IN THE MIDDLE of a tour of sixty one-nighters, Louis Armstrong and the All Stars pulled up to the Chilhowee Park Administration Building in Knoxville, Tennessee, on February 19, 1957. Just another gig—or so they thought. The audience was segregated: two thousand whites and one thousand blacks. But it is possible that amidst the routine and rigors of the tour Armstrong didn’t even notice at first. He was putting on his typically entertaining show—performing his big hits, including his newest, “Mack the Knife”—when, in the middle of “Back o’ Town Blues,” he and everyone else heard and felt an explosion. A stick of dynamite had been thrown from a passing car over a ten-foot fence toward the auditorium, creating a four-foot hole two hundred feet away from where Armstrong was playing. The New York Post reported, “Police Lt. Ross Sims, cruising in a squad car two miles away, said he felt the blast. A woman who lives a half mile from the scene said the force was great enough to cause a headache.”1 Armstrong responded by joking with the audience, “That’s all right, folks, it’s just the phone.” A few people got up and went outside to see what the trouble was, but Armstrong continued to play. “Man, I’ll play anywhere they’ll listen,” Armstrong said after the show, unaffected.2 The White Citizens’ Council in Knoxville was blamed, as it had recently protested the use of the Chilhowee Park Administration Building for concerts attended by both races, even if segregated. Armstrong was unfazed by the possible racial motivation: “Man, the horn don’t know anything about it.” He went on touring the South, but deep down a bitterness was seething.
Soon after, journalist David Halberstam spent a few days with the band to get a sense of what it was like to tour with Armstrong. Halberstam wrote kind words about all the All Stars, “but it was Armstrong himself who surprised me. I had gone to Atlanta half prepared to write a twilight-of-career piece about him. It’s perfectly true that he paces himself carefully, but the essence of the trumpet is all there, still able to touch a man in almost any mood; and the voice, deep and gravelly, is still expressive, light and flirtatious or deep and sentimental.”3
Halberstam quoted Trummy Young: “He still projects something special … I get a spark playing with him that I never had with any other trumpet man. He gets the feeling for his music over, not only to the audience but to his band as well … The guy does it every night, and I think he’s got a bigger tone, a lot fuller than before.”4
Halberstam experienced firsthand the toll these one-nighters took on each member of the band. Barrett Deems told him one morning: “No damn sleep. No sleep the night before, none last night, and none tomorrow. At least we spent the night in Atlanta.” Armstrong, though, was the iron man. He was frequently up until four-thirty in the morning tape-recording albums he had brought with him. “These one-nighters aren’t so bad,” he said.
You gotta take care of yourself. I play them because I love music. I can make it in New York without trouble. But I don’t mind traveling and that’s where the audiences are—in the towns and the cities—and that’s what I want, the audience. I want to hear that applause. Hell, I made money when I was a kid driving a coal cart in New Orleans, and I’ve got all I need now. But I’m a musician and I still got to blow. When I get so I can’t blow my horn the way I want, then it gets put down for good … Now don’t get the idea I’m planning to retire. Why should I when I feel the same way about sex as I did when I was a kid? No reason to. But I got to take care of myself. Don’t forget a man can blow a horn and still be a civilian.5
By now the new music on the scene had firmly taken root: rock and roll. Armstrong was, of course, expected to offer an opinion. “The music will survive, don’t worry about that,” he told Halberstam. “As long as it’s good it’ll get by, no matter what they try to do. But this rock and roll stuff they play, that’s not music. Anyone with a shrill harsh voice can do that. Don’t mean nothing. That’s why it sounds so bad—there’s nothing to it. Man’s not feelin’ when he’s singin’. Hell, there’s nothing to feel.”6 About young rock bands and their fans, Armstrong told a moving story: “Take ‘You Made Me Love You.’ They won’t play something like that. Too slow for them. They gotta have something to pop their eyes out. When we hit Savannah we played ‘I’ll Never Walk Alone’ and the whole house—all Negroes—started singing with us on their own. We ran through two choruses and they kept with us and then later they asked for it again. Most touching damn thing I ever saw. I almost started crying right there on the stage. We really hit something inside each person there.”7
