Within the first pages of the 1952 novel Invisible Man Ralph Ellison's narrator relates Louis Armstrong's music to his own desires and self-conceptions. ''I'd like,'' the narrator writes, ''to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing 'What Did I Do To Be So Black and Blue' – all at the same time''. When Armstrong recorded the show tune by Andy Razaf and Fats Waller from the Broadway revue Hot Chocolates in 1929 he edited the lyrics to shift a dark-skinned female lover's lament over intra-racial color discrimination (the song's place within the plot of the musical Chocolate Dandies) toward a more general lament about racism. Ellison's narrator considers the lyrics but focuses more intently on the specifics of Armstrong's tone and phrasing. Ellison's seemingly central metaphor of invisibility takes on an aural dimension when he attends to Armstrong's ''lyrical beam'' and rhythmic mastery at creating a ''slightly different sense of time.'' The literary translation and transposition of Armstrong's mastery of swing rhythm opens a window onto the intellectual landscape where the author intertwined his musical and social thought.