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Cab Calloway’s career and performance style are deeply connected to dance. One hundred years ago, Cab started his entertainment career emceeing late-night dance parties in Baltimore after local semi-pro basketball games. In Chicago, while the Charleston dance craze was reaching full swing, Cab learned jive slang and how to scat sing, expanding the interaction he had with his audiences. But at his debut at Harlem’s famed Savoy Ballroom in 1929, Cab and his band from Chicago flopped horribly. Although the audience determined that Cab was the best bandleader, his band played outdated music, not what was popular for dancing to in Harlem at the time.

 

As the Great Depression gave way to the Swing era, Cab Calloway led the talented Cotton Club orchestra across the world, breaking attendance records by singing the call-and-response chorus of “Hi-De-Ho”. Throughout the 30s, the Cotton Club in Harlem introduced various dances as part of their bi-annual revues. In his 1939 jive slang glossary known as the Hepster’s Dictionary, Cab documented a decade of popular dances that started at the Cotton Club. Some of the dances were the Shim Sham Shimmy (1930), Trucking (1933), the Suzie-Q (1936), Pecking (1937), and the Boogie-Woogie (1938). Before the term “jitterbug” was identified with a specific type of lindy hop dance, Cab Calloway is credited as coining the term referring to “a swing fan; formerly a person addicted to ‘jitter sauce’”. 

 

Although he never took any dance lessons, Cab cultivated such a lively performance style that in 1932, cartoonist Max Fleischer rotoscoped Cab’s dance moves to bring a fluid motion to his hand-drawn Betty Boop animation. In Paramount’s 1935 film Jitterbug Party, Cab Calloway is seen on stage doing spin moves before heading uptown to a dance party. Cab and Lena Horne co-starred alongside Bill Robinson, the Nicholas Brothers, Fats Waller, and Katherine Dunham in Fox’s classic 1943 film Stormy Weather. The song “Jumpin’ Jive” by Cab Calloway is the soundtrack for the Nicholas Brother’s epic stair routine, widely considered the greatest dance sequence ever filmed.

 

Throughout his career, Cab’s dancing distinguished him from other premier bandleaders, extending his popularity and connection to an audience. In segregated venues, he often performed two shows, one for white patrons and one for everyone else. Often encountering dangerous conditions on the road, Cab was an advocate for civil rights and helped to abolish the infamous “brown paper bag” test for dancers at the Cotton Club. Over the years, Cab would perform and tour with many of the greatest dancers of all time, including Bill Robinson, Bill Bailey, Norma Miller, Honi Coles, Cholly Atkins, Dolly Saulters, the Nicholas Brothers, and the Berry Brothers.

 

Cab’s performance style influenced some of the greatest entertainers of all time, including Elvis Presley, James Brown, Prince, and Michael Jackson. Cab is said to have popularized a dance move called “The Buzz”, an early version of the “Moonwalk”. Cab was also featured along with the Nicholas Brothers and Cyd Charisse in Janet Jackson’s music video for her 1990 single “Alright”. With a dance legacy that spans nearly 60 years, we celebrate Cab as a cultural catalyst whose innovation and influence continue to resonate today.

 

Joshua Cabell Langsam is the grandson and estate director of jazz entertainer Cab Calloway. As a media producer and education advocate, Joshua honors and elevates his grandfather’s entertainment legacy by developing partnerships, programs, and media content that celebrate American cultural history. As a prior board member of the Cab Calloway Foundation, Joshua helped to establish the recording studio at the Cab Calloway School of the Arts, a Blue-Ribbon middle and high school in Wilmington, Delaware, co-founded by Joshua’s mother, Cabella Calloway Langsam.