Armstrong was now approaching what he believed to be his fifty-seventh birthday on July 4, 1957 (after Armstrong died, it was discovered that he had been born on August 4, 1901, not July 4, 1900, making him really a year younger). His birthday was lavishly celebrated at the Newport Jazz Festival. The All Stars and Louis arrived around five p.m., straight from a one-nighter they had played elsewhere in New England. Armstrong was told he’d have to go on at eight and would have to appear with nearly every act on the bill, including such past associates as trumpeter Red Allen, trombonists J. C. Higginbotham and Kid Ory, and even two former All Stars, Cozy Cole and Jack Teagarden. The planned finale would feature Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, and then everyone would come out for “Happy Birthday.” The whole thing might have looked good on paper, but not to Armstrong, ever the professional: “We haven’t rehearsed and I’m not going to go out there and make a fool out of myself.”8 To boot, the All Stars had been glaringly omitted from the evening’s events. This was too much for Armstrong, who reasoned, “Maybe a number [or] two [with the other acts], but I go on with my band to close the show—no other way.” Sidney Bechet, Armstrong’s old musical nemesis, was supposed to have flown in from Europe but was unable to attend. The band could now be accommodated. “We don’t do less than an hour,” Armstrong insisted. But Velma Middleton was told she wouldn’t be performing, because Ella Fitzgerald would be and one female vocalist was enough.9
The rest of the scene was keenly remembered by Dan Morgenstern, who retold the events in liner notes for Columbia’s Chicago Concert release. “Louis has had it by then; and he withdraws behind the tent flap that contains his ‘private’ area,” he wrote. “Soon Velma hears the news, and bursts into tears. Louis, who has fantastic ears, hears her crying. Suddenly he appears from the flap, wearing nothing but a handkerchief tied around his scalp. Shouts and alarums. Women shriek, grown men flinch, and everyone scatters to the winds, Louis’s curses in their ears. Like an ancient African king, he smites them with his righteous wrath.”10 Armstrong said, “I’m playing with my band and my singer and none of this other shit.”11
Critics might have enjoyed knocking Middleton’s antics onstage, but to Armstrong she was family, something George Wein might have underestimated. Speaking alone on a private tape recording at the end of 1957, Armstrong seemed to have the Newport affair still on his mind. Of Middleton he said, “You know, she’s right there with us. There ain’t gonna be no damn All Stars without her. I made that very clear to Glaser. He looked at me like I’m nuts but I said, ‘Listen, man, shit, we’re on these tours eight months out of the year and you’re sitting in the office counting money. No, but [we] work our ass off, you can’t split that. You put all the stars with us that you want. Just let them stand out there and sing, we’ll play for them. But Velma’s one of us.”12
Armstrong was supposed to be honored at a special Newport society dinner party before playing, but he didn’t show up, though Morgenstern reasons, “That it would take the place of his only chance to rest before the performance did not occur to the well-bred planners.” At the concert attended by ten thousand fans at Newport’s Freebody Park, Armstrong played with only the All Stars, turning in high-octane versions of “Mahogany Hall Stomp” and “Lazy River,” dedicating the latter to Glaser. And Middleton performed, as Armstrong had promised. Nobody messed with his All Stars. “The show goes down in style; no one not in the know senses anything wrong,” writes Morgenstern. “At the end of Louis’s set, a giant birthday cake is wheeled on stage, and Ella and Johnny Mercer sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ Louis has fine manners; he joins in, backing them up on his horn. As Ella cuts the cake, someone (perhaps the producer himself) whispers to Louis that Ory and the other musicians are waiting to come on stage with him for a jam session finale. ‘No one hangs on my coattails,’ says Louis, and intones the National Anthem, his band falling in behind him. He doesn’t taste his cake. That night, Louis Armstrong didn’t eat anything they were dishing out.”13
The next day, some critics, especially influential columnist Murray Kempton, had a field day bashing Armstrong’s behavior. “The 57-year-old master tore the patience of his hosts to shreds Friday night by turning what had been planned as a sentimental birthday party for him into a massive display of the sulks,” Kempton wrote. Later, he added: “The expectation had been that, by bringing back Ory, the friend of his earliest, and Miss Fitzgerald, the associate of his latest triumphs, Newport might inspire Armstrong to raise his sights above the well-worn grooves of the program of standard tunes—almost burlesques—he has plowed so incessantly over the last three years. Instead, he drew largely on the repertoire he used at the Roxy last month—the set he has played from Reno to Rome.”14
That evening Armstrong was decidedly not his usual, laughing, happy-go-lucky self, and Kempton did not know what to make of it. “Armstrong’s dismal performance left his hosts with their affection for him undiminished—nothing can destroy it—but recognizing that jazz’s greatest son is much more complicated than they had ever thought,” he wrote. “The old genial, simple Armstrong is gone, if he ever existed. He has been replaced by an insecure, infrequently happy man, in constant need for reassurance as to his stature, working harder in familiar paths than he needs to, reluctant to learn new things or even to revive all but the most familiar of the old, jealous of his billing and distrustful of his juniors. The mask of the clown is only a mask.”15
