Louis Armstrong takes a slow walk through ordinary things. Green trees and red roses. Blue sky and white clouds. A rainbow, and the faces of people passing under it. Friends shaking hands. Babies crying, then growing up. Each verse lands in the same place. He thinks to himself that the world is wonderful.
The song is a catalog of gifts. It is also a sentence with no one on the other end of it. Armstrong sees and admires, and then he speaks the verdict inward. The wonder is real. It is generous. It goes out looking for someone to receive it and comes back to the singer's own mind.
Two of its words lean further than the rest. He calls the day blessed and the night sacred. Those words point past the thing itself. A blessed day implies someone who blessed it. A sacred night implies someone who set it apart. The song picks up both words, sets them down, and goes on thinking to itself.
The Song and the Singer
Armstrong did not write it. Producer Bob Thiele, credited under the pen name George Douglas, wrote it with George David Weiss. Thiele later said they wrote it against the "deepening national traumas" of the mid-1960s: the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, racial strife (Wikipedia). They wrote it for Armstrong in particular, because of how he drew people of every color into the same room.
Armstrong recorded it in Las Vegas on August 16, 1967, after his midnight show. That was a few weeks after Newark and Detroit burned. The head of his new label, Larry Newton, came by for a photograph. He wanted another "Hello, Dolly!" When he heard the slow tempo he tried to stop the session, and he ended up locked outside the studio (Wikipedia). He refused to promote the record. It sold fewer than a thousand copies in America. In Britain it went to number one in April 1968. Americans mostly met it twenty years later, when Good Morning, Vietnam put it over footage of war.
Listen to what Newton heard. The take began around two in the morning (Pop History Dig). Armstrong was 66. Thiele set that gravel voice inside slow strings and soft horns, and there is no trumpet solo. The summer of 1967 belonged to Sgt. Pepper and "Light My Fire." Beside them the record sounds a generation older than it is. Nothing in it announces the year. It plays like a man thinking out loud in a quiet room, which is exactly what the lyric is.
Armstrong said the song took him home to his block in Corona, Queens, where he and his wife Lucille had lived since their marriage (Louis Armstrong House Museum). The roses and the handshakes were his neighbors'.
In 1970, a year before he died, he recorded it again with a spoken introduction. Young people had asked him how he could call the world wonderful with wars all over the place and hunger besides. His answer was that the trouble lay less in the world than in "what we're doin' to it" (History Hit). Then he named love as the secret.
That answer matters for what follows. Armstrong was no naïf. He was born poor in New Orleans and sang through Jim Crow. He knew the world was damaged. He chose to praise it anyway. What the song never settles is whom the praise is for.
The Same Catalog, Addressed
Psalm 104 walks the same ground Armstrong walks. It starts with the sky. God "stretchest out the heavens like a curtain" and "maketh the clouds his chariot" (Psalm 104:2–3). It moves to the trees. "The trees of the LORD are full of sap; the cedars of Lebanon, which he hath planted" (Psalm 104:16). It even keeps Armstrong's hours. "He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going down. Thou makest darkness, and it is night" (Psalm 104:19–20). Then people come out into the morning. "Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening" (Psalm 104:23).
The inventory could almost be traded line for line with the song. The grammar could not. Armstrong's verbs are I see and I think. The psalmist's verbs belong to someone else. Thou coverest. Thou makest. Thou openest thine hand. Thou sendest forth thy spirit.
Every creature in the psalm faces the same direction. "These wait all upon thee; that thou mayest give them their meat in due season. That thou givest them they gather: thou openest thine hand, they are filled with good" (Psalm 104:27–28). Armstrong's world is admired. The psalmist's world is fed, and it knows whose hand is open.
At the center of the psalm comes the line that matches Armstrong's refrain. "O LORD, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches" (Psalm 104:24). It is the same exclamation. What a wonderful world. The psalmist says it to a face.
The psalm also knows what Armstrong told the young people in 1970. It ends with a hard verse: "Let the sinners be consumed out of the earth, and let the wicked be no more" (Psalm 104:35). The writer has seen what we are doing to it. He does not let that cancel the catalog. He holds both, the way Armstrong did, and he brings both to God.
Where Are the Nine?
Ten lepers met Jesus at the edge of a village. They stood far off and shouted for mercy. He told them to go show themselves to the priests, "and it came to pass, that, as they went, they were cleansed" (Luke 17:14).
All ten were healed. All ten could feel it. Skin that had been dying was whole. Each of them, walking down that road, could have said what a wonderful world it was. Nine of them kept walking.
One turned back. He was a Samaritan, an outsider. He "with a loud voice glorified God, And fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks" (Luke 17:15–16). Jesus asked a question that has never been answered. "Were there not ten cleansed? but where are the nine?" (Luke 17:17).
The nine were doing what they had been told. They were on their way to the priests. Nothing in the story calls them wicked. They received the gift and went on with their day. That is the whole of their failure, and it is the common one. Wonder that never turns around.
Paul names the same pattern on a larger scale. Creation itself shows God's "eternal power and Godhead," and still men "glorified him not as God, neither were thankful" (Romans 1:20–21). Notice the order. The thanklessness comes first. The confusion follows.
James gives the address the song leaves blank. "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning" (James 1:17). The Father of lights made the blessed day and the sacred night. He does not change with them. The gift has a sender. The sender has a name.
None of this is a charge against Armstrong. His song is far closer to the Samaritan than to the nine. He stopped on the road and looked, and he said aloud that it was good. He simply ended the sentence one word early.
O My Soul
Psalm 104 opens and closes with the same line. "Bless the LORD, O my soul" (Psalm 104:1, 35). The psalmist is talking to himself. On that point he and Armstrong stand in the same spot. Both men look hard at the world and then speak inward.
What they say inward differs. Armstrong hands himself a verdict. The world is wonderful. The psalmist hands himself an errand. Go and bless the LORD. The first sentence stays home. The second one sends the soul out the door.
Near the end the psalmist describes his own thinking. "My meditation of him shall be sweet: I will be glad in the LORD" (Psalm 104:34). Meditation is thinking to yourself. He keeps the habit Armstrong sings about. He gives it someone to rest on.
The song closes on the babies. They will learn far more than the singer will ever know. Scripture says what they learn first. "Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength" (Psalm 8:2). Jesus quoted that verse in the temple, when children were shouting hosanna and the chief priests wanted them quiet. "Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise" (Matthew 21:16). The children knew whom to thank before they knew much of anything else.
Armstrong was right about the trees and the night. He was also right that the trouble is mostly what we do to the place. The psalmist saw all of it too, and thought to himself, the same as Armstrong. Then he told his own soul to say thank you, and he said it to God.