Louis Armstrong's 1926 recording of Heebie Jeebies is often cited as the first modern song to employ scatting, yet the true origins of the technique stretch back decades before that pivotal moment. Jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton claimed that the first man to ever do a scat number in the history of the United States was a comedian named Joe Sims from Vicksburg, Mississippi, who began performing the style around the turn of the 20th century. Morton recalled in a conversation with Alan Lomax that he and Tony Jackson were using scat for novelty back in 1906 and 1907, long before Armstrong was even out of the orphan's home. While Armstrong's accidental invention during a recording session, where his sheet music fell to the floor and he filled the silence with nonsense syllables, became the national bestseller that popularized the form, earlier masters like Gene Greene had already recorded scat choruses in King of the Bungaloos between 1911 and 1917. Entertainer Al Jolson had also scatted through a few bars in his 1911 recording of That Haunting Melody, and Cliff Edwards scatted an interlude on his 1923 Old Fashioned Love in lieu of using an instrumental soloist. The deliberate choice of syllables became a key element in vocal jazz improvisation, influencing pitch, articulation, and resonance to differentiate personal styles. Betty Carter was inclined to use soft-tongued sounds like louie-ooie-la-la-la, while Sarah Vaughan preferred fricatives and plosives such as shoo-doo-shoo-bee-ooo-bee. These choices allowed singers to mimic the sounds of different instruments, with Fitzgerald's improvisation mimicking swing-era big bands and Vaughan's mimicking bop-era small combos.
Humor and Musical Quotation
Humor serves as another vital element of scat singing, exemplified by bandleader Cab Calloway and performers like Slim Gaillard and Leo Watson. Bam Brown's 1945 song Avocado Seed Soup Symphony features singers scatt variations on the word avocado for much of the recording, demonstrating how nonsensical language can be used for comedic effect. Humor is also communicated through musical quotation, where singers embed recognizable tunes within their improvisations. Leo Watson frequently drew on nursery rhymes in his scatting, a technique known as using a compression. Ella Fitzgerald's scatting drew extensively on popular music, and in her 1960 recording of How High the Moon live in Berlin, she quotes over a dozen songs, including The Peanut Vendor, Heat Wave, A-Tisket, A-Tasket, and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. This practice of weaving familiar melodies into improvised nonsense syllables creates a complex layer of meaning that rewards attentive listeners. The deliberate use of humor and quotation distinguishes scat singing from other forms of vocal improvisation, turning the voice into a playful instrument capable of storytelling without words. The comparison of the scatting styles of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan reveals that Fitzgerald's improvisation mimics the sounds of swing-era big bands with which she performed, while Vaughan's mimics that of her accompanying bop-era small combos. This stylistic divergence highlights how the same technique can be adapted to reflect different musical eras and ensemble sizes.
Following the success of Armstrong's Heebie Jeebies, a number of popular songs featured scat singing, including Harry Barris and Bing Crosby of bandleader Paul Whiteman's The Rhythm Boys, who scatted on several songs including Mississippi Mud in June 1927. On the 26th of October 1927, Duke Ellington's Orchestra recorded Creole Love Call featuring Adelaide Hall singing wordlessly, with her evocative growls hailed as serving as another instrument. A year later, in October 1928, Ellington repeated the experiment in one of his versions of The Mooche, with Gertrude Baby Cox singing scat after a muted similar trombone solo by Joe Tricky Sam Nanton. During the Great Depression, acts such as The Boswell Sisters regularly employed scatting on their records, including the high complexity of scatting at the same time, in harmony. An example is their version of It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing, and their inventive use of scat singing was a source for Ella Fitzgerald. As a young girl, Fitzgerald often practiced imitating Connee Boswell's scatting for hours. During this 1930s era, other famous scat singers included Scatman Crothers, who would go on to movie and television fame, and British dance band trumpeter and vocalist Nat Gonella whose scat-singing recordings were banned in Nazi Germany. The technique became a way for singers to navigate the economic hardships of the era, using wordless improvisation to create music that transcended the limitations of spoken language and economic scarcity.
