UNDERGRADUATE

COKEYS, GONGS, AND THE REEFER MAN: CAB CALLOWAY’S
USE OF STRATEGIC EXPRESSIONISM DURING THE HARLEM
RENAISSANCE
Zoe Krey*
Department of American Studies
During the Harlem Renaissance, writers and intellectuals
such as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Claude
McKay sought to define Harlem by providing rich
accounts of the city’s nightlife. Writers of the time
period offered a social commentary on racial and sexual
limitations present in 1920s Harlem. While popular jazz
artists also contributed to Harlem’s culture through their
performances for black audiences in clubs and cabarets,
many of the biggest venues for black performance were
those which served white audiences; in these venues, music
producers carefully packaged black jazz performances as
representations of Harlem that supposedly demonstrated
black people’s “authentic” lives. A shining example of this
careful marketing occurred at the cabaret the Cotton Club.
Situated in the black district of Harlem, the Cotton Club
and its black artists came to exemplify what was perceived
as a “natural” demonstration of black culture for middle
and upper class white socialites. Their performances
allowed white audiences to get a taste of Harlem culture
in a meticulously controlled environment, and to return
to their safe homes via their costly cars at the end of
the night. 1 Jazz musician Cab Calloway’s extraordinary
performances and improvisation ability, both in song and
in dance, became widely popular amongst white audiences
across the nation at the end of the Harlem
FIGURE 1
Cab Calloway in an advertisement featured in Billboard Magazine
in 1942 2
* This paper was written for HON 301, American Popular Culture of the
1890s to 1930s, taught by Allison McCracken, PhD, in fall quarter of 2015.
It was selected as the Richard deCordova Scholarship award recipient
by the Department of American Studies in 2016. McCracken aided in
editing this essay for publication.
1 Shane Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 81.
2 Source: Billboard Magazine. Https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Cab_Calloway.jpg)
16 CREATING KNOWLEDGE