Blanche Calloway

Blanche Calloway (1902-1978), musician and entrepreneur. Blanche Dorothea Jones Calloway was born in Rochester, New York, the daughter of a lawyer and a music teacher, and as a child moved to Baltimore after her father died. She grew up at a time when recorded music and the new genres of jazz and blues were still in their early stages. As a child she sang in church, won talent contests, and was inspired by jazz pioneer Florence Mills and by her mother, who gave her music lessons but also discouraged her from pursuing a career in music. Calloway studied at Morgan State University but then left to join a cabaret troupe called the Smarter Set Co., starting as a “Bronze Beauty” but making her way up to chorus girl and then featured singer. In 1921 she joined the musical Shuffle Along, which was one of the first black productions on Broadway and also helped launch the careers of Fredi Washington, Paul Robeson, and Josephine Baker. Two years she later got her first major notoriety with another black musical, Plantation Days, which toured around the country. When it ended in Chicago in 1927, Calloway decided to stay there and became one of the featured performers at the Sunset Café, one of the leading jazz clubs in the country. She also formed her own band, Blanche Calloway and Her Joy Boys, which included future legends Louis Armstrong, Cozy Cole, and Ben Webster. In the late 1920s she moved to Philadelphia and joined another group called Andy Kirk and the Clouds of Joy, experiencing success there until Kirk dismissed her. The reasons for her firing are unclear; some accounts say that the owner of the theater where the group performed saw that she was more popular than Kirk and encouraged her to take over the group, while other accounts say that she herself decided that she could run the group more successfully and decided to take over. In either case, she then reformed the Joy Boys with new musicians. This made her the first woman to ever lead an otherwise all-male jazz band.

During the 1930s Calloway’s band recorded more than three dozen songs, including many of her own compositions. Her 1931 recording of “Just a Crazy Song” included the call and response “Hi hi hi/ho de ho de ho”; this likely inspired her younger brother Cab Calloway’s song “Minnie the Moocher,” which was released later that year and became one of the most popular jazz songs of all time. Her composition “Growlin’ Dan” was a response record, featuring an interaction between “Dan” and “Minnie” in its lyrics. The lyrics of “There’s Rhythm in the River” had a strong religious component: “He wasn’t on the level/He’s going to the devil/Deep down where the evil spirits roar/”Cause he kept on repeating/His lying and his cheating, oh Lord!/There’s rhythm in the river, rhythm in the river/Forty days and nights my tears have poured,/My heart is all a’quiver,/Rhythm in the river, oh, Lord!” Other songs were somewhat suggestive; for instance, “I Need Lovin’” and “Catch On,” which stated in part “Now I ain’t good and I ain’t bad/Just a brown-skinned girl who can’t be had.” Nearly all of her compositions featured strong-willing women, challenging the dominant image of passive, demure femininity; “Louisiana Liza,” for instance, describes a “Southern maid, I’m afraid, is sure to make you fall/She knows her stuff, calls your bluff, and brother, that ain’t all!” This was also true of Calloway’s stage high-energy, animated performing style, which heavily influenced her brother’s public persona. In an era when jazz was a hugely popular musical genre, critics praised the Joy Boys as one of the top jazz groups in the country, with the black newspaper Pittsburgh Courier calling her “one of the most progressive performers in the profession.” During her tours around the country, though, she also faced racial and gender discrimination, the latter coming not only from whites but also from black men who thought that women should not lead a band or serve in any musical capacity except singer or dancer. When the Joy Boys stopped at a gas station in Yazoo, Mississippi, she used the washroom reserved for white women only, leading the police to pistol whip one of her band members and to place him and her under arrest. While they were in jail another band member fled with the money, forcing Calloway to disband the group and sell her car in order to get out of the state. Over the next few years she formed several other groups, including one consisting entirely of women, but they struggled to get bookings and she was forced to declare bankruptcy. By the early 1940s, her performing and recording career was largely over.

Calloway briefly returned to Philadelphia, becoming active in Democratic politics, before resettling in Washington D.C. There she managed the nightclub Crystal Caverns, where she helped launch the career of R&B star Ruth Brown by signing her to perform at the club and then facilitating a record deal with Atlantic Records. Calloway later moved to Miami, where she became one of the only female disk jockeys in the country at WMBM, the most prominent black radio station in the city. She quickly moved up to program director and served in that capacity for twenty years. Over the next two decades she also worked with the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Urban League. Although black men had gained the right to vote in 1870 and black women in 1920, racism prevented nearly all African Americans in the South from exercising this right until the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but one story holds that Calloway cast a ballot seven years earlier in 1958 and thus became the first black woman in Miami to vote. In 1968 she founded Afram House, a mail-order cosmetics company for black women. She lived the last few years of her life in Baltimore, where she died of breast cancer in 1978. In 2003 her niece wrote and starred in a biographical musical called “Blanche and Her Joy Boys.” “The mission of an artist in the 21^st century is to heal,” the younger Calloway declared, “I’m grateful to be the channel. That’s what Aunt Blanche was, that’s what Daddy was. The Calloway entertainment tradition is about bringing joy to people.” Blanche Calloway’s career was comparatively short and less memorable than that of her brother or other male jazz musicians of the pre-World War II era, but she was nevertheless the first African American woman to find success as a singer, songwriter, bandleader, performer, and executive, paving the way for Sylvia Robinson, Janet Jackson, Janelle Monáe, Beyoncé, and others.

©David Brodnax, Sr.