Cab Calloway: Minnie the Moocher

The word hep, signifying "in the know," had appeared by the early 1900s, but its greatest vogue came during the 1930s, when hepcat lingo was codified in Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary (1936) by the leather-lunged, hugely popular singing & dancing bandleader. In his greatest hit, "Minnie the Moocher," Cab's jive so masterfully veiled references to cocaine and opium that even Hollywood came running. By the time he revisited her for The Blues Brothers (1980), Cab had been mooching off Minnie for half a century, but neither he nor his audiences ever seemed to tire of the Moocher's infectiously nonsensical call-&-response scatting.