If you want to read a cute story the closes the musical and cultural gap between Louis Armstrong and a little girl, this is the one. It was so playful and fun to read as I was able to sing-along with the words. This would be fun to include a music classroom, but also appropriate for a history class, personal home library, or general reading. I loved the little biography about Louis Armstrong at the end as well, though the focus of the story was on him teaching the little girl how to scat. ( )

One of my favorite recent library loans. This book is wonderful all the way through. The snap and pop of the words and the illustrations makes this a great read.

After finishing the book my daughter and I surfed YouTube for videos of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, and Sara Vaughn. We tried our own hand at scatting all weekend long.

We will be looking to add a copy of this to our personal library. ( )

This story is a rare find for young children and adults alike. It tells of a little girl who is exposed to the scat music of Louis Armstrong by her mother. The illustrations depict a young girl and her mother dancing and jumping to the music. That night she dreams of scat music and makes her own scat music about bubble gum. The scat sounds are written around the illustrations, encouraging young readers to make the sounds the girl creates. At the end of the book, it gives a brief biography of Louis Armstrong. It also explains what scat music is and how it works to create sounds in music. It also gives examples of other people in music who are known for their success with this technique.
Library Implications: This story is a great tie to books and music. It allows the librarian to use technology to introduce children to video and sound recordings of people such as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Torme. It could be used with the story Bud, Not Buddy (Christopher Pual Curtis, 1999) to discuss the impact of African-American musicians had on American culture. For beginning readers, connections could be made between the scat sounds and phonetics. Sounds could be sung and then spelled phonetically on the page, connecting sound and print in a meaningful way. The book also gives young readers a rare opportunity to play with the sound of the language seen on the page. ( )