I think it was just an opera. Now, you go to opera, you expect to see and hear what the opera is. So, it was Catfish Row. It was singers. Marvelous voices. It didn't make no difference what color they were.

Calloway helped establish the Cab Calloway Museum at Coppin State College (Baltimore Maryland) in the 1980s and Bill Cosby helped establish a scholarship in Calloway's name at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. Calloway attended Lincoln University (a historically black university) in Pennsylvania but left in 1930 before graduation. He was back on Brunswick in late 1934 through 1936 when he signed with manager Irving Mills's short-lived Variety in 1937 and stayed with Mills when the label collapsed and the sessions were continued on Vocalion through 1939 and then OKeh Records through 1942.

Calloway was a master of energetic scat singing and led one of the United States' most popular African American big bands from the start of the 1930s through the late 1940s. He was strongly associated with the Cotton Club in Harlem New York City where he was a regular performer.