That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (7 page)

“I was glad to get back to Fifty-second Street,” Prima later told reporters. “There was something about that street. I can’t find the words. It always reminded me of old Bourbon Street in New Orleans. But it was more than just the music. It was a feeling that it gave you.”

To Jack Colt’s delight, they stayed for a record-breaking twenty weeks. They left in May 1938 only after being signed by the legendary producer Billy Rose to appear on a bill with the Three Stooges at the Casa Mañana theater, where they packed the house for seven weeks. (Prima and Moe Howard’s paths would cross again twenty years later in Hollywood.)

But what is arguably Prima’s greatest contribution to American music had been showcased that winter just a few blocks away in, of all places, Carnegie Hall.

Benny Goodman and Louis Prima had encountered each other in Hollywood as well as New York City, and at some point Goodman had added Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing)” to his orchestra’s repertoire. It was already a hit when Goodman was booked to play Carnegie Hall in January 1938. However, because of that performance, the song went from a popular hit to a jazz classic.

Goodman was born on May 30, 1909, in a poor section of Chicago, the ninth of twelve children. His ticket out of poverty was learning to play the clarinet, and playing it better than anyone else by the time he was a teenager—with, of course, the possible exception of Pee Wee Russell.

In 1934, at only twenty-five, he pulled together his first big band. Goodman was inspired by an orchestra led by Ben Pollack that was a big dance band incorporating some jazz onto its playlist. With the exception of the Casa Loma Orchestra and a band just begun by Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey (with arrangements by Glenn Miller), no white bandleaders devoted themselves exclusively to jazz, whereas white audiences embraced the sounds of groups led by Duke Ellington, Chick Webb, Jimmie Lunceford, Bennie Moten, and Fletcher Henderson.

Before the end of the year the Benny Goodman Orchestra was one of the three bands—the other two were led by Ken Murray and Xavier Cugat—featured every Saturday night on “Let’s Dance,” a program broadcast nationally on NBC radio. Goodman was a brilliant bandleader as well as musician, one reason being that he recognized strong talent and material. Many of his up-tempo jazz arrangements were written by Fletcher Henderson, who juggled doing arrangements for others with leading his own band.

While Goodman did not invent swing music—he and many critics often referred to it as “sweet” music—he became the man most closely associated with it. Many critics have maintained that when the Benny Goodman Orchestra opened at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles on August 21, 1935, to a rabidly enthusiastic crowd, the Swing Era began. Goodman rode the wave, urging his group to greater heights. In the 1936
Downbeat
readers’ popularity poll, the orchestra received three times as many votes as the second-place band.

Goodman pushed the envelope of jazz and with it American culture and society. When not leading his orchestra, he headed a trio that recorded and performed onstage together. When he hired Teddy Wilson to play piano, it was the first time (as far as most people knew) that the taboo against having a black musician appear onstage with a white group was broken. Later, the trio became a quartet with the addition of black vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. An oft-overlooked innovation by Goodman took place in 1939 when he invited Charlie Christian, another black musician, to play an electric guitar onstage, the first time an audience in New York saw that instrument.

After the Palomar triumph and with Henderson stretched thin, Goodman hired Jimmy Mundy as a full-time staff arranger. Mundy had been a member of a black band led by Earl Hines in Chicago but may have been eager to move on because their regular gig was at the Grand Terrace, a club frequented by John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Capone brothers.
Killer-diller
was a term coined to describe the hard-charging arrangements that Mundy created.

Mundy saw that “Sing, Sing, Sing” was ripe for reinvention. The lyrics were simple:

There was already a foot-tapping melody. There was room for individual musicians to freelance. And a powerful orchestra like Goodman’s could give the song a socko ending.

Prima composed the song in either late 1935 or early 1936, because it was first recorded by his New Orleans Five on February 28, 1936, in Los Angeles. According to what he later told his fifth wife, Gia, the song originated during his racetrack outings with Bing Crosby. Every time Crosby picked a horse in a race, for luck he’d sing its name, getting louder as the race went on. Prima urged him on by shouting, “Sing, Bing, sing!” That kept going through his head, and it evolved into the song “Sing, Sing, Sing.” By the time his orchestra played it live at the Blackhawk in Chicago on October 11, 1936, it had replaced “Let’s Have a Jubilee” as Prima’s theme song.

