February 22, 2008 by nonotes
Okay, it’s not breaking news. It happened decades ago: Cab Calloway performed “SJI” on The Ed Sullivan Show.
It so happens that that episode — which I have not seen — is part of a Sullivan DVD collection, and according to this piece, “one of the best” musical performances is “the always-watchable Cab Calloway belting out ‘St. James Infirmary’ and a jazzed up ‘Old Man River.’”
Now you know.
[Or: The Point of this Site]
A couple of years ago I did some research into the song "St. James Infirmary," wrote up what I found, emailed that essay to friends and posted it on my web site (as part of a series of "Letters From New Orleans," as I was living in that city at the time). Based on the feedback, I wrote a second version of the essay, and asked for more feedback. Based on that, I wrote a third version.
And now, this site: A place to collect some of the links, leads, thoughts, and suggestions relating to the song that readers (from Finland, The Netherlands, Australia, Spain, England, Sweden, Canada, and all over the U.S.) have sent me. This may lead to a fourth and significantly expanded version of the essay, some day. Also on this site: Plenty of tangents.
Never heard "St. James Infirmary"? Start here.
The most recent version of my "St. James Infirmary" essay is now a few years old. But it's still a fairly decent overview of what I know about the song, and why I'm interested in it. You can read it either in the book Letters from New Orleans (see below), or in the archives of The Gambit, the New Orleans weekly that published the piece as a book excerpt when LfNO came out.
This site is a partial spinoff of the book Letters from New Orleans, published by the unstoppable Garrett County Press. My interest in "St. James Infirmary" is the subject of one essay in the book. All author proceeds from the book still go to post-Katrina relief efforts, so I think it's okay for me to say: You ought to buy it.
My son gave me this DVD as a Christmas gift. He knew I’d be interested in the Calloway performance.
The date was February 23rd, 1964, the day of the Beatles third Sullivan appearance. The Beatles sang “Twist and Shout,” “Please Please Me,” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand.”
Sullivan, sounding nostalgic, introduced Cab: “You know I go a back long long way with Cab Calloway. In the early days – quite long ago as a matter of fact – up at the Cotton Club up in Harlem . . . one of the chorus girls in that show was a very cute girl Winnie Johnson, another was Lena Horne. The big star was Cab Calloway and here he is back on our stage.”
Calloway’s rendition of SJI is fantastic; dressed in a white tux, he mimes the song and shows – at 56 – that he has not lost his remarkable vocal range, or his idiosyncratic vocal phrasing. Sullivan remarks after Calloway’s performance: “That brings back a lot of memories of the good old days at the Cotton Club.”
Hmmm. The good old days, indeed.
[...] May 27, 2009 by nonotes On the Ed Sullivan show (noted earlier): [...]