Lets ruin some more innocent fun

I have long thought that that's why they didn't get a black man to sing it, personally, because they feared a backlash. Fortunately Louis Prima sounded enough like Armstrong that a lot of people thought it was him - and he's a better and more fun singer anyway.

Louis Prima is a better singer than Louis Armstrong? Are you on crack? Satchmo practically invented popular singing as we now know it. Listen to crooners before him and then listen to his original takes on "Ain't Misbehavin', "Lazy River, "Star Dust," etc. It's a whole new world, bunky.
I love Louis Prima, but he's simply not in the same league. I also don't buy the argument that he was more "fun." Armstrong could take the most banal song -- he's still the only person ever to have recorded an enjoyable version of "Hello Dolly" -- and make it magic.

"Man, what a beat!"

"Will you stop that silly beat business and listen?"

Bagerah ain't got the funk.

I know Armstrong was incomparably more important, and I like him a lot, but I like Prima much, much more. He was certainly funnier than Armstrong, and this made him more suited to a Disney soundtrack too.

Even in his day, Armstrong was considered to be sucking up to white people too much. Also note that Italians weren't considered white until recently.

Wow, a little knowledge really is a dangerous thing. Armstrong sucked up to white people? In 1957, speaking out against the Little Rock school crisis -- and well before the Civil Rights Act was passed and black people had to be careful about what they said -- Armstrong was quoted as saying, "Do you dig me when I'm saying I have the right to blow my top over injustice?" After President Eisenhower blamed "extremists on both sides," Armstrong told reporters, "The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell! The President has no guts!"
Many blacks like Sammy Davis Jr. came down hard on him for his comments and even his publicist tried to apologize for him. Armstrong promptly fired him.
Ge stopped playing in his beloved New Orleans for continuing to practice Jim Crow laws. “I don't care if I ever see that city again," he said. "They treat me better all over the world than they do in my hometown. Ain't that stupid?"
Louis Armstrong liked to smile a lot, but an Uncle Tom he was not. He showed more guts than any black performer of his day, and even when countless newspaper columnists and fellow musicians villified him publicly -- and yes, there were death threats -- he stuck to his guns. Even Miles Davis would never have dared to speak his mind so forcefully.
You should go study your history, children, before making such silly and stereotypical comments. Louis Armstrong should be on American currency. Prima was merely a clown. (But I still love him.)

Erm, Dancer did write 'considered'. You can't deny the criticisms, inaccurate and meanspirited as they were, were there, from the 30s onwards? In many ways the Disney film is perhaps reflecting a popular myth.

Nevertheless your post is redressing a balance that most of us probably don't have on that issue, so kudos anyway, or summat.

yeah, I meant considered. The truth is, as always, more compilcated. I was just pointing out that race politics were as raging then as now.

But considered by whom? Certainly not the majority of people familiar with him. Sure, there were some who accused him of tomming - Miles Davis most prominently. But for many white people of the day, seeing and hearing Armstrong play was the first time that they realized that a black person could be a genius. That itself went a long way in the fight against racism.

I agree that Armstrong deserves enormous recognition, as his importance is so huge. But I think his greatness is so much more as a musician than a singer - that's where he is arguably the 20th Century's most important figure. Prima was a copyist at first, but I do prefer the liveliness of his singing, his silliness. I love Armstrong (I reviewed the Hot 5s & 7s box set effusively on FT a while ago), but there is no one in music who more reliably makes me happy than Prima.

Again, I say go back and listen to singers of popular songs before Armstrong started recording his vocals. They were embarrassing -- just crooners with no passion, no sense of rhythm, no inventiveness or fun. His influence as a singer, I'll argue, was as profound as his trumpet playing.

Okay, I'm not saying he was insignificant as a singer! I didn't start this by saying Armstrong was unimportant! I would say that there are other singers of the era who don't fit your thesis at all, but they very probably don't count as 'popular' - but I've no idea of the chronology or scale of Armstrong's early success as a singer, to be honest.

I don't accept importance as any measure of quality, anyway, let alone as indicative of whether I will like someone. I love the agility and imagination and sense of fun in Prima's singing (I'm thinking that high energy late '50s stuff rather than his earlier second rate Armstrong phase) more than what I hear in Armstrong's.

The version of that song by Los Lobos (via "The Jungle Book") = classic.

xpost
so it was only 20s-60s when whitey had all the power?