As Goodman’s group performed “Sing, Sing, Sing” more often in concert, it kept adding to the original “hot” arrangement. One night in particular at the end of the song, an especially inspired Gene Krupa didn’t stop drumming, so Goodman resumed the clarinet, and the rest of “Sing, Sing, Sing” was improvised. According to Goodman biographer Ross Firestone, “By the time Benny recorded the expanded arrangement in 1937, it had grown to be over eight minutes long and covered both sides of a twelve-inch
78-RPM
record.” A version of the song can be heard and seen in the 1937 movie
Hollywood Hotel.

Simply put, the reason the Benny Goodman Orchestra became the first jazz band to cross over to play Carnegie Hall—esteemed home to Arturo Toscanini and Leopold Stokowski and their orchestras, which played the works of Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner—was to help promote cigarettes. The R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company was looking for something new to feature on its
Camel Caravan
musical variety radio show. A publicist at the firm handling the Camel account suggested Goodman’s band. Initially, Goodman refused because he felt Carnegie Hall was too conservative a venue for the hot jazz he played exclusively now and tanking there would attract more attention than an unsuccessful performance at another venue. But upon further reflection, Goodman accepted the challenge. Succeeding at Carnegie Hall, he reasoned, would be a huge boost for jazz.

“It was a great winter for swing music in New York,” wrote Firestone. “Tommy Dorsey was playing across town at the Palm Room of the Commodore Hotel. After two years on the Coast his brother Jimmy returned east and replaced the Casa Loma at the New Yorker. Cab Calloway was at the Cotton Club. Mezz Mezzrow’s short-lived all-star mixed orchestra played a brief engagement at the Harlem Uproar House. Chick Webb was still taking on all comers at the Savoy. Louis Prima and Art Tatum were holding forth at the Famous Door. In January Count Basie went into the Loew’s State on Broadway.”

Impresario Sol Hurok set aside January 16, a Sunday night, for the concert. Ticket prices ranged from eighty cents to $2.75. Goodman would not make a nickel on this gig, but if he was able to win over what might be a tough crowd to the side of swing music, that would be worth more than money. In a fortuitous bit of timing, on January 12,
Hollywood Hotel,
the musical featuring the Benny Goodman Orchestra, opened at the Strand Theater in New York and became an immediate hit.

Carnegie Hall sold out, all 2,760 seats, and another hundred chairs that had been set up were sold too. A line formed that afternoon for standing-room tickets. By 8:45, when the show began, not another person could be shoehorned into the place.

“Don’t Be That Way” was the first number, followed by “Sometimes I’m Happy,” “One O’Clock Jump,” “I’m Coming Virginia,” “When My Baby Smiles at Me,” and “Shine,” which featured Harry James paying homage to Louis Armstrong’s solo on the 1931 recording. Three members of Duke Ellington’s orchestra—all African American, of course—joined Goodman’s group to perform Ellington’s “Blue Reverie.” After another song, Count Basie, Lester Young, and three other members of the Count’s band came out onstage for a free-flowing jam session. Obviously, Goodman was also using the concert at Carnegie Hall as an opportunity to further break the unwritten ban on black and white musicians appearing together.

With Teddy Wilson on piano and Gene Krupa on drums, Goodman’s trio performed “Body and Soul.” Then Lionel Hampton came out, and the quartet did “Avalon,” “The Man I Love,” and “I Got Rhythm.” The audience was in a frenzy, which was a good time for an intermission because there was plenty of music left to play.

The second half of the concert opened with “Blue Skies” followed by a swing version of the Scottish song “Loch Lomond,” and then “Blue Room” and “Swingtime in the Rockies.” With the crowd shouting and trying to dance in their seats, Goodman abandoned the program and brought out Wilson and Hampton again for numbers by the trio and quartet. Then the entire orchestra returned, and everyone in the hall braced for the grand finale.

