Movies - Minnie the Moocher

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	Movies - Minnie the Moocher

"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 The lyrics are remarkable in that, for a widely distributed bit of popular culture of the 1930s, the song is heavily laden with drug references. "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."

Calloway first recorded the song in 1930, around that time also recording a very similar song entitled "Kickin' the Gong Around" . 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).

"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 perfomances, 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. 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 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.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Minnie the Moocher ]

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