Cab Calloway: How the Hi-De-Ho Man Built the Modern Pop Star

Half a century before Michael Jackson debuted the moonwalk, a ghost in a 1932 Betty Boop cartoon was gliding backward across the screen, and the animators had traced the move directly from Cab Calloway's body. This episode traces how a kid born in Rochester in 1907 and raised in Baltimore after his father's death hustled papers, shined shoes, walked horses at Pimlico, played pro basketball for the Baltimore Athenians, and turned down the Harlem Globetrotters to focus on singing. In Chicago's black-and-tan clubs he met Louis Armstrong, who taught him scat singing, and by 1931 he was substituting for Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, earning around $50,000 a year at age 23 in the middle of the Great Depression thanks to a live NBC radio wire.

From there Calloway systematically conquered every medium of his era: Minnie the Moocher made him the first African-American musician to sell a million copies of a single record, he became the first African-American to host a nationally syndicated radio show, starred in Stormy Weather, and in 1938 published the Hepster's Dictionary, the first dictionary ever published by an African-American and one the New York Public Library adopted as its official reference for jive slang. The episode also covers the 1941 spitball fight in which Dizzy Gillespie stabbed him in the leg, the 1945 police beating in Kansas City, the economic collapse of the big bands, and the reinventions that followed: Hello Dolly on Broadway, The Blues Brothers in 1980, and a Janet Jackson video in 1990.

• How rotoscoping let Max Fleischer's animators preserve Calloway's dancing frame by frame
• Why the Cotton Club's radio wire, not the door cover, was the real engine of his early wealth
• The Hepster's Dictionary as a radical act of linguistic ownership
• Life on the road with a 20-piece Black orchestra in segregated America, including the band's own baseball and basketball teams
• Why John Landis said Cab Calloway is hip hop, and how his zoot suit, slang, and percussive vocals became the source code for modern pop stardom