Sam Butera was born August 17, 1927, in New Orleans, and grew up in the 7th Ward, where his father ran Poor Boys Grocery & Meat Market and played guitar in his spare time. He first heard the saxophone at a wedding when he was seven, and took up the instrument himself — turning professional at 14, playing Bourbon Street strip joints. As a teenager, Look magazine singled him out as one of America’s top young jazzmen, and he played at Carnegie Hall. After high school he hit the road with the big bands of Ray McKinley and Tommy Dorsey, and with Al Hirt.
He came back to New Orleans and played the 500 Club on Bourbon Street — owned by Louis Prima’s brother Leon — for four years. In late 1954, Prima, who had signed to play the Sahara in Las Vegas without a band behind him, called Butera and asked him to put one together. Butera assembled the musicians, drove to Las Vegas, and on opening night the band took the name the Witnesses — coined on the spot, it stuck. For more than twenty years he led the Witnesses behind Prima and Keely Smith, holding court in the Sahara’s Casbah Lounge in sets that ran from midnight to dawn, and his arrangements gave “Just a Gigolo / I Ain’t Got Nobody,” “Jump Jive An’ Wail,” and “That Old Black Magic” their maximum impact. The band also played on “I Wan’na Be Like You” in Disney’s The Jungle Book.
After Prima fell into a coma in 1975 and died in 1978, Butera renamed the band the Wildest and kept the legacy going, playing Las Vegas lounges for another 25 years — opening each set with “When You’re Smiling” and closing with “When the Saints Go Marching In,” leading the band on a stroll through the audience. His “Just a Gigolo” arrangement lived on: David Lee Roth built his solo career on it in 1985, and it was covered by Los Lobos, Brian Setzer, the Village People, and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. He made his New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival debut in 2002, and in 2003 he came home to be inducted into the Italian-American Hall of Fame, with Pete Fountain presenting the award. He retired in 2004 and died of pneumonia in Las Vegas on June 3, 2009, at 81.
