Half a century before Michael Jackson debuted the moonwalk, a ghost in a 1932 Betty Boop cartoon was gliding backward across the screen, and the animators had traced the move directly from Cab Calloway's body. This episode traces how a kid born in Rochester in 1907 and raised in Baltimore after his father's death hustled papers, shined shoes, walked horses at Pimlico, played pro basketball for the Baltimore Athenians, and turned down the Harlem Globetrotters to focus on singing. In Chicago's black-and-tan clubs he met Louis Armstrong, who taught him scat singing, and by 1931 he was substituting for Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, earning around $50,000 a year at age 23 in the middle of the Great Depression thanks to a live NBC radio wire.

From there Calloway systematically conquered every medium of his era: Minnie the Moocher made him th ...