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

because there really wasn’t one; there was no big star at that point who stressed his ethnic group.” It is not a stretch to say that because the popular Prima exhibited such pride in his heritage, audiences remained more open to a new generation of Italian singers who emerged during and after the war, among them Perry Como, Tony Bennett, Dean Martin, and Vic Damone.
    During the war, Prima’s orchestra was one of only three white groups to perform at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and they did so seven times in four years, compared to twice each for the other bands. They also appeared at the Royal Theatre in Baltimore, the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., the Regal in Chicago, the Paradise in Detroit, and other venues where the performers and most of the audiences traditionally were black. Prima shrewdly included in the band’s lineup songs with a local connection or references to please the hometown audience, such as “Boogie in Chicago” and “Brooklyn Boogie” (which he cowrote), and when he played black venues he always sang, with a sly grin, “It Takes a Long, Tall, Brown-Skin Gal.”
    With Ellington, Calloway, Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, and Count Basie so popular, it was not unusual for black artists to cross over and play for and have their records purchased by a white audience, but Prima more than any other white bandleader ensured it was not exclusively a one-way street. Sammy Davis Jr. once remarked that “half the people thought that Louis was black anyway, mixed. So he was a big favorite.”
    When not working, Prima had two favorite pursuits: women and horses. And he shared a problem with Ernest Hemingway: as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The problem isn’t that Ernest keeps falling in love, it’s that he marries all of them.”
    Even Keely Smith later admitted, “Louis could have any woman he wanted.” The most enthusiastic members of his audience were female. The Louis Prima Fan Club consisted of forty thousand acolytes—thirty-five thousand of them women, who dubbed themselves the Prima Donnas.
    His devotion to horse racing would eventually cost him a lot of money, but he made some along the way too. It wasn’t enough that he went to the track, he had to also own racehorses. In front of 28,430 spectators at a New York racetrack in 1944, a five-year-old gelding he owned, Play Pretty, was a surprise winner and paid $9.10.
    But most of Prima’s seemingly limitless energy was devoted to music. Like Goodman, he had the knack for recognizing talent. (And like Goodman, he put on integrated performances, also working with Wilson and Hampton.) He preferred to have a regular lineup of good musicians, and he worked them hard in rehearsals so that what they did onstage would sound flawless while appearing spontaneous.
    Jimmy Vincent once recalled that he played with the Prima orchestra for a month, and then one night Prima asked the audience to vote on whether the drummer should become officially part of the band. “I was with him for twenty-four years,” said Vincent in
Louis Prima: The Wildest!.
    He also recalled: “Every time we worked in a theater, during the rehearsal all the light men from the front and the side would come down and say, ‘Let us give you the rundown of the show.’ Louis said, ‘We don’t need no rundown.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ Louis told them, ‘I’ll direct you with my hands. Just follow me.’ Louis liked to work with his hands. So as the show goes on, he’s going here, there, pinpointing here, you over there, lights off, a little meeker, doing this the whole time, and he’s got them where they’re grooving now, everybody in the place. He did that every theater we worked in, directing with his hands always.”
    When the orchestra played New Orleans—such as a very successful run at the St. Charles Theatre in 1944—Louis took as many members as could fit to the house on St. Peter Street to feast on Angelina’s cooking.
    “When Louis would come