Mick Hartley

From one hepcat last week (Slim Gaillard) to another. Cab Calloway this time, from Stormy Weather, looking every inch the dude with white zoot suit and all:

From 1943, with drummer Zutty Singleton, bassist Slam Stewart, Trumpeter Benny Carter.

Calloway wrote a Hepster's Dictionary in 1938:

Cab Calloway’s Hepster’s Dictionary holds the honour of being the first dictionary penned by an African-American. The book became the official reference book of jive slang in the New York Public Library. With this pioneering dictionary, anyone could get ‘hep to the jive’.

The book was a hit. It was published in several editions up to 1944.

From the film Sensations of 1945:

Cab Calloway previously. And here.