Spring 2002
Volume 28, Number 3

Excerpt from
Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of Scat
by Brent Hayes Edwards

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Scat begins with a fall, or so we're told. In his second Okeh recording session with his Hot Five on 26 February 1926 in Chicago, Louis Armstrong recorded a lyric by Boyd Atkins called "The Heebie Jeebies Dance." The words are not particularly memorable, a jingle about a dance craze: "I've got the heebies, I mean the jeebies/ I'm talking about those heebie jeebies blues/ That's what they call it boys,/ Mix it in with a little bit of joy/ Say don't you know it, you should be shown/ These naughty blues, I want to teach you,/ So come on and do that dance they call the heebie jeebies." Supposedly the practice takes of the tune went smoothly, but a fortuitous fumble as the band was cutting the record transformed the song from one of the first journeyman efforts of a studio band to one of the most influential discs in American popular music. As Armstrong himself tells it:

I dropped the paper with the lyrics--right in the middle of the tune . . . And I did not want to stop and spoil the record which was moving along so wonderfully . . . So when I dropped the paper, I immediately turned back into the horn and started to Scatting . . . Just as nothing had happened . . . When I finished the record I just knew the recording people would throw it out . . . And to my surprise they all came running out of the controlling booth and said--"Leave That In."1

As Philippe Baudoin, Gary Giddins, Richard Hadlock, and others have pointed out, it's a rather unlikely anecdote.3 And although this session is often credited as the "origin" of scat singing in jazz, there are many other earlier practitioners of the mode. Baudoin notes Don Redman, who recorded a scat break of "My Papa Doesn't Two-Time No Time" with Fletcher Henderson five months before "Heebie Jeebies."4 Will Friedwald, in Jazz Singing, points to vaudeville singer Gene Green's half-chorus of imitation-Chinese scat in his 1917 recording of "From Here to Shanghai," and mentions other overlooked figures including Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards, who scatted on a December 1923 record of "Old Fashioned Love," and used to work in a theater accompanying silent movies "with his ukulele as well as with singing, vocal sound effects, and 'eefin'" (the word Edwards used before anyone had thought of 'scat')."5 In the late-1930s, the champion self-promoter and deft revisionary historian Jelly Roll Morton told Alan Lomax of his own role in the mode's origins more than twenty years earlier: "People believe Louis Armstrong originated scat. I must take that credit away from him, because I know better. Tony Jackson and myself were using scat for novelty back in 1906 and 1907 when Louis Armstrong was still in the orphan's home."6

I am less interested in the truth or fiction of the anecdote than in its perseverance, its resilience as a touchstone legend of origin. What's fascinating about the story is the seeming need to narrate scat as a fall, as a literal dropping of the words--as an unexpected loss of the lyrics that finally proves enabling. The written words slip to the ground, and an entirely new approach to the singing voice is discovered in the breach, in the exigencies of musical time. It is not exactly that the "song" is separated from the "script," but more that the anecdote relies on an oral/written split to figure the way that Armstrong's voice peels gradually away from the reiteration of the chorus, and from linguistic signification altogether. (This happens as a kind of erosion or disarticulation, not a sudden loss: "Say you don't know it, you don't dawduh,/ Daw fee blue, come on we'll teach you. . .") Of course the anecdote buys into a familiar narrative about "genius" and "spontaneity," the notion that the great man improvises his way out of a tough spot with a dancer's grace--talking to save time, as it were. But there is another quality as well, an apparently necessary coexistence of dispossession and invention, perdition and predication, catastrophe and chance. If "Heebie Jeebies" is an unprecedented occasion for poetic innovation, in which Armstrong's scat somehow moves closer to the qualities of music, it forces the recognition that an occasion is etymologically precisely that, Latin for a "falling toward."7 Here, the lyric sheet drifts down to the floor, and the singer finds resource, happening upon a new sound (itself falling away from the word) in the void of the phonograph horn.

1. Louis Armstrong, "Jazz on a High Note," Esquire 36 (Dec. 1951): 85.

2. George Avakian, "Notes on Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five," The Louis Armstrong Story, Vol. 1, Columbia Records, CL 851; quoted in Stephen J. Casmier and Donald H. Matthews, "Why Scatting Is Like Speaking in Tongues: Post-Modern Reflections on Jazz, Pentecostalism, and 'Africosmysticism,'" Literature and Theology 13 (June 1999): 174. For other versions of this anecdote, see Hughes Panassié, Louis Armstrong, trans. pub. (New York, 1971), pp. 69Ð70; and Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues (1946; New York, 1972), pp. 102Ð4; hereafter abbreviated RB. The discographical information for the recording is Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, "Heebie Jeebies" Okeh 8300, 1926, mx. 9534-A.

3. See Richard Hadlock, Jazz Masters of the Twenties (New York, 1965), p. 26; Philippe Baudoin, "Introduction," Anthology of Scat Singing, 3 vols., Masters of Jazz, MJCD 801, 1995, p. 19; and Gary Giddins, "Louis Armstrong (the Once and Future King)," Visions of Jazz: The First Century (New York, 1998), p. 95, hereafter abbreviated VJ.

4. See Baudoin, "Introduction," pp. 17Ð18. Other predecessors include a Chicago singer named Bo Diddly, as well as Gene Rodemich's June 1924 "Scissor Grinder Joe" and "Some of These Days," recorded by Coon and Sanders in November 1924. See also David Jasen, Tin Pan Alley: The Composers, the Songs, the Performers, and Their Times (New York, 1988), p. 6.

5. Will Friedwald, Jazz Singing: America's Great Voices from Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond (New York, 1990), pp. 28, 16.

6. Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll (1949; New York, 1993), p. 156. Of course, even Morton's chronology is exaggerated, since Armstrong did not in fact enter the Colored Waif's Home for Boys in New Orleans until January 1913.

7. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word occasion as meaning a "falling together or juncture of circumstances favourable or suitable to an end or purpose" (Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., s.v. "occasion"). Robert Creeley discusses poetics as occasion in this sense in his interview with William V. Spanos, "Talking with Robert Creeley," Boundary 2 6 (SpringÐFall 1978): 19.