An Analysis of Cab Calloway's "St. James Infirmary Blues" in Snow-White

 To those of you stumbling onto this blog for the first time, you can find more information about it in my post "Soundscapes on the Wesleyan Campus." For this particular assignment, I am analyzing a short audiovisual sample, in this case a small excerpt from the 1933 Betty Boop animated short Snow-White. The short is a retelling of the classic fairytale story Snow White by Fleischer Studios using some of the studio's trademark characters, Betty Boop, Bimbo, and Koko the Clown. Betty Boop plays the titular Snow White while Bimbo and Koko play guards who disobey the Evil Queen's order to execute Betty who sees Betty Boop as a threat to her title as "fairest in the land." The segment I chose to analyze starts about 4 minutes into the short, when Koko sings the song "St. James Infirmary Blues" to lament the supposed death of Betty.

 

 Snow-White was animated by Roland Crandall and directed by Dave Fleischer, one of the two brothers that owned Fleischer Studios, which was based in New York. African American jazz singer Cab Calloway voiced Koko's performance and also served as a direct inspiration for Kook's dance during the song thanks to a technique called rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is an animation technique (created and patented by Max Fleischer, Dave Fleischer's brother) where "animators would trace live action footage projected frame-by-frame onto paper, either to use as motion reference or directly copy into their work" (Animation basics: What is rotoscoping?). So Cab Calloway was recorded dancing, and that recording was projected and copied over by Roland Crandall. Therefore, a lot of the visual elements in the scene match up really well with the rhythm of the music (even the animations that weren't rotoscoped).

 "St. James Infirmary Blues" is a blues song that originated in the 1920s, and it's lyrics clearly heavily influenced the animation. It seems to me that they chose the song to reflect the creepy, supernatural environment the animator was trying to portray. This atmosphere is present in a lot of Fleischer's cartoons (see Minnie the Moocher or Swing You Sinners), so I don't think the song itself was the sole inspiration for the tone of the scene. 

 From my interpretation of the lyrics, "St. James Infirmary Blues" is sung from the perspective of a man seeing his girlfriend's body at the St. James Infirmary after she's passed away, which thematically fits with the story in Snow-White as Koko the Clown is singing over Betty Boop's coffin. Right off the bat, the song creates a spooky atmosphere with Calloway's mournful wails before anything creepy happens on screen. Then, when Koko and Bimbo enter what is called the "Mystery Room" the environment changes into a cold hellscape. From this point onwards, the lyrics of the song are often directly represented visually. The most obvious examples occur when the ghost version of Koko morphs into a coin while singing "Put a twenty dollar gold piece on my watch chain" or when his head changes into a beer bottle when he sings "Hand me another shot of that booze" because they happen in the foreground, but nearly every single line in the song is represented by a picture that's displayed on the moving background. These representations can range from obvious, like a skeleton rolling dice to the lyrics "Give me six crap shooting pall bearers," to fairly subtle, like a collection of portraits of hideous, demon men being shown to the lyrics "She can search this whole wide world over/But she'll never find another sweet man like me," the implication being that those men are what she'd find if she went looking for another lover.

 My initial question after doing some research was what the power dynamics of the relationship between Cab Calloway and Fleischer Studios were. The circumstances seemed to have some similarities with the working relationship we discussed in class between Huddie Ledbetter (better known as Lead Belly), a black blues singer, and John and Alan Lomax, the white ethnomusicologists that recorded him and made him famous. Even though Ledbetter's association with the Lomaxes benefitted him overall, Ledbetter was still dissatisfied because he had less power in the relationship, likely because of the inherent inequality between black and white people during the Jim Crow era: "Frustrated by the working relationship and monthly payments, Lead Belly would eventually hire legal counsel to sue Lomax for payments, royalties and dissolution of the management contract" (Blues Law: Lead Belly vs. Lomax). 

 Knowing this, I looked for some information on Cab Calloway's relationship with the Fleischers. In Calloway's autobiography, "Of Minnie the Moocher and Me," he wrote that black "professionals were paid a . . . lot less than white professionals with the same job." Unfortunately, I could only find short excerpts of the book online so I could not find anything specifically relating to the Fleischers. However, it can be inferred from this quote that Calloway's collaborators did not pay him as much as Calloway thought he was due, meaning that his collaborators (most likely including the Fleischers) held more power in their relationships, just as the Lomaxes did with Ledbetter.

 Both the song and the motions were performed by a black man and, as we have discussed in class, the blues are a genre that's rooted in African American history, so I thought it was strange that the animation, Koko the Clown, was not black as well. One book I found, "Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation," by Nicolas Sammond, claimed that Koko was the cartoon equivalent of a minstrel (a usually Caucasian performer who imitated and mocked black people as an act). However, I could not find any other sources to corroborate this claim. Other articles only note that his design was based off of European clowns. My current theory is that Fleischer Studios did not have a well known black character and either didn't want to make one or wanted to stick with a character audiences would be familiar with, resulting in an inaccurate portrayal of the performer.

 Thank you everyone for reading! My next big blog post should come out in December.