In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I want to share a song featuring Louis Armstrong today I just recently discovered when it was played on my local Jazz station, KBEM Jazz88.

Here is some information I found researching The Real Ambassadors and this song in particular.

The Real Ambassadors is a jazz musical developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Dave and Iola Brubeck, in collaboration with Louis Armstrong and his band. It addressed the Civil Rights Movement, the music business, America’s place in the world during the Cold War, the nature of God, and a number of other themes.

It was set in a fictional African nation called Talgalla, and its central character was based on Armstrong and his time as a jazz ambassador. It was the first major large-scale musical collaboration between Dave and Iola Brubeck and served as a template for their future musical

Iola Brubeck, who wrote the lyrics for this song and the others in the musical, intended for some of her lyrics to be light and humorous in their presentation (believing that some messages would be better received if presented in a satirical manner). Louis Armstrong, however, saw this performance as an opportunity for him to address many of the racial issues he had struggled with for his entire career.

The studio recording was finished in just one take, and everyone in the studio was “crying their eyes out” by the end of the performance.

Later, at the live performance of The Real Ambassadors with Armstrong at the 1962 Monterey Jazz Festival, Lambert, Hendricks, and Bavan put sackcloths and hoods over their heads (which they lifted before singing) just before beginning “They Say I Look Like God.” The performance was not filmed, and Brubeck always regretted not having had the cash on hand to pay the festival’s $750 fee to record the performance, stating that it was a “terrible goof” that the live performance wasn’t filmed.