Louis Prima often spoke of writing a book about his life and times. Had he done so, his memory would not have to be contented with the few meager and hastily written paragraphs that follow. Indeed, were it not for the kindness of my own heart, his memory would have not even these.

Eschewing cheap sensationalism, I make no mention of the filthy procreative deed which led to Mr. Prima’s birth, but begin my account with the birth itself. He was born on December 7, 1910, in New Orleans. He studied the violin for seven years, and at the age of 10 he won the first prize in an amateur fiddling contest. While still young and pure and incapable of the filthy deed which brought him into this vale of tears, he put aside his violin and lifted to his lips a trumpet. By the time he was 12, he and his 15-year-old brother, Leon, were leading their own band, playing at various functions throughout the Crescent City.

After graduating the city’s Jesuit high school, Louis and his band, which were now called the Collegiates, began performing regularly at the Saenger Theatre. When his brother opened up a night club, the Beverly Gardens, Louis was the first act he hired, and until 1930 the young man with a horn trod regularly between Saenger Theatre and the Beverly Gardens.

His innocence was behind him now. Soon he married a young lady named Louise Polizzi. What happened on their wedding night, I leave to your, the reader’s, imagination. His home town was no longer enough. He had a lot of living to do.

. In 1932 he traveled to Cleveland where he played for a brief time with Red Nichols. In September, 1933, he went to Chicago, where he and two other musicians recorded two songs for the Bluebird label. These recordings, hot versions of “Chinatown” and “Dinah,” were released under the fitting name of the Hotcha Trio.

In August, 1934, Prima moved to New York, where he organized a seven-piece band, Louis Prima and His New Orleans Gang. They began recording for Brunswick-Vocalion in September of that year. By March, 1935, they were playing regularly at the new Famous Door on 52nd Street, one of the most prestigious jazz clubs in town.

In 1936 he traveled west to Los Angeles, where he successfully exploited his musical talents and dago puss in a series of films. First was the RKO short Swing It, followed by several full-length features: Rhythm On The Range (1936); You Can’t Have Everything (1939); Start Cheering, with Broderick Crawford and the Three Stooges (1938); and Rose Of Washington Square, with Tyrone Power and At Jolsoh (1939). It was while in California, in 1936, that Prima wrote and introduced the song “Sing, Sing, Sing/’ which Benny Goodman cut and made famous the following year.

Returning to New York, Prima began recording for the Varsity label in January, 1940. By now he had mastered a singing style the likes of which the world had never heard. It was, like his music itself, jazz-influenced, yet it struck one’s ears as decidedly strange. He sang in English, granted; but it Was an English heavily interlaced with the Neapolitan slang of his greaseball roots. When all else failed, he simply commenced making odd sounds. Long before there was a Little Richard, there were people sitting around listening to Louis Prima records, asking one another, “What was that? What did he say?”

When he recorded for Varsity, he rechristened his band Louis Prima and His Gleeby Rhythm Orchestra. Suitably, the first song he recorded under this hew name was the mysterious “Gleeby Rhythm Is Born.”

Gleeby rhythm is born,

Gleeby rhythm is born;

Gleeby rhythm comes on,

Gleeby rhythm comes on;

Oh, gleeby rhythm is born.

The gleebs are rompin ’,

The gleebs are stompin’;

Oh, gleeby rhythm is born.

Most men would rest upon their laurels after such an achievement. But not Louis. Onward he blew and howled, toward the rhythm beyond gleeb. He went through record companies like they were candy. Leaving Varsity in 1941, he signed with Okeh; then came Majestic, then RCA-Victor, then Robin Hood. He had one hit with each of these labels, then moved on. Nothing, it seemed, could contain him. (He also went through wives fairly well, too. After divorcing La Polizzi, he married an Alma Raase. Divorcing het, he married Tracelene Barrett, a 21-year-old secretary, in June, 1948. Perhaps the procreative deed is addictive to some of us. But, alas, we have no time here to pause and ponder, nor to weep. Like the man whom we honor, we must move on.)

In October, 1951, Prima signed with Columbia Records, for which he recorded some of his most outstanding and intriguing work, such as “The Bigger The Figure” (1952), a salacious homage to fat broads based on the “Largo Al Factotum” aria from Rossini’s Barber Of Seville. (The flipside, “Boney Bones,” dealt with a lady of leaner dimensions.) It was also in 1952 that Prima married his fourth wife, 20-year-old Dorothy Keely Smith, a Virginia girl who had been working with Louis since 1948. (Keely Smith was not the first female vocalist that Prima employed. As early as 1939 he had been performing duets with Lily Ann Carol, who was billed as Miss Personality of Song.)

Prima stayed with Columbia through most of the 50’s, but there were no hits. This mattered little, however, for by 1954 Louis Prima and Keely Smith were one of the most popular acts in Los Vegas, commanding nearly $10,000 per week for their shows at the Sahara. (A full-page ad run by the Sahara in a December, 1955, issue of Variety quoted none other than Howard Hughes on the subject of Prima and Smith: “The more I see them, the more I enjoy them.” What a way with words.)

Toward the end of 1956, Prima went to Capitol. Singing a Son-of-Sam version of “That Old Black Magic” with Keely Smith in 1958, he had his first hit since 1950. One more Capitol hit followed, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” (1959); then the couple switched to Dot Records. While at Dot, Louis had the worst hit of his career, “Wonderland By Night” (1960). Indeed, now, at the age of 50, Louis seemed to be losing the powers he had once possessed. Gleeby rhythm was nearly dead.

The Prima-Smith act broke up in October, 1961, when Keely filed for divorce on the grounds of “extreme mental cruelty.” Prima’s comment was terse: “Eh, fucka the Irish troia, eh?”

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He returned to his roots, performing in March, 1962, at the old,Saenger Theatre in New Orleans. Signing again with Capitol, he made the last great album of his life, The Wildest Comes Home, released in June of the same year. But there' were no more hits, and slowly Mr. Prima became naught but a memory except among the faithful who gathered before him in Vegas and Tahoe to hear him sing his words of magic.

1 got a gal, she’s six an’ a half feet tall;

Y’oughta see my baby, she’s six an’ a half feet tall;

She sleeps wit’ her head in the bed an’ her—ooo—come si chiama in in the hall.

In 1965, he took on a new wife and vocalist, Gia Maione, with whom he performed the deed. The next 10 years passed as in a dream. In October, 1975, his head was opened for the purpose of removing a brain tumor. He fell into a coma, and he lay in stillness in a New Orleans nursing home. On the bright, hot day of August 24, 1978, he died. And with him, not only gleeby rhythm but much, much else besides.