Krupa banged away on the tom-tom to launch “Sing, Sing, Sing.” After several minutes of inspired solos and driving ensemble work there was silence, and, thinking the song was over, the audience began applauding. But in the tradition of “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” a tenor saxophone resumed the tune; Krupa performed another solo as did Harry James on trumpet. Then it was Goodman’s turn for a clarinet solo that sounded like a pure stream of consciousness. That was followed by an almost contemplative two-minute piano solo. It concluded with Krupa bashing the cowbells and the band racing to a rousing climax. The entire performance lasted over twelve minutes and left the audience exhausted.

Oddly, the critics of the day were ambivalent about the obviously popular success of the Carnegie Hall show. The opinions of those who attended and heard about it on the jazz grapevine easily won out over the years.
The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert
was finally issued in 1950 and “became one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time,” according to Firestone, “and the night of January 16 came to be enshrined as the absolute pinnacle of Benny’s career and one of the truly important landmarks in the whole history of jazz.”

Over the years Goodman would often be referred to as the King of Swing. A big reason for that was the collective memory of “Sing, Sing, Sing” performed by the Benny Goodman Orchestra being one of the watershed moments in American music. To this day there are people surprised to find that Louis Prima, not Goodman, composed it, though in fairness the version performed by Goodman’s band elevated the song to the status of music legend.

What did that Carnegie Hall concert mean for Prima’s career? It validated him as a composer within jazz music circles. A big feather in his cap was that Benny Goodman, the most popular bandleader in the United States (and probably beyond), had chosen the Prima song as a climax to his concerts. And it sure didn’t hurt that he would receive residuals for an enduring classic, though not as much recognition as Goodman.

When Louis Prima and his band made their highly publicized comeback in New York and the performance of “Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing)” had audiences swooning in their seats, Dorothy Jacqueline Keely was just short of ten years old. She was born to Howard Keely, a carpenter, and Fanny Stevens on March 9, 1928, in Norfolk, Virginia. (Throughout most of her career, however, her birth year was given as 1932.) The closest Dot, as she was called, came to having musical surroundings was her mother playing the organ in church.

Her parents divorced when she was nine. When her mother remarried, Dot took on the last name of her new stepfather, Jesse Smith, also a carpenter. Dot’s biological father was half-Cherokee and half-Irish, and her grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee. Dot was the only daughter out of four children. (Unlike their sister, the brothers would retain their childhood nicknames for the rest of their lives—Dumps, Piggy, and Buster.) The family of six took in laundry to help make ends meet.

“We lived in a very bad section of Norfolk called Atlantic City,” Smith remembered. “When I say bad, I mean every thief, every hooker, every anybody that did anything bad that landed in jail came from this little section of town that I lived in.”

For whatever reason, Dot liked to sing. She performed at social gatherings. One time her mother found her “sleep-singing”: though asleep, she was standing on her bed doing the Ink Spots’ “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.”

At age eleven, Dot Smith agreed to accompany a friend, Rae Robinson, to a local radio studio, where Rae planned to audition for “Joe Brown’s Radio Gang,” a popular regional program and act. Brown asked Dot if she also sang, and she replied, “Yes, but just for my family.” Brown persuaded her to warble something, and she sang “White Lies and Red Roses.” When she was done, Dot, not her friend, got the job. Instead of being paid, however, she paid a dollar a week after that to learn new songs.

“Joe Brown’s Radio Gang” performed on Friday and Saturday nights at venues in and around Norfolk. The emerging Dot Smith learned to please an audience as well as how to sing a wide range of songs. At fourteen, during World War II, she sang at a bond rally at her high school, and in the audience was Saxie Dowell, who led a band at the Norfolk Naval Aid Station. He had played saxophone for Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and other big-band leaders in the 1930s, but his main claim to fame was composing “Three Little Fishes,” a hit song for Kay Kyser.