by Moe Zilla

Created on: February 09, 2008

Louis Prima influenced music, and was a part of American music for five decades. The zany onstage antics of Frank Sinatra's "Rat Pack" was inspired by Prima's freewheeling Vegas act in the 1950s, but Prima's wild singing and personality graced five decades, from the 1920s through the 1960s.

Prima came from a proud New Orleans tradition, where a performer was expected to entertain the crowd, play the trumpet, sing a song - everything. His older brother was a bandleader, and Prima started as one of his trumpeters. But soon Louis had his own swing band in New York City, and his fast-paced shows became legendary in Manhattan's "swing alley." Prima was 24, and the excitement of New York life seemed to energize his music.

Appropriately, Prima's most famous song from this era is his composition "Sing, Sing, Sing." It became a standard of the swing era, featuring a rowdy trumpet and drum breaks, but it's Prima's forgotten lyrics that show his lurking sense of crowd-pleasing fun. ("When the music goes around, everybody goes to town...") Prima's hearty singing style resembled another famous New Orleans entertainer, Louis Armstrong, but the "Sing Sing Sing" lyrics even capture some of the scatting that would later become a Prima trademark.

After conquering New York, Prima moved to Los Angeles with his band, "the Dixieland gang." Success continued to shine on the popular entertainer. "Sing Sing Sing" became a best-selling recording featuring the best swing artists of the time, including Benny Goodman, Harry James, and Gene Krupa, and Prima even appeared in a film with America's top recording artist, Bing Crosby. When the big band era replaced swing, Prima simply formed a big band.

Decades later, Sonny and Cher would admit that they'd modeled their onstage personality after the "dueling" personalities of Louis Prima and Keely Smith. Prima began featuring young Smith, his fourth wife, as the band's singer, to rave reviews. Smith's strong, serious voice and presence created the perfect contrast for Prima's antics. (Audiences felt "he was getting away with something," according to one critic.) And her role was even more successful when Prima switched to a smaller "Vegas combo." As Prima cavorted on the stage, his young wife would stare on balefully or even roll her eyes, always trying not to crack a smile. The couple won a Grammy award in 1959 for their fast duet of the jazz standard, "That Ol' Black Magic," and they repeated the formula on a "I've Got You Under My Skin."

Prima's enthusiastic stage presence earned him the name "The King of the Swingers," a persona reflecting in the titles of his album.(The cover of "Call of the Wildest" showed Prima singing to a giant moose head, followed by a cover showing a horror movie titled "Return of the Wildest.") Together with Keely Smith, they cranked out albums and appeared on television, and often their last show of the evening in Vegas would end at 6 a.m.

Prima's personality became a fixture in America's pop culture, and in 1967 he was taped to play "King Louis," the king of the monkeys in Walt Disney's 1967 cartoon "The Jungle Book."

Prima died in 1978 (Though Keely Smith is still with us. In 2002, at the age of 70, she was nominated for a Grammy.) But even in death, Louis Prima left behind one last self-deprecating joke. Inscribed on the door of crypt in New Orleans is a line from one of his most famous songs. "When the end comes, I know, they'll all say 'just a gigolo' as life goes on without me."

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