This is about Cab Calloway. Sort of.
Calloway was, according to my count, the twenty-second person to record "St. James Infirmary." This was a mere three years after Fess Williams' and the Royal Flush Orchestra's initial release, then titled "Gambler's Blues," in 1927. One year after Louis Armstrong's version (recorded in 1928, released in 1929).
Cab restricted the song to the three verses that Louis Armstrong definitively recorded in 1928 (the 3rd recording of the song). Fess Williams, on the other hand, included eight verses.
As I wrote about in the book I Went Down to St. James Infirmary, other early recordings (for instance, two versions by the Hokum Boys in 1929 (4th & 5th overall)) had a much different lyric, now forgotten - but, still, obviously SJI.
Carl Sandburg's written notation - the first one ever (1927) could only scrape the surface of the many versions that were making the rounds throughout North America with solo blues singers, small and large touring bands, in fancy night clubs and sleazy bars and back porches and living rooms and brothels and street corners and music halls, before the recording studios more or less defined (and restrained) the song into the variations we hear today.
Cab Calloway, performing at Harlem's notorious Cotton Club in the 1930s, used SJI as his theme song. Until, using the same opening and the same melodic structure, he substituted Minnie the Moocher - which was based upon a "traditional" song (also documented in Sandburg's "American Songbag") titled Willie the Weeper.
This is such a small part of the story, and it's pretty recent.
(Btw I have no doubt that Michael Jackson studied Calloway's moves.)
The long history of this song is fascinating.
So, in a nod to recent history, here are two videos of Cab Calloway performing St. James Infirmary. The first is from 1947, from his movie "Hi-Di-Ho," seventeen years after his first recording of the song. (He presents the protagonist as a hopeless failure, rather than the gambler who could afford the extravagant funeral arrangements.) The second is from his 1964 appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show," preceding The Beatles' third appearance. (You can see both of these on my blog entry from 2021.)
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