Blanche Dorothea Jones Calloway (February 9, 1902 – December 16, 1978) was an American jazz singer, composer, and bandleader. She was the older sister of Cab Calloway and was a successful singer before her brother. With a music career that spanned over fifty years, Calloway was the first woman to lead an all-male orchestra and performed alongside musicians such as Cozy Cole, Chick Webb, and her brother. Her performing style was described as flamboyant and a major influence on her brother's performance style.
Blanche Calloway was born in Baltimore, Maryland at 1017 Druid Hill Ave, home of her paternal grandparents to Martha and Cabell II Calloway. Blanche was the eldest of five children, Bernice, Henry, Cabell “Cab” Calloway III, and Elmer. While the family moved to Rochester for some time, they then returned to Baltimore when she was a teenager, where they lived first with her grandparents, Cabell I and Elizabeth Calloway, and then at 2216 Druid Hill Avenue. After her father’s death, Blanche’s mother remarried and had two additional children from that union.
Blanche was known to be an incredible, charismatic performer, with a big personality. Her style and flair onstage was a huge inspiration for her younger brother, Cab Calloway, and she paved the way in show business for Cab. Though her parents wanted her to pursue a more “respectable” career for a lady, Blanche dreamed of a career as a performer like her idols, Florence Mills and Ida Cox.
In 1921, Blanche quit school at Morgan College, and toured around the country with cabaret groups, including the Smarter Set Co. In that same year, she made her professional debut in the first all-Black musical hit on Broadway, “Shuffle Along” written by Noble Sissle and fellow Baltimorean Eubie Blake, where she joined an all-star cast including Florence Mills, Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, among others.
Blanche formed her own orchestra in two iterations, in the 1920s and 1930s respectively, becoming the first African American female to conduct an all-male Jazz orchestra. She made her first recordings in 1925 with her “Joy Boys”, with a young Louis Armstrong on Cornet playing songs she composed herself, including Lonesome Lovesick Blues. During the 1930s Blanche and Her Joy Boys, including Chick Webb, Cozy Cole, Bennie Moter and others, toured worldwide and performed extensively in New York at the Apollo Theater, Harlem Opera House, and the Lafayette Theater.
Blanche’s most pivotal performance engagement came in 1923 when she joined the national traveling tour of Plantation Days. The tour ended in 1927 in Chicago. After graduating high school, Cab Calloway joined his sister on the Plantation Days tour. Blanche decided to remain in The Windy City, performing regularly at the Sunset Café, the club where she secured an additional performance spot for her younger brother, Cab. It is impossible to speak of Blanche without noting the influence that she had on Cab as an artist and vice versa.
Blanche recorded “Just a Crazy Song (Hi, Hi, Hi) in March of 1931 with the call and response refrain “Hi, de, Ho,” the same month that Cab Calloway recorded his chart-topping single Minnie the Moocher, which contains the same iconic refrain. She also composed and recorded “Growling Dan”, a song containing Minnie the Moocher in the lyrics.
After years of struggling for major success, in 1938 she declared bankruptcy and broke up her orchestra. In 1940 she formed a short-lived all-women orchestra, feeding on the popularity of all-female bands during World War II. The band struggled to get bookings and soon disbanded after forming. Calloway continued to sing on occasion and moved to a suburb of Philadelphia with her husband in the mid-1940s.
After she stopped performing on a full-time basis in the 1950s, Blanche pursued many career paths. She was a Democratic Committee Person in Philadelphia, a musical agent in Washington, D.C., a DJ for WMBM in Florida and a program director for the same station — a job she held for 20 years before she moved back to Baltimore — and she started her own cosmetics company serving African Americans.
When living in D.C., Blanche worked as the musical agent to Ruth Brown, often referred to as “the Queen of R&B”, who credits Blanche with discovering her and getting her signed with Atlantic Records. Blanche was the first African American voting clerk in Florida and she was the first African American woman to vote in Florida in 1958.
Before her death in 1978 at the age of 76 from breast cancer, Blanche was active in Civil Rights organizations such as the NAACP (The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), Congress for Racial Equality, and the National Urban League.
(Edited from Opera Baltimore & Wikipedia)