Jimmy Cavallo

Jimmy Cavallo (born James Cavallo, March 14, 1927, Syracuse, New York, United States) is an American musician best known for performing with his band in the 1956 movie, Rock, Rock, Rock, by pioneering music DJ Alan Freed. Jimmy and the Houserockers were the first all-white band to play at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, where they celebrated the movie's release.

When Cavallo (often misspelled Cavello) was in high school in Syracuse in the early 1940s, he played in a swing band, playing harmony on alto sax. He knew even then that playing the harmony was not for him, and he wanted to do the melody line, sing and lead a band. Cavallo started buying Louis Jordan records and learning those songs, and other jump blues records, and soon switched to tenor sax because that was the lead horn in jump blues. When Cavallo was around 16, he formed his own band, but the only work they got was playing local Italian weddings (and the occasional Polish, Jewish, or Irish wedding).

When he left home to serve in the United States Navy at the end of World War II, Cavallo took his saxophone with him. While in the service in North Carolina, and Washington DC, he spent his free time in black clubs, listening to the latest in the blues, and jamming with some of the rising stars of what would soon be called rhythm and blues, and later, rock and roll.

Upon his discharge, Cavallo hit the Carolina beaches with a band called the Jimmy Cavallo Quartet, one of the world's first white R&B bands, playing Wynonie Harris, Louis Jordan, and Hucklebuck Williams tunes, as well as originals. The line-up was Bobby Wrenn, drums; Max Alexander, bass; Bobby Hass, sax, and Diz Utley, sax. They played in the beach music or "shag" scene all over North Carolina through 1947 and '48, and during 1949 had a residency in Carolina Beach at a dance club called Bop City, drawing huge crowds of dancers. (A first-hand account of this scene can be found in Shagger Magazine, volume 2 issue 2).

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