Minnie the Moocher: [Media Notes 108]

I’ve just streamed The Blues Brothers, which I saw during its theatrical release in 1980 and which is loads of fun. As I thought about doing a post about the film I kept side-tacking into the various currents of cultural history flowing into the film. Rather than writing about the film, which I may do a bit later, I’ve decided follow one of those side-tracks, “Minnie the Moocher,” sung by Cab Calloway before the tremendous car-chase and crack-up that all but swallows the end of the film.

Calloway recorded “Minnie the Moocher” in 1931 and it became an immediate hit, selling over a million records and seeping into popular culture over the decades. It formed the basis for a Fleischer brothers cartoon released in 1932:

The film opens with a live-action scene where Calloway fronts his band in an instrumental version of “St. James Infirmary.” Then we see Betty Boop being scolded by her immigrant parents. Then this and that. “Minnie the Moocher” starts at 3:51 in the cartoon. We don’t see either Calloway or his band, but the slinky walrus who sings the vocal and dances is obviously rotoscoped from Calloway’s dancing. The whole cartoon is worth watching for what it is as a cartoon, but if I were to start commenting on that I’m pretty sure I’d go down another rabbit hole and who knows when I get back to Minnie.

Here's a video of Calloway fronting his band and singing the song. I believe this was filmed in 1958, when Calloway would have been 51.

We see the Calloway with the same dance moves that we saw at the opening of the cartoon. The call-and-response to scat syllables (Hi de hi de hi dee ho...”) is perhaps the most notable feature of the song and would, in time, become detatched from this song and be used elsewhere by various performers.

Here's a somewhat different performance. It’s from 1990 in the first episode of the British comedy series, Jeeves and Wooster, staring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. The series is based on the well-known duo created by P.G. Wodehouse and is set in the 1920s and 1930s, when “Minnie the Moocher” would have been a hit. Laurie’s piano playing is based on sheet music, which would have been created for any song that was even half-way a hit, for that’s where the money was, in publishing.

Of course the fictive Bertie Wooster wasn’t the only one hacking away at the song in his parlor. Tens of thousands of people we doing it. I suspect that most of them would have been more graceful with the Hi-De-Hos than Jeeves. One could build a ice cultural studies paper around the cultural process being satirized in this little scene.

And that, I fear, is why a film like The Blues Brothers could not be made today. There are just too many white guys performing black music in it, starting with Aykroyd and Belushi as the Jake and Elwood Blues, aka, The Blues Brothers. Unfortunately for current cultural studies, that’s how American culture, high culture, popular culture, folk culture, all-of-it culture, has functioned since whenever. It’s the way of the world.

Here's Calloway performing “Minnie the Moocher” in the film. He would have been 73 at the time. He performed for a dozen more years and died in 1994.