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IntroduCtIon Folks, now here's a story 'bout Minnie the Moocher / She was a red-hot hoochy coocher" is the beginning of one of the most famous songs of the Jazz Age.Cab Calloway and His Orchestra first recorded "Minnie the Moocher" in December 1930, while Calloway was presiding over Harlem's worldfamous Cotton Club in the absence of Duke Ellington and the club's regular orchestra, who were then touring and making films in Hollywood.Perhaps the most famous "black and tan" nightclub, where white patrons reveled in black pageantry, the mob-owned Cotton Club has come to represent the sundry delights of the Jazz Age.1 A New Woman and New Negro, Minnie signified an age of newfound freedoms.The story Calloway's song spins about black womanhood, however, is multiracial and spatial in nature.Minnie's exotic, erotic dancing-named the "hoochy coochy" in the song-was a fusion of "authentic" and fantastical forms of belly dancing borrowed from an imagined Orient, and in the course of her adventures, Minnie travels the length of Manhattan and finds herself in an opium den in Chinatown.This song, then, provides a complicated snapshot of Jazz Age New York, in which we find not just the Harlem of black entertainers and white interlopers, but a complex, multiracial, imperial cityscape.In Jazz Age New York, exotic tropes of empire had captured the imaginations of city denizens.Nightclubs featured performances and décor inspired by idyllic dreams of island paradises;
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