Bop and the Avant-Garde Shift
Over the years, as jazz music developed and grew in complexity, scat singing did as well. During the bop era of the 1940s, more highly developed vocal improvisation surged in popularity. Annie Ross, a bop singer, expressed a common sentiment among vocalists at the time: The music was so exciting, everyone wanted to do it. Many did: Eddie Jefferson, Betty Carter, Anita O'Day, Joe Carroll, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Jon Hendricks, Babs Gonzales, Mel Torme and Dizzy Gillespie were all singers in the idiom. Free jazz and the influence of world musicians on the medium pushed jazz singing nearer to avant-garde art music. In the 1960s Ward Swingle was the product of an unusually liberal musical education. He took the scat singing idea and applied it to the works of Bach, creating The Swingle Singers. Scat singing was also used by Louis Prima and others in the song I Wan'na Be Like You in Disney's The Jungle Book in 1967. The bop revival of the 1970s renewed interest in bop scat singing, and young scat singers viewed themselves as a continuation of the classic bop tradition. The medium continues to evolve, and vocal improvisation now often develops independently of changes in instrumental jazz. During the mid-1990s, jazz artist John Paul Larkin, better known as Scatman John, renewed interest in the genre briefly when he began fusing jazz singing with pop music and eurodance, scoring a world-wide hit with the song Scatman Ski Ba Bop Ba Dop Bop in 1994. Vocal improviser Bobby McFerrin's performances have shown that wordless singing has traveled far from the concepts demonstrated by Louis Armstrong, Gladys Bentley, Cab Calloway, Anita O'Day, and Leo Watson.
Vocal Bass and Hip Hop Rhythms
Vocal bass is a form of scat singing that is intended to vocally simulate instrumental basslines that are typically performed by bass players. A technique most commonly used by bass singers in a cappella groups is to simulate an instrumental rhythm section, often alongside a vocal percussionist or beatboxer. Some notable vocal bass artists are Tim Foust, Adam Chance, Bobby McFerrin, Al Jarreau, Reggie Watts, Alvin Chea, Joe Santoni, Avi Kaplan, Matt Sallee, Chris Morey, and Geoff Castellucci. Many hip hop artists and rappers use scat singing to come up with the rhythms of their raps. Tajai of the group Souls of Mischief states the following in the book How to Rap: Sometimes my rhythms come from scatting. I usually make a scat kind of skeleton and then fill in the words. I make a skeleton of the flow first, and then I put words into it. The group Lifesavas describe a similar process. Rapper Tech N9ne has been recorded demonstrating exactly how this method works, and gangsta rapper Eazy-E used it extensively in his song Eazy Street. This adaptation of scat singing into hip hop demonstrates the technique's versatility and its ability to transcend genre boundaries. The rhythmic patterns created through scatting provide a foundation for rappers to build their lyrics upon, creating a seamless blend of vocal improvisation and spoken word poetry. The use of scat syllables to generate rhythmic skeletons allows for a fluid transition between singing and rapping, highlighting the technique's enduring relevance in modern music.
Theories of Origin and Cultural Parity
Some writers have proposed that scat has its roots in African musical traditions. In much African music, human voice and instruments assume a kind of musical parity and are at times so close in timbre and so inextricably interwoven within the music's fabric as to be nearly indistinguishable. Dick Higgins likewise attributes scat singing to traditions of sound poetry in African-American music. In West African music, it is typical to convert drum rhythms into vocal melodies; common rhythmic patterns are assigned specific syllabic translations. However, this theory fails to account for the existence, even in the earliest recorded examples of scatting, of free improvisation by the vocalist. It is therefore more likely that scat singing evolved independently in the United States. Others have proposed that scat singing arose from jazz musicians' practice of formulating riffs vocally before performing them instrumentally. The adage If you can't sing it, you can't play it was common in the early New Orleans jazz scene. In this manner, soloists like Louis Armstrong became able to double as vocalists, switching effortlessly between instrumental solos and scatting. Scat singing also resembles the Irish/Scottish practice of lilting or diddling, a type of vocal music that involves using nonsensical syllables to sing non-vocal dance tunes. These diverse cultural influences converge in the development of scat singing, creating a unique form of vocal improvisation that draws from multiple traditions while maintaining its distinct identity within the jazz genre.
Critical Assessment and Emotional Depth
Scat singing can allow jazz singers to have the same improvisational opportunities as jazz instrumentalists: scatting can be rhythmically and harmonically improvisational without concern about the lyric. Especially when bebop was developing, singers found scat to be the best way to adequately engage in the performance of jazz. Scatting may be desirable because it does not taint the music with the impurity of denotation. Instead of conveying linguistic content and pointing to something outside itself, scat music, like instrumental music, is self-referential and does what it means. Through this wordlessness, commentators have written, scat singing can describe matters beyond words. Music critic Will Friedwald has written that Louis Armstrong's scatting, for example, has tapped into his own core of emotion, releasing emotions so deep, so real that they are unspeakable; his words bypass our ears and our brains and go directly for our hearts and souls. Scat singing has never been universally accepted, even by jazz enthusiasts. Writer and critic Leonard Feather offers an extreme view; he once said that scat singing, with only a couple exceptions, should be banned. He also wrote the lyrics to the jazz song Whisper Not, which Ella Fitzgerald then recorded on her 1966 Verve release of the same name. Many jazz singers, including Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Jimmy Rushing, and Dinah Washington, have avoided scat entirely. Despite these criticisms, the technique remains a powerful tool for emotional expression, allowing singers to convey feelings that words cannot capture.