He could take a dirge and make it into an ode to joy, transform the despair of “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” into, in the words of Ralph Ellison, “a beam of lyrical sound.”9 As early as his March 1929 recording of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” Armstrong was already demonstrating his sure instinct for deconstructing the vocal line, departing radically from the melody, and singing far behind the beat in a performance that ranks among the finest early ballad recordings in the jazz idiom.
