicality from his mother, a church organist and teacher, and his singing talents were initially noticed when singing church hymns as a child.

After the death of his father, the family moved to Baltimore, Maryland in 1918, where he worked first as a shoe-shine boy, then later a newsboy selling the Sunday papers whilst finishing his schooling. There, Cab met the jazz pianist Tommy Jones and drummer and band leader Chick Webb, who had a strong influence on his early jazz training. His older sister Blanche was also a jazz singer and band leader, and under the influence of these three, pretty soon Cab started performing regularly in Baltimore jazz nightclubs.

In 1929, during the prohibition era (1919 to 1933), the bandleader and pianist Duke Ellington invited Cab Calloway and His Orchestra to replace his band at the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York, whilst the Duke Ellington Orchestra was on tour. This led to a regular deal with the club, alongside notables like Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, and Ellington. The Cotton Club was the number one jazz venue in the country, run by the gangster Owney Madden from his cell in the maximum security prison Sing Sing. Although it was a whites-only nightclub, many black performers had the opportunity to showcase their talents to a high-class celebrity audience whilst Madden flogged his high-quality liquor to New York's finest.

It was at the Cotton Club that Cab Calloway and His Orchestra first brought down the house with their rendition of the risqué song "St. James Infirmary," written by the Jazz music publisher Irving Mills (a.k.a. Joe Primrose,) and based on an English folk song called "The Unfortunate Rake" about a licentious soldier that eventually dies of a sexually-transmitted disease.