Every year at this season I honour the birthday, on August 4, 1901, of a personal hero of mine. His origins were unpromising. He was born Black in a racist society, in an urban neighbourhood justifiably called the Battlefield, to a 16-year-old sex-trade worker and washerwoman, and a father who abandoned them after impregnating her with a second child. He left school in Grade Six, and at 11 was arrested for firing a gun with blanks on New Year’s Eve, and sentenced to the New Orleans Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys, where he served two years.
From these humble beginnings rose a man whom the music critic Gary Giddens has seriously compared to Dante, Shakespeare and Bach; whom the great jazz and classical trumpet player Wynton Marsalis calls, uncategorically, “the greatest musician in the world”; and of whom the singer Tony Bennett said, “You judge a country by what it gives to the world. And what America gave to the world was Louis Armstrong.”
Armstrong revolutionized trumpet playing and jazz singing. He played so loud and high that other musicians would examine his trumpet for technological gimmicks. (There weren’t any. It was him.) The jazz solo, with each musician taking a turn playing a verse or chorus, is such a staple of the form that it seems to have been there from the beginning. It wasn’t. Armstrong invented it.
As a singer, he was famous for the gravelly quality of his voice (though there are some beautiful recordings, such as “West End Blues,” where he sings without it). Other jazz singers would catch cold deliberately, to sound like him. And experts say you can hear Armstrong’s influential phrasings in the singing of Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Tony Bennett, and dozens of others.
He was also the first to record scat singing, in which the singer improvises without lyrics: you can hear the moment when he did it, on the song “Heebie Jeebies.” While recording, Armstrong accidentally dropped the lyric sheet on the floor. If he reached down to get it, he would go out of microphone range. If he stopped, they’d have to start over, which was expensive. So he made up his own nonsense syllables (as they sometimes did in rehearsal), they put out the recording, and scat singing became famous.
He invented language. He originated the ‘50s slang terms “cats,” meaning men, and “chops,” meaning technical skill. And he was famous for his own nicknames for himself: “Satch,” “Satchmo,” “Dippermouth,” “Gates,” “Pops,” etc.
He was a funny, amiable, and hugely popular onstage presence. By the 1950s he was a living American icon and cultural ambassador. In 1964, his cover of “Hello, Dolly” went to Number 1 and stayed on the Hit Parade for 22 weeks. He was, at 62, the oldest person ever to have a Number 1 hit, and it knocked The Beatles off that position, which they had occupied for 14 consecutive weeks. (He said, “I like The Beatles. They got that beat!”) He won two Grammys and was posthumously inducted into the National Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame.
He had his personal flaws. He was a serial adulterer and womanizer: he married three times, and appears to have cheated on all three wives. (He once wrote an article for Ebony Magazine called “Why I Like Dark Women.”) He was obsessed with his bowels, and seemed not to understand that we don’t discuss such matters in polite society: he once handed out packets of his favourite laxative to highly-amused members of the British Royal Family, while Tony Bennett sat by, mortified. He was also addicted to marijuana, and got high almost every day of his adult life.
His record on racial politics is mixed. On the one hand, he cheerfully indulged in some appalling racial stereotypes. On the other, he displayed attitudes ahead of his time. His bass player, Arvell Shaw, said, “In those days, if one Black man called another man ‘Black,’ that was fightin’ words, you know. But Louis, he was the first man I heard say, ‘You Black. Be proud of it.’ […] He was saying that when it was so very unpopular, you know.”
During the desegregation of southern public schools in 1957, Armstrong wrote an open letter to President Eisenhower, inviting him to come to Little Rock and walk with him alongside the Black children who were daring to enter the school. The White House declined to respond, and such other celebrities as Sammy Davis, Jr. criticized him for rushing the process.
My favourite story involving Armstrong is about a white boy named Charlie Black, who grew up in Texas in the 1920s, believing that coloured people were all very well in their place, which was in service to white people. Then, in 1931, at age 16, Charlie attended a Friday night dance at Austin’s Hotel Driscoll, featuring a “Negro orchestra.” As Charlie and his buddies entered the ballroom, there were the musicians, and in front of them a young man playing the trumpet.
Black later recalled: “He played mostly with his eyes closed, letting flow from that inner space of music things that had never before existed. […] Steamwhistle power, lyric grace, alternated at will, even blended. He was the first genius I had ever seen. […] It is impossible to overstate the significance of a sixteen-year-old southern boy’s seeing genius, for the first time, in a Black person.” The trumpeter “opened my eyes wide and put to me a choice. Blacks, the saying went, were ‘all right in their place.’ [But] what was the ‘place’ of such a man, and of the people from which he sprang?”
In 1954, Charlie Black, by then Prof. Charles L. Black Jr., a distinguished teacher of constitutional law, volunteered for the team of lawyers, Black and white, who persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court that the racial segregation of schoolchildren was unconstitutional. And he always said he did it because, at 16, he heard Louis Armstrong play the trumpet.