Minnie the Moocher

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Cab Calloway and His Orchestra, from the opening credits of Max Fleischer's Minnie the Moocher, which included a recording of the titular Calloway song.

"Minnie the Moocher" is a jazz song recorded by Cab Calloway and His Orchestra.

The song is based both musically and lyrically on Willie the Weeper [1] [2] The lyrics are heavily laden with drug references, being a product of the Harlem jazz culture. "Smokey" is described as a user of cocaine; the business about "kicking the gong around" refers to smoking opium, and other verses describe Minnie's opium dream, involving living with the king of Sweden and having a "million dollars worth of nickels and dimes."

Calloway also wrote an extended version, adding verses which describe Minnie and Smokey going to jail; Minnie pays Smokey's bail, but he abandons her there. Another verse describes her tempting "Deacon Lowdown" when she "wiggled her jelly roll" at him. Finally, they took Minnie to "where they put the crazies", where she dies. This explains why both the short version and the long version end with the words "Poor Minnie, poor Min." [3]

Calloway first recorded the song in 1930, around that time also recording a very similar song entitled "Kickin' the Gong Around" [4]. In 1932, Calloway recorded the song for a Fleischer Studios Talkartoon short cartoon, also called Minnie the Moocher, starring Betty Boop and Bimbo. Calloway and his band provides most of the short's score, and appear in the short themselves in a live-action introduction. The thirty-second live-action segment is the earliest-known film footage of Calloway. In the animated section of the film, Calloway appears as an animated character, a ghost walrus (whose dance movements were rotoscoped from footage of Calloway dancing). The song was also included in the 1937 film When You're in Love, in which it was sung by Grace Moore.

"Minnie the Moocher" is most famous for its nonsensical adlibbed ("scat") lyrics. During a live performance of "Minnie the Moocher", Cab Calloway forgot the lyrics to the song, and simply replaced the verses that he could not remember with gibberish (for example, "Heidi heidi heidi hi"). These have eventually been recognized as valid lyrics to the song. In performances, Calloway would have the audience repeat each of the scat phrases, which finally lead to a phrase so long and complex that the audience would laugh at their own failed attempts to repeat it.

Much later, in 1980 Calloway performed the song in the movie The Blues Brothers. It came up again in 20th century pop culture by being sampled by rappers Tupac Shakur and Ol' Dirty Bastard. Puerto Rican hip hop artist Tego Calderon used a slower version of the song's melody as the backbeat of his first single, Abayarde. The song appeared in an episode of Jeeves and Wooster, performed by Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry was later released on the soundtrack album. It has been covered by many artists.

"Minnie the Moocher" was also performed in another film from 1980, Richard Elfman's Forbidden Zone, with singer Danny Elfman modifying the lyrics to go with the film's plot.

Chris Berman of ESPN also referenced the song many times in the late 1990s and early 2000s by singing "Heidi Heidi Hi" whenever wide receiver Chris Calloway (no relation to Cab Calloway) of the NFL's New York Giants caught a pass for a touchdown.

Minnie herself is mentioned in a number of other Cab Calloway songs, including Minnie the Moocher's Wedding Day, Ghost of Smoky Joe, Kickin' the Gong Around, Minnie's a Hepcat Now, Mister Paganini - Swing for Minnie, We Go Well Together, and Zah Zuh Zaz.