- The Observer, Sunday 19 March 2006
He sang and danced like no other performer of his time. Tall, handsome and resplendent in a white zoot suit, his stage presence was electric. The man who made 'Minnie the Moocher' a household name in the early 1930s would go on to become one of America's best-loved entertainers. Cab Calloway gave up law school and turned down an offer to play basketball with the Harlem Globetrotters, for music. He introduced the song on a live radio broadcast from Harlem's famous Cotton Club in early 1931. As he started to sing, he forgot the words, so he improvised: 'Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-ho. Ho-de-ho-de-ho-de-hee.' 'I asked the audience to join in,' he recalled in his autobiography Of Minnie the Moocher and I. 'They hollered back and nearly brought the roof down.' The subsequent recording, made in March that year, became jazz's first million-seller, and gave him an immediate identity - 'The King of Hi-de-Ho.' In 1980, he introduced the song to a new generation in the film The Blues Brothers and despite his death in 1994, 'Minnie the Moocher' lives on. A big financial services company currently has a Calloway-like figure singing the song in a Cotton Club-like tableau in their current TV ad campaign. But instead of 'Now here's a story of Minnie the Moocher,' the Calloway-lead sings 'Now here's a story of a mortgage adviser.' Calloway, who loved betting on horses and was the inspiration for Sportin' Life in George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, would have loved the irony.
