There's a story, well-worn by now, that Louis Armstrong dropped his lyric sheet mid-recording of "Heebie Jeebies" in 1926 and, rather than stop, which, fair enough, is generally what most of us do when we lose our place, kept singing anyway. Except what came out wasn't words anymore. Skip-de-bay-doo, boo-doo-de-oo, doo-wah. The details have grown a little legendary with retelling, and the truth is less tidy: wordless vocal improvisation already existed before that session, and Armstrong himself had almost certainly done something like it before, singing in New Orleans and in Fate Marable's band, long before a recording engineer ever caught it on wax. What "Heebie Jeebies" did wasn't invent scat singing, but it did put it on the map, gave it a name, and a face. It was a moment the public couldn't ignore. Armstrong didn't discover fire. He just happened to be holding the first camera when someone else's fire went viral.
The idea that there's a point in a song where language runs out of road, and instead of the song stopping, something else takes over, has stuck with me ever since.
Ella Fitzgerald later made scat into a deliberate art form with extended solos, minutes long, shaped by melody, rhythm, quotation, and a kind of control Armstrong's spontaneous version never needed to have. His improvisation, dropped sheet or not, drew on something he already knew how to do: using his voice as an instrument rather than a narrator. It's the difference between someone who trips into a perfect one-liner at a party and someone who's been quietly workshopping their material for years. Both are impressive. Only one of them can do it again on command.
I think that's the real trick of scat. It refuses to choose between singing and playing. A singer with words is telling you something. An instrumentalist is doing something closer to gesture: quotation, rhythm, call and response, a whole vocabulary that isn't lexical but is still very much a language, just not one you could transcribe into a sentence. Scat singing sits in between the two. A human voice doing what a horn does: meaning something without relying on a single word to carry it.
There's a version of this in books too, though it took me longer to see it. Gertrude Stein's most famous line is usually shortened to "a rose is a rose is a rose," but she first wrote it in 1913, in Sacred Emily, as "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" (the first Rose a name, a person, before the sentence loops back into the flower), presumably to the eternal confusion of anyone named Rose at that particular party. Stein later wrote that in that line, she felt the rose was red again, for the first time in a hundred years of English poetry. She wasn't claiming the word had stopped meaning anything. She was doing something closer to what Armstrong did - using repetition and sound to wear a word back down past habit, until you actually notice it again instead of just reading past it.
Neither of them made meaning disappear. Scat still communicates constantly through rhythm, phrasing, notes and melody dropped into the middle of a solo. What both Armstrong and Stein found, in their own mediums, was a way to stop using language purely for information and start using it for feeling instead. NOT meaninglessness. A different kind of meaning, one that doesn't run through a dictionary to get to you.
That's why the story of the dropped lyric sheet has survived a hundred years, even in its slightly exaggerated form. Not because a man ran out of words. Because, in that gap where the words should have been, something else got through anyway. And because "he improvised brilliantly, drawing on years of prior vocal practice" was never going to make as good a story around a campfire.
If you're the sort of person who's still thinking about this an hour later, you're the sort of person who'll enjoy wandering our shelves. We restock often, and we never mind if you leave with more than you came for.
P.S. Write to me and tell me the nonsense word your family still uses that nobody outside your house would understand (or your favourite nonsense word or phrase from literature).
We might run the best ones next week.