Cab Calloway

Cab Calloway was a noted bandleader and singer of the Swing era, famous for his song Minnie the Moocher.

He shared a residency at the Cotton Club in Harlem with Duke Ellington. In the early 1930s he led one of the most popular Big Bands in the USA. He was noted for an imaginative and flamboyant interpretation of the scat singing made famous by Louis Armstrong.

His career extended well beyond the Swing era - in the mid 1940s he published the New Cab Calloway's Hepsters Dictionary: Language of Jive, which documented the slang terms which had permeated his songs for the benefit of interested squares.

In 1980 he appeared in the Blues Brothers movie singing Minnie The Moocher.

Regarded with great affection as a kind and generous man by anyone who worked with him, he died in 1994.