Louis Prima could only have come from New Orleans. From the 1920s through the 1940s, the city was a glorious mix of ethnic and racial groups united by food, music and an insatiable passion for good times. Prima, a trumpeter from an Italian family, got his start as a band leader in the early 1930s and headed to New York with his New Orleans Gang.
Radio followed along with his hit song, Sing, Sing, Sing, which Benny Goodman covered and made famous in 1936. That year he was in Los Angeles trying to get a big band off the ground without much success. In New York in 1937, he became a sensation with a smaller group that toured extensively on the East Coast.
During World War II, he became something of a novelty act, having huge success singing and recording jazzed-up Italian songs with comedic lyrics. By the late 1940s, he was giving many of his songs a hip, swinging twist. Burning through his vast income, Prima found his musical format flagging, and the bills piled up. With an ingenious knack for re-invention, Prima looked for a female vocalist to play off of on stage. He found Keely Smith in Virginia Beach in 1948 and she joined Prima on the road. The pair married in 1953.
Keenly aware of Bill Haley's success with white R&B and teens, and savvy enough to know that Frank Sinatra's re-emergence on Capitol had ushered in a looser, swinging sound, Prima repeatedly called Bill Miller at the Sahara in Las Vegas in 1954 until Miller gave him and Smith two weeks that November. Prima brought in tenor saxophonist Sam Butera and his new singing/comedy act with horns and a big beat became a smash hit.
On stage, Prima and Smith seemed like polar opposites but had plenty of nervous chemistry and charm together. The act wouldn't have worked as well without the two of them. Prima's swinging, incorrigible buffoon on stage dovetailed neatly with Smith's reserved metabolism, deadpan expression and feigned revulsion. Their popular act set the tone for TV's The Honeymooners, which began airing in October 1955.
Prima and Smith's act connected instantly with the growing number of working-class white couples vacationing in Las Vegas who saw themselves in Prima and Smith, just as they would in Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows on TV. The boasting husband with the bright ideas being reeled in by the prudent, kill-joy wife. wife. With that formula nailed, Prima and Smith would become the biggest act in Las Vegas throughout the 1950s, known for their uplifting, high-octane singing and mugging.
As for Prima's musicial importance, he began by uniting jazz and ethnic Italian music and then jazz and R&B, laying the groundwork for rock 'n' roll in 1956. While Elvis Presley admitted borrowing Dean Martin's cool look and laid back singing style, he also clearly slipped comfortably into Prima's hip-swiveling physicality on stage. Prima died in 1978.
Here's a fascinating 2001 documentary on Prima...