I never met a man who wore genius with as light a touch as Louis Armstrong. It’s impossible to imagine him without that broad, almost blinding smile he was known for—the sheer, clear pleasure he took in playing and singing and being onstage.
Louis was the grandson of slaves, and had grown up in a neighborhood so tough it was known as “the Battlefield.” Today the international airport of his hometown is Louis Armstrong International because his name (and nickname, Satchmo) is still celebrated around the world as an example of American genius.
Louis Armstrong invented jazz as much as the Wright brothers invented the airplane—in other words, although hundreds of other worthy people made important contributions to America’s defining music, Louis was the one who made it soar.
I once painted a portrait of Louis Armstrong while we were both in London and gave it to him. He brought it back home and hung it in his study in Sunnyside, Queens, where he lived. Louis would tell visitors, “Here’s a painting a guy who lives in my neighborhood did of me.”
Louis had a life made for the blues, and turned it into jazz. When Louis was just a baby, his father left the family. For years thereafter, he’d only get a glimpse of the man he was told was his father when he played music in New Orleans parades. His mother, Mary, worked as a prostitute in Storyville, a red-light district of New Orleans where the trade was tolerated. To help support his mother and sister, young Louis worked a series of hard jobs, such as hauling coal to homes, before he was even a teenager. But the brothels of Storyville were overflowing with music, and Louis joined other boys in the neighborhood who sang for money.
How did the greatest trumpet player alive first play the horn?
William Gary “Bunk” Johnson, a great trumpet player, claimed to have first shown young Louis how to play by ear at a place called Dago Tony’s. But Bunk, who had career resurgence in the 1940s, was famed for his storytelling. Louis always credited the great (and much more famous) Joe “King” Oliver, who was certainly his mentor. But then Louis, bless him, was famed for his storytelling, too. For years he told interviewers that he had been born on the Fourth of July; baptism records later revealed he was really born on August 4, 1901. To which I say, the day Louis Armstrong was born ought to be a national holiday in any case, so I’d go with July 4—and King Oliver—too.
There was also a Jewish family, the Karnofskys, with a junk-hauling business in the neighborhood, who gave Louis odd jobs to do for money and, more important, clothes and meals in their home. They became a kind of family for Louis, not replacing his mother, but becoming a part of his life, too. Louis wore a Jewish star all of his adult life, in tribute to the family he had been part of. He liked to remind people that Jews had not had an easy time of it in most of New Orleans, either.
Louis was spirited, creative, rambunctious, and ambitious. Sometimes his rambunctiousness (he fired a pistol into the air on one of the city’s many holidays) got him sent to the New Orleans Home for Colored Waifs. There, a wonderful musician, Professor Peter Davis, who came to the school several times a week, showed young Louis some of the technical skills, including reading music, which polished his creative genius. Louis became the bandleader of the home’s orchestra, and featured cornet player, as they played in parades and other gigs.
By the time he was fourteen, Louis Armstrong was playing aboard riverboats and in bands with Bunk Johnson and his idol, King Oliver. King took off for Chicago when Louis was nineteen, and left him in charge of what was left of his band. Three years later, the King asked him to come north. Chicago had the most vibrant jazz scene in the country then, and Louis’s days of taking odd jobs to make ends meet were over. In fact, he quickly became pretty rich.
“It was the first time I lived in my own apartment,” he once told me, “with my own bathtub, my own bathroom.”
By the time I met Louis Armstrong, he was in his late forties and had been the face of jazz for a generation. He had also become known as Satchmo and Pops, beloved nicknames that had been given to him for his wise, folky observations, like, “You blows who you is,” and, “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know,” and, “If they act too hip, they play like shit.”
(One version of how he got the nickname Satchmo comes from a story he told, that when he used to dance for pennies on the streets of New Orleans, he had to scoop up pennies from the street before older boys could steal them, and became known as Satchelmouth. At other times he said the name came from his wide, warm grin. But I’m not sure even Louis knew. Or if he did, that he’d tell us.)
He had also made scores for recordings and films, been on the cover of Time, been a worldwide ambassador of jazz for the United States, and received a golden trumpet from King George V.
Louis Armstrong essentially created the role of soloist in jazz. His trumpet artistry and ingenuity were so distinctive, they couldn’t be contained. Great classical players would hear Louis play and ask, “How does he do that?” But in creating that role for the horn, he also carved out a place for the individual voice of the singer in jazz. He took some of the most popular songs of the day, ran them through his genius, and turned them into something totally different. “Never do it the same way twice,” Louis always said.
And of course . . . what a voice Louis Armstrong had! It was gravelly and raspy, but also revealing and expressive. Louis told me once he had begun singing a verse or two in a song to save wear and tear on his mouth and lips from blowing the horn; then people began to ask him to sing. His singing became inseparable from the rest of his artistry.
Think of George Douglas and George David Weiss’s great song “What a Wonderful World.” We’ve all recorded it. But in your mind, do you hear anyone but Louis Armstrong singing it? ABC Records didn’t like it and didn’t promote it when it came out in 1967. But then it zoomed to the top of the charts in Britain, got more play in the United States, and zipped to the top here, too. What you hear in Louis’s singular rendition is the voice of a man who was born into hard times but made a joyful life. When he sings, “What a wonderful world!” you believe it.
Louis was a good friend of my pal Bobby Hackett, the great horn player who also lived in Queens. They’d spend hours listening to classical music together. When they came over to my house once, Louis said, “I’m the coffee, Bobby’s the cream.” His gift for expression was always on.
Louis’s smiles were sincere. But he had also learned, a long time before, how the light he could shine on others with his talent and zest could shield him from some of the hurts of the outside world.
In the 1960s, some young black activists criticized Louis. They considered his ceaseless grin to be a kind of shucking and jiving for whites. But where were they in 1957, when Louis refused to go on a State Department tour to perform in the Soviet Union because he felt that President Eisenhower and the federal government were not coming to the aid of the nine black students who had been enrolled at Little Rock Central High School?
“The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” Louis told reporters. “It’s getting so bad, a colored man hasn’t got any country.” And by the end of the month, President Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne Division to protect the black students and their place in the school. When pundits said that public opinion had forced Ike to send in troops, I couldn’t think of a more powerful opinion than Louis Armstrong’s. His warmth and smiles were utterly sincere. But so was his rare, righteous anger.
I think what I learned most from Louis is how, by taking joy in your work, you can give joy to others. So many performers somehow behave as if their talent were some kind of a burden or a chore, from which they can never take a rest. Louis Armstrong’s enthusiasm for using and sharpening the talent he had to entertain others was unquenchable and, for those of us blessed to know him, almost contagious. Louis’ memory reminds us to make the most of what we are given while we can, and to spread it generously.
New York