64. Eagle Scat

64. "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong

Yes, it's cheesy. Yes, it's been covered by innumerable artists. Yes, it's overplayed in funeral videos. But Louis is one of my trumpet jazz heroes, and I can't not include him in my top-200 list.

What? You say he's not playing the trumpet in this song?! Well, that's how good he was on the trumpet--he didn't even have to play it to make a hit record! He just had to hold it while he sang.



I've got lots of great musicians on my top-200 list. But none of them approach Louis' genius or his impact on musical history. It's hard to overstate his importance to jazz music, or all music for that matter, but here's the Biography Channel's attempt at doing so.



In my youth, we had a Louis Armstrong record at home that had "Ain't Misbehavin'" on it. I thought the lyrics and Louis' singing made for a funny combo. I played it so many times that I memorized most of the lyrics, including the little scats. (I wasn't a talented enough trumpet player to memorize his trumpet solo.) There was lots more scatting on other songs on the record, so I would sometimes entertain myself while milking the cows by scatting in a Satchmo voice. I think the cows liked it.



During the beginning of my junior year in high school, after one victorious game, the seniors on the football team--many of which were MarVals--were sitting in the back of the bus and singing "This Little Light of Mine." (They didn't sing if we lost.) Now, I didn't like the MarVals. Many of them seemed to think they were the elite music group in the school, and completely dismissed the idea that the band might be better at playing music than they were at singing it. So in an attempt to ruin their song, I started scatting in between the lines. But instead of making them mad and ruining the song for them, like I had sincerely hoped to do, they liked my Louis-style scatting so much that they made me do it over and over. And that's how I ended up scatting like Satchmo to "This Little Light of Mine" in front of the entire student body out on the football field during a pep rally.

Zut-n-zah-zahhh bo-dit-n-do dozee-dozee zo-zahhhh!