Free That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas by Tom Clavin

1930s and ‘40s pretty much wiped out the whole New Orleans approach to jazz,” says Bruce Raeburn of the Hogan Jazz Archive. “The small combo, doing collective improvisation, all of this was taken over though some of it got featured in big bands. The music was pretty much organized by arrangers and band leaders. By 1940, Louis Prima had a big band which he called the Gleeby Rhythm Orchestra, which was a great name, and you can see what he’s doing over the course of the early 1940s. He was appealing to the public. He was trying to find the sound that they wanted.”
    The orchestra Prima put together—which he sometimes also dubbed the “Be Happy” Orchestra—would eventually contain as many as eighteen musicians. They spent most of their time in cars on the road. The Gleeby Rhythm Orchestra could play in Kansas City one night, St. Louis the next night, and Cincinnati the night after that. It was indeed one of the most popular acts in the country. When Prima wasn’t on the road he could be found in a recording studio, producing the orchestra’s latest records.
    He and Guy Lombardo were among the “name bands” that headlined the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. For the Prima show that August, three thousand seats were set up “with room for many more thousands to stand near by,” the
New York Times
reported.
    With the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Prima’s thirty-first birthday, the United States entered World War II. The war had no effect on his popularity, but Prima from time to time had to replace musicians who enlisted or were drafted, and gas rationing forced the William Morris Agency to arrange for more geographically prudent bookings for the band. Prima spent more time in the Northeast, with the occasional foray to New Orleans or Miami Beach.
    Depleted ranks didn’t cause him much concern because ultimately the entire act was on his shoulders. “Louis Prima, in an eight-week run at the Syracuse Hotel, has brought the spot the biggest business of the season,”
Billboard
reported in 1942. “Prima, fronting with his torrid trumpet, now has a commercial band that does both hot and sweet numbers and Prima is still the showman of old.”
    “Louis Prima and his orchestra enjoy top-billing in this week’s vaudeville entertainment at Loew’s State Theatre,” reported the
New York Times
on March 19, 1943. “Other performers on the program include Jackie Green, comic; the Debonettes, dancers, and Carlton Emmy and the Mad Wags, dog act.”
    Unlike the less ethnic big bands, a good portion of the Prima repertoire consisted of familiar Italian tunes, such as “Josephina,” “Please No Squeeza Da Banana,” and “Bacciagaloop, Makes Love on the Stoop,” and music he wrote himself. One song was dedicated to his mother, “Angelina.” (The presumption has always been that this song was written by Prima as a tribute to his mother, but in fact it was composed by Doris Fisher, who was also known for another novelty hit, “Tutti-Frutti.”) While this fare was a big reason why jazz critics wrote negatively, sometimes scathingly, about the Gleeby Rhythm Orchestra, such songs were real crowd-pleasers.
    A more cautious and less confident bandleader would have ditched these tunes during World War II because Italy was a member of the Axis. But Prima knew his audience, and his popularity actually increased.
    “When Mussolini joined Hitler, all of the Italians were sort of, how would I say, dumbfounded, because they didn’t think it would happen, so maybe you stay away from that music,” said Leon Prima. “But Louis stayed with the Italian trend, he still played the Italian music and used the Italian words.”
    “Obviously, one of the things that made Louis Prima very special and different from other trumpet players and singers was the Italian element,” said Will Friedwald in
Louis Prima: The Wildest!.
“It’s not just the fact that it’s Italian, but that it’s any type of ethnicity group,