Fee Diddly doo wop skiddly skiddly dow wee.  Scat singing is an art form where the performer uses hir voice. We as a musical instrument without recourse to intelligible lyrics. They often use it to test a tune out before entrusting it to a musical instrumen. It is the use of the human voice as an instrument in its purest form. Satchmo Louis Armstrong was a past master at this from 1927 on. Bobby McFerrin is a modern exponent of this practice. Cab  Callaway did it. Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald did it. I read somewhere that it dates from a time when black folks were either slaves or share-croppers, and either weren’t allowed to own instruments because slaves weren’t allowed to own anything, or they were so busy working in the fields that they couldn’t stop long enough to play an instrument, since even a blues harp requires the hands to hold it in front of one’s mouth, as the holder had not yet been invented that Bob Dylan is so famous for using.  It’s become a fixture in jazz, which is so dependent on improvisation within certain structures. It seems as though all the jazz greats did scat singing. When something is that old an ubiquitous, it attains the status of a tradition.

What, you may ask, has scat singing got to do with the art of the novel?  To be frank, I don’t know, Except that novel writing, like scat singing, employs improvisation within a set group of rules or principles. One learns these rules through experience. In the case of the scat singers, it was growing up with the art form being practiced around them. In my case, it was going to school and studying novels. Then, when I found a publisher, it was going through succeeding layers of editing before coming up with the finished product and having it published.  

The next job is promotion.  Here too am I learning my way around the various rules of the groups to which I belong. It's a steep learning curve, for me anyway, since like most writers, I am an introvert and do not have the sales type personality. When I started to write this blog, my mind was blank. I knew I wanted to write something, but had no idea what.  Then a friend suggested that I just write whatever came to mind, hence the paragraph on scat singing. In my ugly notebook, I often start out, by way of warming up, with the written form of scat singing. I put nonsense syllables down by way of warming up my writing muscles.

My ninth book just came out.  It is Love on the Other Side of the Sun II: The Book of Invasions.  All right, I confess that I stole the subtitle. It is the English translation of a book written by a cleric on the mythical history of Ireland. I am not the only one to steal that title.  It is also the title of an album by a group named Horslips. But my book is the story of two invasions by inimical forces on Nibiru. The husbands of the three main characters/ heroines are separated from them and sent to work camps. Will they ever be united with their beloved wives and children again? The e-book is  for sale at Amazon.com. Download a copy, why don't you?