Earworm of the Day: I beeped when i should have bopped

We can thank Jake and Elwood Blues for the revival in interest in music by Cab Calloway, making his records more easily available to kids like me who were living out in the dingles. After the closing of Wirtz's Corner Books and Records when I was still in junior high school, my local supply of records was a small set of racks at the diminutive regional equivalent of K-Mart. Jack's had, at any one time, about a hundred records available. If I wanted anything above and beyond their selection, I needed to get a ride through the endless corn fields to a neighboring city (Galesburg IL, or Burlington IA), or take a day trip to Chicago, where there were *real* record stores.

Well, actually, it was on a school trip to Chicago that I fell upon my first Cab, at Rose Records, around 1975. They were playing a swing anthology over their speaker system. It was magical. It was also tragical, because I'd already spent all my discretionary funds, so I came home without the album. But his voice stayed with me, and when, at last, the rest of the world rediscovered him, I could start amassing his works on tape (and the occasional vinyl), to the best of my budget's ability. Otherwise, I might never have had this song buzzing in the back of my head overnight.

(The YouTube link above is strictly audio, with a pic of the brilliant Nicholas Brothers from their performance in Cab's classic Jumpin' Jive. If you want to understand what they were trying to imitate but never quite captured in the film Cotton Club, begin with this.)