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Louis Prima: The Sicilian Kid From the French Quarter Who Made America Jump
Raised in New Orleans’ “Little Palermo,” Louis Prima wrote “Sing, Sing, Sing,” sang in Italian when it wasn’t safe to, and invented the Las Vegas lounge act. Then he became a Disney orangutan. During Mardi Gras in 1934, Guy Lombardo, one of the most popular bandleaders in America, wandered into a nearly empty club on Bourbon Street. The place was the Shim Sham, run by a New Orleans cornetist named Leon Prima. The trumpet player on the bandstand was Leon’s younger brother, Louis, and Lombardo couldn’t believe nobody was listening. Lombardo pushed him to try New York. When Prima got there, one club owner, Eddie Davis, backed out of a booking. Davis had taken Prima, with his olive skin and tight curly hair, for a Black man, and worried that a Black bandleader would scare off his customers, according to the historian Gregory Theriot. A story about union rules served as the cover. Lombardo found Prima another stage at the Famous Door, and he quickly became a sensation. That episode holds much of Louis Prima’s story. He belonged to two worlds that segregated America insisted on keeping apart, and he turned the space between them into some of the most joyful music of the 20th century. Little Palermo Louis Leo Prima was born on Dec. 7, 1910, in New Orleans. His father, Anthony, was the son of Leonardo Di Prima, an immigrant from Salaparuta in western Sicily. His mother, Angelina Caravella, had come over as a baby from Ustica, a small island off Sicily’s northern coast. The family lived at 1812 St. Peter Street, at the edge of the lower French Quarter, which had become a Sicilian enclave locals called Little Palermo. It was the same community that, in 1891, watched 11 Italian men lynched by a mob after the killing of the city’s police chief. Angelina insisted that each of her children learn an instrument, and Louis started on violin. As a teenager he switched to the horn, learning by listening to Leon practice with Black and white musicians. He fell for jazz hearing Black players, Louis Armstrong among them, and watching Italian and Black musicians share bandstands in the neighborhood’s Italian clubs. In New Orleans, Sicilians were often treated as not quite white, and many lived and worked alongside Black and Creole neighbors. Prima absorbed all of it. Sing, Sing, Sing By the mid-1930s Prima was a national name. “The Lady in Red,” recorded in 1935, was a jukebox hit. In March 1936 he wrote and recorded “Sing, Sing, Sing.” Benny Goodman turned it into the anthem of the swing era and the showstopper of his famous 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall. Plenty of people who know every drum break still have no idea a Sicilian kid from St. Peter Street wrote it. During World War II, when Italian Americans were viewed with suspicion and hundreds of thousands of Italian immigrants were labeled enemy aliens, Prima did something that took nerve. He recorded songs in Italian and Sicilian-flavored English: “Angelina,” named for his mother, “Please No Squeeza Da Banana,” “Felicia No Capicia.” Some heard them as novelty records. They were also a public refusal to hide where he came from. “He belonged to two worlds that segregated America insisted on keeping apart.” The wildest show in Las Vegas In 1948, at a club in Virginia Beach, Prima met a 20-year-old singer named Keely Smith. They married in 1953. A year later he landed a stay at the Sahara in Las Vegas with a young New Orleans saxophonist, Sam Butera, and his band, the Witnesses. The shows ran deep into the night: Prima shouting and mugging, Butera honking, Smith delivering her lines with a perfectly straight face. It became the blueprint for the Vegas lounge act. The act earned a Capitol Records contract in 1955. Their first album for the label, “The Wildest!,” arrived in 1956, and its medley of “Just a Gigolo” and “I Ain’t Got Nobody” became a signature. Prima and Smith won a Grammy at the very first Grammy Awards in 1959 for “That Old Black Magic.” In January 1961, Frank Sinatra invited Prima to perform at John F. Kennedy’s inaugural gala. He and Smith divorced later that year. King Louie In 1967, Disney cast Prima as the voice of King Louie, the jazz-loving orangutan in “The Jungle Book,” and he sang “I Wan’na Be Like You” on the soundtrack. A new generation of kids grew up knowing his voice without knowing his name. He married his fourth wife, Gia Maione, in 1963, and they had two children, Lena and Louis Jr. After a heart attack in 1973, Prima was diagnosed with a brain stem tumor in 1975. Following surgery he suffered a hemorrhage and slipped into a coma from which he never woke. He died in New Orleans on Aug. 24, 1978, at 67. He is buried in Metairie Cemetery, in a marble crypt topped by a statue of Gabriel, the angel with the trumpet. Still jumping Prima’s music has never really gone away. David Lee Roth took “Just a Gigolo” back up the charts in 1985, and Brian Setzer’s cover of “Jump, Jive an’ Wail” helped set off the swing revival of the late 1990s. Every wedding band that closes the night with “Sing, Sing, Sing” is playing his song. He came from a neighborhood that much of America looked down on, at a time when Italians in New Orleans had learned to keep their heads down. Louis Prima never did. He played loud, sang in his grandparents’ language, shared the stage with whoever could swing, and made the whole country dance to the sound of Little Palermo.