Louis Armstrong and his band covering “Dinah” in 1933 reminded me of Slayer. Armstrong and Slayer bassist/vocalist Tom Araya both loosely “sang” while wearing big grins on their faces. Neither actually sang; rather they said the lyrics to they rhythm of the song. This is the most common method of unsung vocals in metal and hip-hop but is rarely seen in jazz. This is one way of integrating vocals into the song without having them become the melodic line of the music, that is the actual music of the music.

Both Louis Armstrong and Tom Araya dropped words from lyrics written by others to emphasize certain words and phrases of their own choosing. This allowed them themselves control how others’ words were said where the performer otherwise have been constrained to what was written if he said them straight; Louis Armstrong by having to perform the racism inherent in a minstrel style song such as “Dinah” and Tom Araya playing bass in a metal band, which is in no way as potentially demeaning as a black man performing a minstrel song onstage for a white audience, is still constraining as the bassist in metal mostly just plays the chords of the guitars much as the vocalist sings the riffs. This allows intense creative expression for the vocals to accentuate the music rather than distract from it.

For Armstrong, this accentuation is empowering. It enabled him as a black performer to take a sort of cultural ownership of a song written for a racist medium. Dinah’s minstrel show past is completely overshadowed in the public eye by Armstrong’s version. A random person off the street would not even be aware Armstrong is parodying the minstrel show format and stripping the song of its racist caricatures by choosing not to say certain lyrics. Dinah sounds like just another jazz or swing song. This choice takes the song away from the minstrel appeal of its white writers and back towards general entertainment, wiping away one tiny dehumanization by in effect by overshadowing the covers of the song performed straight.