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Wonderful world of the whites6/12/2023 Listen to the best of Louis Armstrong on Spotify or Apple Music. “All I’m saying is, see what a wonderful world it would be, if only we’d give it a chance.” “It seems to me, it ain’t the world that’s so bad, but what we’re doing to it,” he said on the intro to his 1970 version of the song. Hank Williams III appears in The Wild & Wonderful Whites of West Virginia in commentary scenes, as well as in music performances with Jesco White shot outside of Hank Jr’s cabin. For Armstrong, it told a story of possibility. Since then, a diverse array of cover versions – from Tony Bennett to Joey Ramone and Celine Dion to the Flaming Lips – have helped to cement “What A Wonderful World”’s iconic status.ĭecades after its original release, Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World” continues to inspire through its timeless message of love, peace, and harmony. Eleven years later, it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Then in 1988, the song was back in the charts when its appearance on the soundtrack to the hit movie Good Morning Vietnam brought it to the attention of a new generation of listeners. 1 both in the UK, where it sold 600,000 copies during a 29-week chart run, and Austria.Īrmstrong re-recorded “What A Wonderful World” in 1970, a year before his death, adding a spoken intro. Though it flopped in Armstrong’s home country, in other places around the world, especially in Europe, “What A Wonderful World” was hugely successful it reached No. Thiele ended up locking him out, but Newton got his revenge by refusing to promote the single when it was released in America. Larry Newton had come to Vegas to get some promotional photographs of the singer/trumpeter and, when he found out about the recording session, he tried to shut it down. His vocals were cut live with an orchestra, but the session didn’t go smoothly: two takes were aborted after loud whistles from passing freight trains were picked up by the studio microphones.īut that wasn’t the only problem confronting Armstrong. ![]() Despite Newton’s protests, Armstrong secretly began recording the song in Las Vegas immediately after a show there in September 1967. In his 2005 book, What A Wonderful World: A Lifetime Of Recordings, Thiele said that the song was intended as a reassuring antidote to the mounting problems facing America in the late 60s a time defined by what he described as “the deepening national traumas of the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, racial strife, and turmoil everywhere.” The recordingĪfter hearing Thiele’s demo tape of “What A Wonderful World,” Armstrong was keen to record the tune but Larry Newton, the president of ABC, purportedly hated it and vetoed the idea. ![]() “What A Wonderful World” was written in 1967 by George David Weiss together with George Douglas, an alias for Bob Thiele, Armstrong’s producer at ABC Records.
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