How did Mr. Crothers come to be know as ‘Scatman’?
Thanks.
I assume he did some “scat” singing in his day. Ella Fitzgerald is a “scat” singer with whom you may be familiar. Louis Armstrong also was a “scatman.”
Before he was an actor, he was a musician, much like Marky Mark Wahlberg. He used to play drums and sing “scat”. He first thought of the nickname while auditioning for a radio program in Dayton, Ohio in 1932; the director thought he needed a snazzier name than “Benjamin”.
Forgot to link to the source-his obituary.
To elaborate on these answers, “scat” (as in the music, not as in a term for excrement) is a form of singing that is mostly nonsense syllables sung at different pitches and often in rapid succession. Think of it as sounding like trying to imitate a musical instrument with your voice, singing sounds like “dwee-ba, yow, dit dit dit, doo-dah.”
Another scat singer was the great Cab Calloway, songwriter of Minnie the Moocher.
He almost gets close to his old scat roots in an episode of “Love Boat,” where he plays Virgil “Scattergun” Gibson. That segment was actually a pretty good one, dealing with the old “Negro Baseball Leagues.”
If you’ve ever seen the Betty Boop version of Snow White (1933) that’s Cab doing an extremely fine rendition of “St. James Infirmery Blues.”
Scatman Crothers serves up a little bit of his scatting talent in the introduction to Ralf Bakshi’s Coonskin, now better known in video stores as Street Fight.
(A crazy voice lineup is to be found in that film, by the way. In addition to Crothers’ veteran animation voice-overs, he is joined by Miami Vice’s Phillip Michael Thomas, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Charles Gordone, and the unmistakeable Barry White.)