Dear Santa Have You Had the Measles?—Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2023-‘23

 Dear Santa Have You Had the Measles? by Lael Calloway with a little help from her dad Cab Calloway.

Something about Christmas inspires novelty songs.  Records in every possible genre have been recorded by surprising artists.  The hope to cash in with a lifetime annuity like All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth or Grandma Got Runover by a Reindeer.  A few songs struggle to reach the lower reaches of the music charts and fade away after one season.  Most of the would-be clever songs  disappear into obscurity.

Dear Santa Have You Had the Measles? is one never noticed.  It came to me only because of a bit by the cheerfully chatty WGN Morning News which had a short clip from a 1950s era 45 RPM single.  What intrigued was the singer—Lael Calloway who happened to be the 8 year-old daughter of the Harlem hipster and band leader Cab Calloway.  Dad provided the spoken introduction to the song.  Under Lael’s name on the label in small print it said, “assisted by Daddy.”

 

A clipping about the same 1950 recording session by Lael and Cab.

Calloway was born Rochester, New York, on December 25, 1907 to a middle class Black couple with high expectations.  The family relocated to Baltimore where he clashed with their expectations that he become a lawyer like his father.  Instead, he was interested in music, playing the ponies, the sporting life ghetto street culture,  and emerging jazz, he dropped in and out of school, was sent to reform school and started singing on street corners and in saloons for tips.  Calloway had many jobs but finally was able to graduate from Fredrich Douglass High School in 1925 then dropped out of Law School to follow his older sister Blanche Calloway into show business in 1927 on tour for the popular Black musical revue Plantation Days.

 Living in Chicago he haunted the Dreamland Café, Sunset Cafe, and Club Berlin, performing as a singer, drummer, and master of ceremonies.  Louis Armstrong taught him scat singing.  Handsome, charismatic, and manic on stage established himself as a vocalist singing Ain’t Misbehavin’ by Fats Waller in the revue Connie’s Hot Chocolates.  He took over a band named The Missouirans which became the Cab Calloway Orchestra and in 1930 replaced Duke Ellington as the house band of the Harlem Cotton Club which catered to swank uptown swells out to see the most famous Black musicians.  It became his base until the club closed in 1940.  

                            Calloway as the handsome young band leader, singer, an emcee at Harlem's Cotton Club.

While Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and later  Count Basie  sometimes yearned for musical respectability,  Calloway celebrated the gritty urban streets.  In 1931, he recorded his most famous song, Minnie the Moocher, first single by an African American to sell a million copies.   Mountain,  in early  Max Fleischer Betty Boop cartoons.   Minnie the Moocher (1932), Snow-White (1933), and The Old Man of the Mountain (1933). Calloway performed voice-over for these cartoons, and through rotoscoping, his dance steps were the basis of the character’s movements.  It was his first broad exposure to a national white audience,

That led to being signed with Paramount Pictures low budget race short subjects like Hi-di-Ho with Fredi Washington and to do musical numbers in A-list pictures like International House with W.C. Fields where he sang the marijuana ode Refer Man.  His parts were designed to be able to be snipped out of the movies for showing in the South.

                            A one reel short film aimed at Black audiences.

From 1941 to 1942, Calloway hosted a weekly radio quiz show called The Cab Calloway Quizzicale. Calling himself Doctor Calloway, it was a parody of Kay Kyser’s The College of Musical Knowledge. During World War II, Calloway entertained troops in United States before they departed overseas. The Calloway Orchestra also recorded songs full of social commentary including Doing the Reactionary, The Führer’s Got the Jitters, and  My Lament for V Day.

With the end of the Cotton Club, Calloway successfully took versions of his Orchestra on tour.  His biggest movie break came in Stormy Weather, one of the first mainstream Hollywood films with a Black cast including Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Lena Horne, the Nicholas Brothers, and Fats Waller. 

                        Calloway became the quintessential Zoot suiter.

During the War years Calloway got away from the elegant white and black formal tailcoats he usually wore and was an early adopter and popularizer of the Zoot Suit.  Animator Tex Avery  based his Big Bad Woolf in a zoot suit—the lecherous predator of Red Riding Hood on Calloway’s image.

After his band broke up around 1950, Calloway became a popular performer on TV variety shows.  In 1953, he played the role of Sportin’ Life a character modeled on him in a production of Porgy and Bess with William Warfield and Leontyne Price as the title characters.  In 1956 Calloway and his daughter Lael recorded Little Child, an adaption of Little Boy and the Old Man. Released on ABC-Paramount, which charted on the Billboard Hot 100.  The same session produced the less successful Dear Santa Have You Had the Measles?

The same year,  Calloway starred in The Cotton Club of Miami featuring a troupe of 48 people, including singer Sallie Blair, George Kirby, Abbey Lincoln, and the dance troupe of Norma Miller.  The success of the shows led to the Cotton Club Revue of 1957 which had stops at the Royal Nevada Hotel in Las Vegas, the Theatre Under The Sky in Central Park, and Town Casino in Buffalo.  That show introduced tap dance phenoms Maurice and Gregory Hines.   Versions of the show went on to tour the World for another two years and finally had a run on Broadway.

Calloway wrote and published three editions of the Hepster's Dictionary which became the go-to reference for the colorful patter of Jive.

In the 1960’s Calloway appeared as an actor in The Cincinnati Kid with Steve McQueen, Ann-Margret, and Edward G. Robinson.   In 1967, he co-starred with Pearl Bailey as Horace Vandergelder in an all-Black cast of Hello, Dolly! on Broadway during its original run.  He played himself in a bit from The Blues Brothers in 1980 with Jim Balushi and Dan Aykroyd.  

On June 12, 1994, Calloway suffered a stroke at his home in Westchester County, New York.   He died five months later from pneumonia on November 18, 1994, at the age of 86, at a nursing home in Delaware.  He was survived by his wife, five daughters, and seven grandsons. Calloway was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.