Louis Armstrong

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Louis Armstrong borrowed his stepfather's gun without permission on the 31st of December 1912, fired a blank into the air, and spent the night at New Orleans Juvenile Court. The next day a judge sent the boy to the Colored Waif's Home, where mattresses were absent and meals were often little more than bread and molasses. It was the kind of detail that should have ended a story before it began. Instead, inside that spartan home, a man named Peter Davis put a cornet in his hands. How does a child arrested for firing a blank become the figure Bing Crosby would call the beginning and the end of music in America? How does a boy from a rough Rampart Street neighborhood called The Battlefield end up wearing a Star of David, meeting two popes, and having an asteroid named for him? Armstrong was born in New Orleans, most likely on the 4th of August 1901, though he himself often claimed the 4th of July 1900. The man kept secrets, told tales, and signed his letters "Red beans and ricely yours." This is the story of how he remade the sound of a century.

• 2. The Karnoffsky Gift

  ›

  Morris Karnoffsky gave Louis Armstrong an advance toward purchasing a cornet from a pawn shop. The Karnoffskys were a family of Lithuanian Jews, and the young Armstrong worked for them collecting rags and bones and delivering coal alongside their sons Morris and Alex. They fed him, knowing he lived without a father, and they nurtured him. Armstrong's first musical performance may have come at the side of their junk wagon. He tried playing a tin horn to attract customers and set them apart from other hawkers on the street.

  In 1907, the year a seven-year-old Armstrong sang "Russian Lullaby" with the family when their baby son David was put to bed, he learned to sing, in his own words, "from the heart." The detail carries a strange wrinkle. The lyrics Armstrong later quoted match the "Russian Lullaby" that Irving Berlin copyrighted in 1927, about twenty years after the child remembered singing it. His doctor at Beth Israel Hospital, Gary Zucker, had shared Berlin's lyrics with him in 1969, and Armstrong folded them into a memoir written more than sixty years after the events.

  That 1969 memoir, written while Armstrong recovered from heart and kidney problems, was titled Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, LA., the Year of 1907. In it he described seeing the family discriminated against by other white people who felt themselves better than Jews. "I was only seven years old," he wrote, "but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the white folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for." From them he learned, he said, "how to live, real life and determination." His Jewish manager Joe Glaser later gave him a Star of David, which Armstrong wore until the end of his life in memory of the family who raised him.

• 3. Riverboat University

  ›

  Fate Marable toured the Mississippi River on the steamboat Sidney with the Streckfus Steamers line, and aboard that boat Armstrong got an education. Marable was proud of his young player's musical knowledge and insisted that Armstrong and the other musicians learn sight reading. Armstrong called his time with Marable "going to the University," because it gave him a wider experience working with written arrangements. By the age of twenty, he could read music.

  In 1918, King Oliver decided to go north and resigned his seat in Kid Ory's band. Armstrong replaced him, and he also became the second trumpet for the Tuxedo Brass Band. His musicianship matured fast on these brass bands and riverboats of the late 1910s. Armstrong became one of the first jazz musicians to be featured on extended trumpet solos, injecting his own personality and style. He also started singing during his performances, a habit that would one day rival his horn.

• 4. Chicago And The Cutting Contests

  ›

  Armstrong could blow 200 high Cs in a row, and word of it spread until other musicians challenged him to cutting contests. In 1922 King Oliver invited him to Chicago to play second cornet in Oliver's Creole Jazz Band at the black-only Lincoln Gardens on the South Side. The money let Armstrong quit his day jobs. He lived in an apartment with his first private bath and began a career-long habit of writing letters to friends back in New Orleans.

  On the 5th and the 6th of April 1923, Armstrong made his first studio recordings with Oliver for Gennett Records. The band endured several hours on the train to remote Richmond, Indiana, and was paid little. The performances suffered from a lack of rehearsal, crude equipment, bad acoustics, and a cramped studio. These were true acoustic recordings, the band playing into a large funnel connected to the needle that cut the master. Armstrong played so loudly that Oliver could not be heard beside him, so Armstrong had to stand fifteen feet away in a far corner of the room.

  Lil Hardin, the band's pianist, urged Armstrong to seek more prominent billing and to develop a style apart from his mentor. She pushed him to play classical music in church concerts and to dress more stylishly to offset his girth. Her influence strained his bond with Oliver, especially over the salary and money Oliver held back from his band members. When Armstrong's mother Mayann came to visit in the summer of 1923, told that her son was out of work and sick, Hardin found and decorated an apartment for her to stay in.

• 5. The Hot Five Revolution

  ›

  "Whip That Thing, Miss Lil" and "Mr. Johnny Dodds, Aw, Do That Clarinet, Boy!" The shouts were Armstrong's, free at last to lace his records with effervescent jive. In 1925 he returned to Chicago, and Lil set up a recording session with Okeh and a gig at the Dreamland Cafe. He formed Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five, a band with Kid Ory on trombone, Johnny Dodds on clarinet, Johnny St. Cyr on banjo, Lil on piano, and usually no drummer. Over a twelve-month period starting in November 1925, the quintet produced twenty-four records.

