‘Kickin' The Gong Around’ (1931) is one of three sequels to Cab Calloway’s most famous song, ‘Minnie the Moocher’, released the same year. ‘Minnie’ told the story of a real-life woman who begged for food in downtown Indianapolis. (She died in 1951, as covered in a Jet magazine obituary).

In 1932, the Frank Tuttle-directed The Big Broadcast featured Cab Calloway and His Band (more commonly referred to as Cab Calloway and His Orchestra). They played ‘Kickin' The Gong Around’.

For anyone who’s not yet listened to ‘Gong’ or witnessed Calloway’s live performances, the video’s worth enjoying before reading this article. Cab and his band tell the story better than the words below can.

A literal gong opens the song and is the first of many allusions (and more explicit references) to smoking opium. The titular expression, “Kicking the gong around”, is said to have come from “gong” and “gonger”, meaning an opium pipe; others say it originated from opium smokers hitting a gong for a minion to bring them a pipe.

Calloway’s foreboding melodies—“Counting millions on the floor / When a knock came on the door”, and later, “As he stood and looked around / Nobody made a sound”—are soon followed by oddly cheerful lines. “Tell me, where is Minnie?” is delivered like someone asking a friendly shopkeeper where they store the apples, rather than a cokehead arriving at a drugden in search for his girlfriend.

Cab uses the 1930s slang he used on ‘Minnie the Moocher’: “He was looking for his frail”. “Frail” meant “woman” or “girl”. In ‘Minnie’, we’d learned Smokey’s girl was the “roughest, toughest frail”. And in ‘The Ghost of Smokey Joe’ (1939), another of the sequel songs, Cab would sing, “Tell me, do you remember Minnie? / That frail I never found”. (Another, ‘Minnie the Moocher's Wedding Day’, had charted in 1932.)

‘Kickin' The Gong Around’ is full of hooks, not least Cab’s call-and-response with the band. The emphasised syllables of their replies—“If you don’t know Minnie”, “She’s tall and she’s skinny”—arrive on the pulse. You can feel the “don’t” and the “Minnie” on the beat. The “don’t” and the “tall”, rather than the words at the start of those lines, come on the One. The band nail the timing – this is simple work to them, expert musicians Cab had recruited for his specific demands: “What I expected from my musicians was what I was selling: the right notes, with precision, because I would build a whole song around a scat or a dance step.”

One of Cab’s freakouts comes just before those lines. At 1:11, he sings, “Has she been here?” and then mimes snorting a line, and after his “Kicking the gong around”, his shoulders jump with staccato chords from the horns, while the bass keeps the swing going.

Soon, Cab really gets moving and makes the drug references more explicit. While he joyfully scatted in plenty of other contexts, Minnie’s habits do give Calloway a great excuse to explode into some “Woah”s and recline into some “Lah-dah-day”s – pitch-perfect as ever, despite the power he expels. One gets the sense that the mic could be a hundred feet away and Cab would have no problem.

Then comes a simple, beautiful melody: “And as he departed / The curtains parted”. The curtains likely referred to those commonly found in opium houses, behind which guys and gals would “kick the gong around” and attend to other business.

Later, the band’s responses are simple affirmations—“I want Minnie,” Cab sings, and they understand: “You want Minnie”—as though they’re fellow drugfiends familiar with Smokey’s habits.

The Big Broadcast was Cab’s first acting credit in a long film career that included a major part in The Blues Brothers (1980). His role in that film prompted a resurgence in popularity.

Calloway once told Billboard that he was rapping decades before the artform became popular, giving the examples of ‘Minnie the Moocher's Wedding Day’ and ‘Hi-De-Ho Man, That’s Me’. That publication’s Timothy White wrote that Calloway was “frequently emulated” and “seldom acknowledged”.