Creativity Quote by Cab Calloway

Calloway’s little burst of incredulity is really a manifesto about ownership, authenticity, and who gets to decide what “counts” as culture. “That’s what George wrote!” isn’t just loyalty to Gershwin; it’s a swipe at the genteel impulse to sand down Black American art until it behaves in polite company. The rhythm of his speech - the repeated “wrote,” the plainspoken “Why change it?” - feels like bandstand talk turned into cultural critique: direct, impatient, and allergic to committee-approved revisions.

The context hovering behind this is Porgy and Bess, that endlessly contested crossroads of opera, jazz, and racial representation. Calloway is defending the text as written, but he’s also defending the living ecosystem around it: the dialect, the phrasing, the vernacular textures that make the piece feel American rather than “European company” respectable. His dig that “didn’t nobody know what Porgy was” undercuts the authority of outsiders who want to “improve” the work while lacking any real relationship to it. Ignorance plus institutional power is the real villain here.

Subtextually, he’s drawing a line between interpretation and alteration. You can perform it, inhabit it, even argue with it - but rewriting it to suit a foreign market or a highbrow sensibility turns art into export product. Coming from a musician whose career sat at the boundary between Black innovation and white consumption, the quote lands as a warning: preservation isn’t nostalgia; it’s leverage.