  "Heebie Jeebies," recorded in 1926, captured Armstrong scat singing, improvised vocal jazz using nonsensical words, and he was among the first to record it. The story goes that the sheet music fell to the floor and the music began before he could retrieve the pages, so he sang nonsense syllables while Okeh President E.A. Fearn told him to keep going. Armstrong did, thinking the take would be discarded. That was the version pressed to disc, and it became an unexpected hit that made the group the most famous jazz band in the United States, even though they had seldom performed live.

  "Weather Bird," the famous 1928 duet with pianist Earl "Fatha" Hines, and Armstrong's trumpet introduction and solo on "West End Blues" remain among the most influential improvisations in jazz history. Young trumpet players across the country bought these records and memorized the solos. Before Armstrong, ensembles playing jazz simply varied a song's melodies. He was virtually the first to build significant variations on the chord harmonies instead, turning a piece of collective folk music into a soloist's art form. Banjo player Johnny St. Cyr remembered the feeling of working under him: "One felt so relaxed working with him, and he was very broad-minded... always did his best to feature each individual."

• 6. The Voice

  ›

  The RCA ribbon microphone, introduced in 1931, imparted a warmth to vocals that became part of the crooning sound, and Armstrong's recordings took full advantage of it. His gravelly, velvety lower register became an archetype that was endlessly imitated. His radical re-working of Hoagy Carmichael's "Lazy River," recorded in 1931, showed his approach to melody and phrasing. The main melody arrives through sobbing horns, punctuated by Armstrong's growling interjections at the end of each bar: "Yeah!" "Uh-huh." "Sure." "Way down, way down." By the second stanza he breaks into an almost entirely improvised melody that evolves into a passage of pure scat.

  Bing Crosby learned directly from this. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz describes Crosby easing the weight of breath on the vocal cords, passing into head voice at a low register, and singing on consonants, techniques emulated by nearly all later popular singers. Crosby copied Armstrong, evident on early recordings such as "Just One More Chance" from 1931. Crosby himself called him "the beginning and the end of music in America."

  Armstrong once told Cab Calloway that his scat style came "from the Jews rockin," an Orthodox Jewish style of chanting during prayer. Though widely recognized as a pioneer of scat singing, Armstrong was not the first to record it; Ethel Waters and others preceded him in the 1920s, according to Gary Giddins. On a later recording, while taping "I'm A Ding Dong Daddy From Dumas," Armstrong simply sang out "I done forgot the words" in the middle of the song.

• 7. Ambassador And Dissenter

  ›

  "The way they're treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell." Armstrong said it to journalism student Larry Lubenow in 1957, in a candid interview in Grand Forks, North Dakota, shortly after the conflict over school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas. He denounced Governor Orval Faubus and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, calling the President "two-faced" and saying he had "no guts." Armstrong threatened to cancel a planned tour of the Soviet Union for the State Department, refusing to represent a government in conflict with its own people. The FBI kept a file on him for it.

  The outburst was startling because Armstrong generally remained politically neutral, which sometimes alienated black Americans who wanted him outspoken during the civil rights movement. His stand drew both praise and backlash. Jackie Robinson and Lena Horne publicly supported him, while a Mississippi radio station banned his records. When his road manager Pierre Tallerie tried to walk back the comments, Armstrong rebuked him sharply and nearly fired him, insisting on speaking for himself.

  Under the sponsorship of the US State Department, Armstrong toured Africa, Europe, and Asia with great success, earning the nickname "Ambassador Satch" and inspiring Dave Brubeck to compose the jazz musical The Real Ambassadors. His travels carried him to Egypt, Ghana, and Nigeria, and even into part of the Communist Bloc in 1965. He could access the upper echelons of American society at a time when this was difficult for black men, a man who said he was raised a Baptist, always wore a Star of David, and was friends with the pope. He had been baptized a Catholic in New Orleans, and he met Pope Pius XII and Pope Paul VI.

• 8. Satchmo's Last Acts

  ›

  In 1964, after more than two years away from a studio, Armstrong recorded his biggest-selling record, "Hello, Dolly!", a Jerry Herman song first sung by Carol Channing. His version stayed on the Hot 100 for 22 weeks, longer than any other record that year, and went to number one. It made him the oldest person to top the chart, at 62 years, nine months, and five days, and it knocked The Beatles from a number one position they had held for 14 consecutive weeks.

  The trumpet was punishing his body even as the hits came. Armstrong's aggressive style and preference for narrow mouthpieces dug into the soft flesh of his inner lip. On his 1930s European tour he suffered an ulceration so severe that he had to stop playing for a year. He took to using salves and creams, and to cutting off scar tissue with a razor blade. By the 1950s he was an official spokesman for Ansatz-Creme Lip Salve.

  Against his doctor's advice, Armstrong played a two-week engagement in March 1971 at the Waldorf-Astoria's Empire Room, and at the end of it he was hospitalized for a heart attack. Released in May, he quickly resumed practicing his trumpet, still hoping to get back on the road. He died of a heart attack in his sleep on the 6th of July 1971 at his home in Corona, Queens, and was interred in Flushing Cemetery. His honorary pallbearers included Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, and Frank Sinatra, while Peggy Lee sang "The Lord's Prayer" at the services. His recording of "Melancholy Blues" rode the Voyager Golden Record into space, a sample of the sights and sounds of Earth, carrying that gravelly voice past the planet that made it.