Cab Calloway (1907–1994) was the zootiest of mid-twentieth-century jazz masters, best remembered now for his decades of shows at the Cotton Club and touring when he wasn’t playing there. He wrote and performed his song “Minnie the Moocher” (1931) so much and to such acclaim that he became the Hi-de-ho Man, and he revived the song in a cameo in the film The Blues Brothers (1980). The original recording sold over a million copies making it the first platinum record — avant la lettre — by a Black artist. My family doesn’t realize this, but my own scat style descends entirely from Calloway’s.
Calloway was also one of the first to champion Black language in the United States, in a booklet titled Cab Calloway’s Cat-ologue: A “Hepster’s Dictionary,” first published in 1938. The dictionary element of the book is attributed to Calloway, but Ned E. Williams, soon-to-be managing editor of Downbeat, wrote the foreword, which is worth quoting at length:
The people of Harlem, particularly the musicians and the performers associated with them in show business, always have had a patois or language of their own, special words and phrases with meanings only apparent to themselves.
With the rising popularity of swing music, much of this language was adopted as the idiom of the new craze. White musicians and eventually the “alligators” or swing fans, began to use the picturesque expressions, and many of them have become almost universal.
To facilitate an understanding of the “jive,” as Harlemese is called on Lenox Avenue, Cab Calloway has compiled a glossary of terms and definitions, which is presented herewith. With the assistance of this “Hepster’s Dictionary,” anyone can pull his boots on and lace them up high, as the hep cats say.
The dictionary section includes items like “jive – to kid along, to blarney, stuff and things, also lingo or speech”; “icky – one who is not hip”; “kopasetic – absolutely okay”; and “mellow – all right, fine.” The first edition of the Cat-alogue — can you dig it? — includes five pages of glossary with words like these, but the notion proved popular, and the revised 1939 edition, The New Cab Calloway’s Cat-ologue, expanded to ten pages of glossary, while the 1944 edition grew to thirteen pages. The difference between 1938 and 1939 was a matter of figuring out what the market would bear, but between 1939 and 1944, new hepster slang demanded entry. The Cat-ologue is important evidence of Black slang. Clarence Major included entries for the four terms mentioned here in Dictionary of Afro-American Slang (1970), but with slightly different definitions, and those entries are all dated, which means that the words and their meanings were already outdated by the 1970s.
But the record of those different meanings is important to the lexicography of Black language and American slang, and the booklets are important documents in Black American culture, not just because of their contents, but because, like other dictionaries in Madeline’s collection, they were also used to establish a brand (hepster) and organize a community around it, to the commercial benefit of a certain hep performer and his orchestra. The glossary was so short, at least to begin with, that the booklet included blank pages for memoranda, dates, and addresses — if someone used a copy fully, it would be around for a while, until the dates had passed, friends had been crossed out, and shopping lists covered the blank pages. Each booklet is an ephemeral item fighting against its ephemerality.
But the different impressions of the booklet did have a sort of “sell by” date, because they advertised upcoming performances, and they were distributed in the areas surrounding those performances, to build audiences. Madeline’s copy of the first 1938 impression announces, inside and on its back cover,
Cab Calloway
and his
Cotton Club Orchestra
with
Russ Andrews
Stump and Stumpy
Six Cotton Club Boys
A fast, furious, funny musical show noted by newspaper critics in New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago and other Cities as the most sensational entertainment Calloway ever presented on a stage.
City Auditorium Birmingham
Wednesday Night August 3rd
Advance Ticket Sale Paramount Cigar Store
Buy Early and Save
A later impression from the same year advertises another program at
bal-a-l’-air
Shrewsbury on the Pike
Jct. Routes 9 and 20
Labor Day Night
September 5
Other ads for the Bal-a-l’-air in the same year clarify that the Pike is Worcester Pike, and the Shrewsbury in question Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. Cab Calloway and the Cotton Club Orchestra got around, performing Harlem hep to the rest of the country, and advertising that with authentic jive.
Madeline bought her seven Cat-ologues from the House of Rulon-Miller for $7500, a thousand dollars each plus a premium for an autographed copy of the 1944 edition. Given the size of the booklets — height, width, and length — that’s a lot of money, but no one can deny the cool factor, that and how you can hold a lot of American cultural history in your hand. I know several people who would pay a thousand dollars for a copy, some who already have — the high price reflects the market. The Holy Grail of Cat-alogue collecting would be to find, not only each impression, but each copy with a different Calloway advertisement. Madeline’s copies — three distinctive copies of the 1944 edition, for instance — suggest she might have had that sort of completism in mind.
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