Cab Calloway Quotes

• Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

  Cab Calloway

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Club, Join, Cotton, Audience

• Bubbles was a very good dancer. Tremendous dancer. He was one of our leading dancers of the country at that time. And, of course, he didn’t have much of a voice.

  Cab Calloway

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Leading, Dancers, Tremendous, Dancer

• 90%, 100% are going there to hear the singing. The story is another thing. Nobody’s interested in the story. Happiness is happiness.

  Cab Calloway

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Interested, Singing

• We usually never got out of there before four or five o’clock in the morning. Every morning. So it was rough.

  Cab Calloway

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Never, Four

• It’s very difficult to photograph an opera. And they messed up on it. It just wasn’t there. And I don’t blame the Gershwins for taking it away. Of course, if they had gotten the original company to have done it, it would have been very good.

  Cab Calloway

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Messed, Gotten, Blame

• He was a silly guy. Out – do the other guy. That was his effort at all times.

  Cab Calloway

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Times, Silly

• That’s what George wrote! He wrote it. Why change it? There was this European company that I was speaking about awhile ago – course, didn’t nobody know what Porgy was.

  Cab Calloway

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Ago, Awhile, Nobody

• My audience was my life. What I did and how I did it, was all for my audience.

  Cab Calloway

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Audience

• I think it was just an opera. Now, you go to opera, you expect to see and hear what the opera is. So, it was Catfish Row. It was singers. Marvelous voices. It didn’t make no difference what color they were.

  Cab Calloway

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Opera, Marvelous, Voices, Expect

• What opera isn’t violent? Two things happen, violence and love. And other than that, name something else. You can’t.

  Cab Calloway

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Opera, Violent, Happen, Things

• You don’t think it was because a white man wrote it, a black man wrote it, a green man wrote it. What – doesn’t make a difference! Doesn’t make a difference. I think he did a good job.

  Cab Calloway

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Green, Good

• We didn’t have any segregation at the Cotton Club. No. The Cotton Club was wide open, it was free.

  Cab Calloway

  Tags in Segregation, Wide, Club

• The only credit I can give them. They synchronize wonderful. That’s all. They synchronize very – you would have thought that they were actually acting, but they were synching all the time, and that’s a rough job.

  Cab Calloway

  Tags in Credit, Rough

• Everybody did something. It was very entertaining. We had a lot of fun. Lot of fun. And there was no segregation, that I could see. I never saw any.

  Cab Calloway

  Tags in Entertaining, Segregation

• At times as a performer they segregated us in some of theatres.

  Cab Calloway

  Tags in Segregated, Performer

• A movie and a stage show are two entirely different things. A picture, you can do anything you want. Change it, cut out a scene, put in a scene, take a scene out. They don’t do that on stage.

  Cab Calloway

  Tags in Scene, Entirely, Cut

Cab Calloway (16)

Birth:	25th December, 1907
Death:	18th November, 1994
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Bandleader, Singer

About

Cab Calloway was born in Rochester, New York. He was a jazz singer and bandleader. He was strongly associated with the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York City, where he was a regular performer. He was a master of energetic scat singing and led one of the United States' most popular big bands from the start of the 1930s through to the late 1940s. Calloway continued to perform until his death in 1994 at the age of 86.

Related Authors

• Art Blakey
• Artie Shaw
• Brian Jones
• Chico Marx
• Dave Brubeck
• Anthony Tillmon Williams
• Ian Dury
• Dave Holland
• Carla Bley
• Count Basie

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 6th June

Births

• 1755 - Nathan Hale
• 1941 - Alexander Claud Cockburn
• 1947 - Robert Englund
• 1948 - Rocco Buttiglione
• 1923 - Virginia C. Andrews

Deaths

• 1916 - Yuan Shikai
• 1926 - Meyer London
• 2010 - Marvin Isley
• 1922 - Lillian Russell
• 1861 - Camillo Benso di Cavour