That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas Read Online Free Page A

and write, an education for her children was a priority—and not just for her sons, but for Elizabeth, too, who continued in school until she entered the convent.
    Angelina was also determined that her children would make music. Given that they lived in New Orleans, where music was in the air they breathed and perhaps the water they drank, this might seem automatic. But her goal was that her children would learn to play classical music, which was more part of mainstream American culture and … well, it was high-class. Like many matriarchs in immigrant families, Angelina was determined that her offspring would be respected and do well financially. She happened to be more formidable than most, so whatever Anthony’s views might have been, she spent some of his earnings on piano lessons for Leon and Elizabeth and violin lessons for Louis. The dutiful son, Louis at seven made his first violin out of a cigar box.
    They gave recitals. As Leon remembered in the documentary
Louis Prima: The Wildest!,
released in 1999, “When we were kids, I played the piano and Louis would play the violin, and Sister Maryann [Elizabeth] played the piano too.” Papa Anthony smiled benignly, but what mattered most to Louis was Angelina’s effusive approval. From an early age, he learned how to win love from his audience.
    But Angelina’s vision of her children—or at least her sons, since Elizabeth found a different calling—going on to college and maybe playing with orchestras was derailed, ironically, by music. The lure of jazz and blues sweeping through the clubs and even some of the churches in New Orleans proved to be too strong for Louis and his brother.
    “We used to listen to the black fellows that would play,” Leon said. “Trucks came along, and the bands on them would play.”
    “We lived in what was called ‘Back-a-town,’ primarily a colored neighborhood,” Louis recalled in a 1970 interview for the New Orleans Jazz Museum. “We used to follow those colored bands on their trucks around. They would congregate in the neighborhood on Sunday afternoons. And we lived near a cemetery, so we watched all the funeral parades marching in and out.”
    Louis was a little more adventurous than Leon. “Louis told me that as a child, he also went and stuck his head in the little black churches which were very near where he was raised, and see all of that excitement that was part of the worship,” said Segreto in the 1999 documentary.
    Angelina didn’t stand a chance. Louis and his brother were adolescents in a musical environment that not only held a major city in its grip but was also changing the culture of the country.
    “My brother Leon started it all,” Louis said in a 1974 interview. “He played piano. In school they made me leader of the orchestra because I played the violin, but I followed Leon and the boys in his jazz band around. I wasn’t making it with the violin because I was playing all of the ‘long hair’ stuff.”
    For much of his life, Louis eschewed the “long hair” stuff and gave his audience the popular tunes they wanted. One of his slogans was “Play pretty for the people.” He was about to learn how to do so.

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    For much of its history, the music of New Orleans remained regional. That was about to change, and many of the major cities in the United States were going to experience what that hybrid music was all about. Television in most American homes was still decades away, but in the 1920s the New Orleans sound spread out because of radio and the native musicians who took their songs, performing styles, and stories on the road.
    “If you look at Canal Street in the midst of a Zulu parade in the 1920s, what you’re going to see is white, black, colored, Latino, in other words, the entire spectrum of ethnicity right there on the street, waiting for King Zulu to come down, waiting for the music,” says Bruce Raeburn, head of the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University