I suddenly remembered Shooby Taylor this week, particularly the attached video, which went viral when it was uploaded to YouTube in 2009. I had this on my iPod Touch to listen to ironically as a teen. William “Shooby” “The Human Horn” Taylor (1929-2003) was a bit of a lolcow in life, as seen in this other viral clip of him getting booed off stage:

He was a trooper, though, and I respect that:

I was hurt, very hurt because I got booed off… And then I figured, “Oh, I did it wrong.” But after months and months of thinking about it, I said, “I did it the way how I wanted to do it!”

Taylor’s approach to scat singing was to emulate the sound of a horn (a saxophone, specifically) but it led to… mixed results. I just think whoever worked on his recordings should have cut him off after the first time he used the sounds poopy and blah and asked him nicely to workshop his flow a bit harder. Mme. Mort’s hypothesis is that as a former sax player he was doing what his mouth did when he played the sax, not making the sounds the sax makes. For the record, it’s possible to pull this off, the idea itself is not bunk. See Babs Gonzales, who was one of Shooby’s inspirations:

“Stout-Hearted Men” is a song from the Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein II operetta The New Moon, which is about an aristocrat who flees to New Orleans during the French Revolution. Kind of a weird pick for Shooby, but I guess it fell into the stage musical → jazz standard pipeline.

The album art I’ve picked here is from Songs in the Key of Z, which is a book + compilation album series on outsider music by music historian Irwin Chusid. Shooby’s presence on this album and Chusid’s support led to his widespread recognition.