LouisPrima

Louis Prima was born in 1910 to a first-generation Italian-American family in New Orleans, where he heard Louis Armstrong play and switched from violin to cornet. By the 1930s he was leading his own jazz bands and cutting records for Bluebird, and in 1936 he wrote "Sing, Sing, Sing" — a song that, in Benny Goodman's hands, would define the Swing Era. Eleanor Roosevelt personally invited him to play for FDR's birthday in 1939.

His career truly ignited in the mid-1950s, when he took a small group residency in Las Vegas with singer Keely Smith and saxophonist Sam Butera. The combination of Prima's frantic energy, Smith's cool deadpan, and Butera's blaring horn was irresistible — "The Wildest Show in Vegas" became a phenomenon. The 1956 Capitol album The Wildest! captured it perfectly.

Elvis Presley once attributed his controversial hip-shaking to Prima. Disney cast him as King Louie in The Jungle Book (1967), and his voice was so perfectly suited to the swinging orangutan that the character became one of the film's highlights. David Lee Roth's 1985 cover of "Just a Gigolo" introduced a new generation to Prima's best-known song.

Prima suffered a stroke in 1975 from which he never recovered, dying in New Orleans in August 1978. His recordings — above all The Wildest! — remain objects of genuine delight, the sound of a man who simply could not help making everyone around him move.