Orleans (band)

The campaign responded by dropping the song from their playlist. And Butera and the Witnesses also continue to tour. The band made the news briefly in late October 2004 when John Hall publicly commented that the Bush presidential campaign never received permission to use the song at campaign events. The Prima-Butera arrangements and recordings continued to be copied by younger musicians, including David Lee Roth, who covered his medley of "Just a Gigolo"/"I Ain't Got Nobody" in the 1980s, and Brian Setzer, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and other nouveau swing bands of the 1990s, covering such Prima standards as "Jump and Jive and Wail". Hall quit his solo career and reunited with the band in the early 1990s, releasing a few recordings on the band's own label, Major Records. He is interred in the Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans. Kelly died of a heroin overdose in 1984. He never recovered, and died three years later.

They continued performing, in spite of a diminishing audience, and released One of a Kind in 1982. In 1975 he went into a coma following surgery to remove a brain tumor. Orleans, meanwhile, got another hit with Forever's "Love Takes Time". Prima performed shows in Las Vegas throughout the 1950s and '60s, before returning to New Orleans in the early 1970s. In 1977, Hall left to begin a solo career and became active in the anti-nuclear program, cofounding Musicians United for Safe Energy. "I Wanna Be Like You" was a hit song from the movie that led to the recording of two albums with Phil Harris: The Jungle Book and More Jungle Book, on Disneyland Records. The song was used as a slogan by ABC television in 1977. In 1967, Prima made a memorable contribution to the Walt Disney film The Jungle Book, as the voice of the raucous orangutan King Louie.

"Still The One" from their follow-up LP Waking and Dreaming was their second big hit. (Smith was of Cherokee descent; Cher was Armenian.) Prima, Smith, and Butera put on a live show that rocked as hard as anyone's. One of its singles, "Dance with Me", became a Billboard top ten song in 1975. The act, Louis Prima and Keely Smith, was very much the model for Sonny and Cher, the exuberant Italian musician and the serious, unsmiling exotic female singer. After ABC dropped the group, their self-produced second album, Let There Be Magic, came out on Asylum Records in 1974. In the late 1940s he added young singer Keely Smith (who was to become Prima's 4th wife) and saxophonist/arranger Sam Butera to lead his band, called Sam Butera and the Witnesses. Their debut album was Orleans, recorded in Muscle Shoals. He appeared in several Hollywood movies, including a featured performance with Bing Crosby in the 1936 film Rhythm on the Range.

The band signed with ABC Records in 1973. He moved to Los Angeles to headline at the Famous Door nightclub. Lance Hoppen, Larry's brother, joined the band later in that year. His 1936 composition "Sing, Sing Sing" became one of the biggest hits and most covered standards of the swing era, famously being performed in Carnegie Hall by Benny Goodman with a featured performance by Gene Krupa on drums. The band took their name from New Orleans because that city was home to the mixture of music they played when the band was founded. He moved to New York in 1934, working regularly on 52nd Street. The band was founded in January 1972 in Ulster County, New York by Wells Kelly, John Hall and Larry Hoppen. In his youth in New Orleans Prima played trumpet with Irving Fazola, his brother's band, and the pit band of the Sanger Theater before forming his own group, Louis Prima's New Orleans Gang.

Orleans is a 1970s soft rock band, best known today for "Dance with Me" and "Still the One". His singing and playing showed that he absorbed many of the same influences as his fellow Crescent City musician, Louis Armstrong, particularly in his hoarse voice and scat singing. Prima was proud of his heritage, and made a point of letting the audience know at every performance that he was Italian-American and from New Orleans. His older brother Leon Prima was a well regarded local bandleader. He studied violin for several years as a child.

Prima was born into a musical family of Sicilian descent in New Orleans. Prima rode the musical trends of his time, starting with his seven-piece New Orleans style jazz band in the 1920s, then succesively leading a Swing combo in the 1930s, a Big Band in the 1940s, a hot Vegas lounge act in the 1950s, and a pop-Rock go-go band in the 1960s, in all cases projecting his exuberant personality. Louis Prima (December 7, 1910- August 24, 1978) was an American entertainer, singer, actor, and trumpeter born New Orleans.