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YouTube Gold: Caldonia

Louis Jordan is mostly overlooked now, but he was a huge star in the 1930s and 40s, with great songs like Choo Choo Ch’ Boogie, Texas and Pacific and Azure Te.

Although he developed a comedic style on stage and in shorties (sort an early form of music videos), he was an incredibly talented singer who could keep pace with the great Ella Fitzgerald, which not many people could do. In songs like Ain’t Nobody’s Business But My Own or Baby It’s Cold Outside, he matches her step for step.

And he never lost his gift: relatively late in life he did a cover of Mac Davis’s song I Believe In Music which was phenomenal.