Dandy Crawford's Havana "Banana Boat"
Merengues, calypsos and Cuban swing.
The zoot-suit wearing singer Dandy Crawford was an obsessive fan of American big band music who adopted a suitably swinging name. He was born Armando Rodríguez Cárdenas, according to Cuban music historian Rosa Marquetti, who in a biographical text in her book Desmemoriados reports that claims that he was born to Jamaican parents are untrue.
Cuban jazz writer Leonardo Acosta deemed Crawford Cuba’s first scat singer; Marquetti calls him one of the island’s premiere showmen.
As a teenager in the thirties, he danced boogie woogie and the jitterbug to Benny Goodman songs that played on the jukeboxes of bars frequented by American sailors in the port of Havana. In the 1940s and 1950s, Crawford was a figure about town who could be heard on radio shows like CMQ’s El club del swing; he performed at the Tropicana and the Sans Souci, and in more intimate settings, as a member of the smoky Cuban jazz movement filin.
