Cab Calloway Stands In For the Moon

Greetings, Gate! The subject heading of today's post comes from the title of a book I've never read and which, I suspect, has little or nothing to do with Cab Calloway. Of Minnie the Moocher and Me, however, has plenty to do with Cab since that's the title of his autobiography. A first edition copy of Cab's book arrived yesterday and I'm digging it. Calloway's band was always smokin' hot and Chu Berry and Dizzy Gillespie passed through the outfit. Calloway was also one of the first black entertainers not compelled to act like a grinning caricature ... and with his hep-to-the-jive Harlem slang, he laid the foundations of rap.

"Folks, here's the story of Minnie the Moocher,
She was a low down hoochie-koocher,
She was the roughest, toughest, frail,
But Minnie had a heart as big as a whale.

"She messed around with a bloke called Smokey,
She loved him though he was cokey,
He took her down to China Town,
And showed her how to kick the gong around.

"She had a dream about the King of Sweden,
He gave her things that she was needin'
He gave her a home built of gold and steel,
A platinum car with diamond wheels.

"He gave her a racetrack and his racing horses,
Each meal she ate was a dozen courses,
She had a million dollars in nickels and dimes,
She counted them all a million times."

Zabuh, zabuh, zabuh za-aay!