[Dixielandjazz] What a Wonderful World

[Steve Barbone]

Below article is excerpted. It was sparked by a new release of WWW by
alt-folk chanteuse Jolie Holland and soul-music legend Booker T. Jones.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


MUSIC: REPRISE
Because he really thinks it's a wonderful world

Forty years after the song's original release, soul-music legend Booker T.
Jones tells Brad Wheeler why he rerecorded the Louis Armstrong classic just
in time for Christmas

by BRAD WHEELER  December 15, 2007

The world is wonderful, more than ever, which is why I was recently puzzled
by something written in these pages. Ninalee Allen Craig, known as Jinx
Allen in 1951, was interviewed about her featured role in Ruth Orkin's
famous photograph, the one where Craig was captured walking down a Florence
street past a group of leering Italian men. Then an American tourist in her
mid-twenties, Craig didn't feel threatened by the ogling men. She said she
hoped the photograph would inspire young women to travel, but that these
days they would need to be more careful. "Our world is much, much uglier
today," she judged.

Is it, really? Was post-Second World War Europe so beautiful? Are things so
bad today?

Of course not, but the perception that present days are worse days is
nothing new. At any time in history, the grass was greener several decades
prior, when nobody needed to lock their doors and you could buy a dollar
with a nickel! It was 40 years ago that songwriters Bob Thiele and George
David Weiss composed the classic What a Wonderful World, a hummable tune for
the froggy-voiced, hankie-dabbing trumpeter Louis Armstrong. Against the
backdrop of race riots and the Vietnam War, the balmy song was hopeful for
the future, with lines about blooming trees and babies learning. Thiele once
said the song was about "how good things really could be."

Over the years, the song has become a holiday standard, its cheerful
optimism and placid melody suitable for the season, though it has nothing to
do with Christmas itself. . . . . . snip to . . .

Though it was a hit in England upon its 1967 release, What a Wonderful World
flopped in the United States. It took time, and placement in the soundtrack
of 1987's Good Morning, Vietnam, before the song became popular.

Holland's and Jones's version likely won't be a hit right away either, but
there's time. As for the world's condition, Jones sees better days - and
better people. Of the cozy line about seeing friends shaking hands, saying
"How do you do?" when what they're really saying is "I love you," Jones
agrees. 

"For every one person that's doing something untoward, you've got 500 or a
thousand people who are trying to help somebody," he says. "That's been my
experience. That's what the ratio is. That's the way the world is."

A single's rocky road to classic status

Now a holiday season favourite, What a Wonderful World was originally
written by Bob Thiele and George David Weiss in 1967 as an antidote to the
era's turmoil. But although Louis Armstrong's stringed version was serene,
not everything about the recording went smoothly.

ABC Records chief Larry Newton wasn't happy with the project at all,
threatening to cancel the recording session because he thought a ballad was
dead wrong for Armstrong, who had recently had a buoyant hit with the
Dixieland-arranged Hello Dolly.

After the recording (and after Thiele was fired, and then rehired), Newton
described the song as a "piece of [garbage] that isn't going to sell at
all." The single did sell poorly in the United States, but not in England,
where Armstrong became the oldest male to top the UK pop charts, at nearly
67 years old. 

Armstrong was paid only union scale ($250) for the record. After the success
of the single in England, the label wanted a full album, at the same paltry
rate. Armstrong demanded, and eventually received, $25,000.

What a Wonderful World is often used ironically on soundtracks, over violent
imagery in the films Good Morning, Vietnam and Bowling for Columbine -
because of which, the song was reportedly placed on Clear Channel's
post-9/11 banned list of radio songs. B.W.