Last week I called attention to how Ella Fitzgerald's rendition of Mack The Knife inserts herself into a male tradition. One of her explicit 'targets' is Louis Armstrong.
Now Armstrong is no stranger to using lyrics in re-orienting musical tradition through such insertion. For example, Armstrong has a neat duet with (one of my favorite movie stars) Danny Kaye of "When The Saints Go Marchin In" [see below]. It's a song made famous by Armstrong in the 1930s; I grew up with it as a Football march song. Now Wikipedia treats the Armstrong-Kaye version as comedic. Funny it is. But the evident joy should not be mistaken for lack of seriousness in this adaptation. (The apocalyptic undertones of the song have not been removed.) For Armstrong becomes the final arbiter ("Chopin, a solid Man") of a musical tradition stretching back to Bach and Haydn ("who?...let him come out") that now pointedly includes Fats Waller and himself.
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