Millions of children heard Louis Prima as the scat-singing orangutan King Louie in Disney's 1967 film The Jungle Book, but the man behind the voice was a five-times-married Las Vegas showman who had spent fifty years transforming American music. This episode follows him from a Sicilian immigrant household in 1910s New Orleans, where he hijacked his brother Leon's cornet, through the neighborhood clubs where Italian and African American musicians traded syncopation and Sicilian melodies, to a disastrous Florida road trip, a riverboat gig on Canal Street, and a move to New York facilitated by Guy Lombardo.

The hosts explain how he fused Dixieland with swing at the Famous Door, wrote Sing Sing Sing in 1936 only to watch Benny Goodman make it the recording of the decade, and refused to hide his Italian heritage during World War II, releasing so ...