February 26, 1926: Louis Armstrong Gets the Heebie Jeebies

Left to right: Johnny Dodds, Louis Armstrong,

Johnny St. Cyr, Kid Ory and Lil Hardin Armstrong.

February 26, 1926, 100 years ago: Louis Armstrong gets the heebie jeebies.

His band was billed as "Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five." His wife, Lil Hardin Armstrong, played piano. It was she who "took the country out of him" and convinced him to assert himself, both on the bandstand and with money. This would end up working against her: Within a few years, he divorced her for spending too much of his money.

The others were musicians he'd previously worked with in his hometown of New Orleans: Edward "Kid" Ory on trombone, Johnny Dodds on clarinet, and Johnny St. Cyr on guitar, and sometimes banjo.

Although all of the Hot Five got their professional starts in New Orleans, their initial recording, on November 12, 1925, was in Chicago, at the studio of Okeh Records. He had previously recorded as the trumpet player in the jazz band of Joe "King" Oliver, but this was his 1st time recording a band he led. They recorded Louis' compositions "Yes! I'm in the Barrel" and "Gut Bucket Blues," and Lil's composition "My Heart."

Their next session was on February 26, 1926. Among the songs they recorded was "Heebie Jeebies," written by saxophone player Boyd Atkins. The term "heebie jeebies" was coined by Billy DeBeck, the cartoonist who wrote the Barney Google strip. It means a feeling of anxiety or apprehension.

In addition to playing trumpet like nobody's business, Louis, known as "Satchelmouth" for his big mouth, eventually shortened to "Satchmo" or "Satch," tried scat singing, and this made the record his first real hit.

Armstrong, Ory and St. Cyr would all later admit that the reason Armstrong was scatting -- something already well-known in jazz circles, but not on record -- is that he didn't know the words, and was reading them off a sheet of paper, and he dropped it, and had to improvise. His scatting was the defining "roar" of the Roaring Twenties.

(There's an old joke: "Why does a hummingbird hum? Because he doesn't know the words." And another: Musicians are playing in an apartment, and a woman in the apartment building next door opens her window and yells across the alley, "Don't you know people are trying to sleep?" And the bandleader, acting as if "People Are Trying to Sleep" is a song title, says, "No, but if you hum a few bars of it, we'll catch on!")

In 1928, Armstrong formed a new Hot Five, replacing everyone but himself with members of the Carroll Dickerson Orchestra: Fred Robinson on trombone, Jimmy Strong on clarinet and tenor saxophone, Earl Hines (later nicknamed "Fatha," short for "Father") on piano, Mancy Carr on banjo, and Arthur "Zutty" Singleton on drums. So now it really was Louis Armstrong and a Hot Five. It was this group that recorded the landmark instrumental "West End Blues" in 1928.

Louis Armstrong died on July 6, 1971, of heart trouble, in New York, a few days short of his 70th birthday. Lil Hardin Armstrong died a few weeks after that. Johnny Dodds, the greatest jazz clarinetist of the 1920s, was an alcoholic, and it gave him a fatal heart attack in 1940. Mancy Carr followed in 1946, Johnny St. Cyr in 1966, Kid Ory in 1973, Zutty Singleton in 1975, Jimmy Strong in 1977, Earl Hines in 1983, and Fred Robinson in 1984.

In 1956, rock and roll pioneer Little Richard recorded a different song titled "Heebie Jeebies." It was not a hit.