Creativity Quote by Cab Calloway

Calloway’s genius here is how casually he refuses to treat whiteness as the default setting for “serious” art. He starts with a shrug - “just an opera” - and in that understatement he dismantles a whole stack of expectations about who gets to be universal onstage. Opera, in the American imagination of his era, was coded European, elite, and implicitly white. Calloway answers that coding with something almost aggressively plain: you go to the opera to see the opera. Not to audit the cast’s legitimacy.

The specifics matter. “Catfish Row” points straight at Porgy and Bess, a work trapped for decades in a double bind: praised as high culture, policed as racial representation. By focusing on the craft - “singers. Marvelous voices” - Calloway reframes the argument away from anthropology (Is this an acceptable portrayal of Black life?) and toward performance (Did they deliver?). That’s not naïveté; it’s strategy. He’s claiming the right to judge Black performers by the same metric used for anyone else: excellence.

The line “It didn’t make no difference what color they were” lands with the punch of vernacular authority. The grammar is the point. Calloway isn’t petitioning gatekeepers in their language; he’s asserting taste from inside the culture that gatekeepers routinely exoticized. Underneath the calm is a radical demand: let Black artistry occupy “opera” without quotation marks, without special pleading, without the audience turning the evening into a referendum on race.