Scatman Crothers

Benjamin Sherman "Scatman" Crothers (May 23, 1910 – November 22, 1986) was an American actor, singer, dancer and musician known for his work as Louie the Garbage Man on the TV show Chico and the Man, and as Dick Hallorann in The Shining in 1980. He was also a prolific voiceover artist, and provided the voices of Meadowlark Lemon in the animated TV version of The Harlem Globetrotters, Jazz the Autobot in The Transformers, the title character in Hong Kong Phooey, and Scat Cat in the 1970 film The Aristocats.

Benjamin Sherman Crothers was born on 23 May 1910 in Terre Haute, Indiana, and he was performing before he was grown. He left school around the age of fifteen to work as a drummer and singer, touring the Midwest with bands through the 1930s, playing speakeasies, clubs and theatres at a time when a Black entertainer's road was long and hard. It was a Dayton, Ohio radio announcer — struggling on air with "Benjamin Sherman Crothers" — who handed him the name the world would remember: Scatman. He earned it honestly, too. Crothers was a genuine scat singer, improvising wordless vocal lines with a drummer's sense of rhythm and a voice like gravel wrapped in velvet.

The jazz years were not a footnote; they were the foundation. Crothers worked with the great Slim Gaillard, formed his own bands through the 1940s, and moved to California, where the music led naturally to recording work. He cut records through the 1950s, 60s and 70s — albums and singles that captured a performer equally at home on drums, guitar and vocals — and built the kind of stage ease that cannot be taught. When Hollywood finally came calling, he arrived with four decades of timing already in his bones.

His film debut came in 1953 with Meet Me at the Fair, and the sixties and seventies filled out a character-actor résumé of unusual range. He appeared in Hello, Dolly! (1969) opposite Barbra Streisand, The Great White Hope (1970), The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin (1975), The Fortune (1975) and Silver Streak (1976). In Miloš Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) he played Turkle, the night-shift orderly — a small part in a Best Picture winner, played with the weary warmth that became his signature. The following year he stood opposite John Wayne in The Shootist (1976) as Moses Brown, in what would be the Duke's final film.

Television made him a household name first. From 1974 to 1978 he played Louie the garbage man on Chico and the Man, the warm, wry foil to Jack Albertson's cranky garage owner — a role that let him be funny, musical and humane in equal measure, and that introduced him to viewers who had never heard him scat a note. He guest-starred across the era's biggest shows: Bonanza, Bewitched, Ironside, Mannix, The Love Boat, Starsky & Hutch, Taxi, Magnum, P.I., Hill Street Blues — a working actor's tour of American television at its peak.

Then came the role that made him immortal. In Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), Crothers played Dick Hallorann, the Overlook Hotel's cook — a gentle man who shares young Danny Torrance's psychic "shining" and who drives through a blizzard to try to save him. It is one of the great performances in horror cinema: kindness made physical, and therefore the film's most devastating loss. The industry agreed — Crothers won the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor for the role. Generations who never heard his records know his face from that snowy maze, and know exactly what his character was walking into.

Children knew him from somewhere else entirely: the recording booth. He was Scat Cat in Disney's The Aristocats (1970), leading the show-stopping "Ev'rybody Wants to Be a Cat" — the rare voice role that feels like it was written around the performer's actual soul. He voiced the title character in Hong Kong Phooey (1974), Meadowlark Lemon in the animated Harlem Globetrotters series, and Jazz — the cool, music-loving Autobot — in The Transformers in the mid-1980s. He kept working to the end: Zapped! (1982), Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), The Journey of Natty Gann (1985).

Scatman Crothers died on 22 November 1986 in Van Nuys, California, of pneumonia, after a battle with lung cancer. He was 76. He had spent more than fifty years in show business — from speakeasy drum kits to Kubrick sets to Saturday-morning cartoons — and he crossed every one of those worlds without ever losing the musician's joy that started it all. He was a bridge between the jazz age and the blockbuster age, and he crossed it with style.

Scatman Crothers was already a legend before most people knew his name — a jazz singer, drummer, and dancer who'd been performing since the 1930s, with a voice like gravel wrapped in velvet. Hollywood finally caught up in the seventies: as Louie the garbage man on Chico and the Man, and then, immortally, as Dick Hallorann in The Shining, the cook who tries to save Danny Torrance and pays for his kindness.

Kubrick's film made him unforgettable to generations who never heard him scat a note. But the music was the foundation — he recorded with the likes of his own bands for decades, and his voice work (Hong Kong Phooey, among others) introduced him to kids who'd later discover the films. He was a bridge between the jazz age and the blockbuster age, and he crossed it with style.