Kempton’s Psychology 101 diagnosis of Armstrong anticipated those of James Lincoln Collier and other misguided writers. There is no reason to assume that, ever the professional, a happy showman onstage and friendly offstage, Armstrong should have countenanced others messing with his act. He had worked hard to perfect his All Stars show and was not about to demean it, much less for something far less assured. Had he had time to rehearse the Newport program as presented to him, he might have gone ahead with it, but he did not appreciate that it was being forced on him at the last minute. While the press was merciless, those close to him were more understanding. “He kept his own counsel and nobody could turn him around,” said Lucille Armstrong.16 For his part, Jack Teagarden, who Kempton suggested was hurt by Armstrong’s behavior, was moved to comment, “Some of these people seem to be trying to crucify Pops.”17
Kempton also claimed that Armstrong “snubbed” Ella Fitzgerald, lamenting the missed opportunity to reclaim the magic of their first album together. But Fitzgerald did not seem to have felt that she was slighted, for at the end of July, just a few weeks after the Newport debacle, she and Armstrong recorded a follow-up album for Norman Granz. All of the musicians who had played on the first Armstrong-Fitzgerald collaboration—save drummer Buddy Rich, who was replaced by Louie Bellson—returned for Ella and Louis Again, which was eight tracks longer than the original. Unlike most sequels, this one lived up to the achievement of its predecessor, especially on “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” “Autumn in New York,” “Love Is Here to Stay,” and a free-wheeling version of “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” which originally had started as a rehearsal take but became such a loose, joyous performance that Granz issued it on the final album. Ella and Louis Again also featured solo tracks by the two stars. Ella’s three are above average; Armstrong’s four are classics. “Willow Weep for Me” has a solo extraordinary for the slightly burnished tone of Armstrong’s trumpet; the vocal-only “Makin’ Whoopee” is a crash course in storytelling; and Armstrong’s vocal on “I Get a Kick Out of You” swings so hard in the out chorus it challenges all other recordings of the Cole Porter standard, including Frank Sinatra’s, for greatness. Armstrong’s eight-minute-and-forty-one-second rendition of Porter’s “Let’s Do It”—his delivery a gem—might very well be the only version of the song to feature every verse Porter wrote. Full of humor, and taken at a dangerously slow tempo, “Let’s Do It” is arguably the highlight of his association with Verve—no wonder that the terrific two-CD sampler of his Verve years is titled Let’s Do It.
The first two Armstrong-and-Fitzgerald pairings on Verve were highly successful; the original Ella and Louis rose to number 11 and number 12 on the Billboard and the Cash Box charts, respectively. For their third (and sadly, final) album, recorded in August 1957, Granz broke from the format of the first two. The Peterson rhythm section was dispensed with, and in its place was Russell Garcia’s orchestra, a gigantic ensemble of horns, woodwinds, and strings. Rather than another tour through the Great American Songbook, Armstrong and Fitzgerald undertook the score of George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. “I loved both of them,” Garcia remembered in 2008. “Louis was such a wonderful, nice person. He loved everybody. Nothing could wipe that beautiful, loving smile off his face. Which is amazing considering what he must have gone through with racism when he was young. When we were recording Porgy and Bess, I ran down the orchestra part for the first tune, and Louis said in that rough voice, ‘Russ, you’re a genius. If I ever get rich I’m going to put you on salary.’ ” Garcia said that Armstrong and Fitzgerald “were a joy” to work with, but “Louis annoyed her a little bit. When she was singing a beautiful passage, he’d come in with his growling. She’d shoot him a sharp look and go on. It would throw her for a second. But it came off beautifully. Some people call that album ‘Whipped Cream and Sandpaper.’ ”18 Bassist Ray Brown, who worked on the first two Verve collaborations, agreed, saying, “If Armstrong’s voice was the male equivalent of Ella Fitzgerald’s voice and had the same range, I don’t think it would have been as much fun. I think that the big difference in their styles is what made it work. What one sings is so completely different from what the other sings.”19
The album, naturally, featured Armstrong singing the original male parts and Fitzgerald the female. Her “I Wants to Stay Here” is a masterpiece; his “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York” is a romp with an extended trumpet solo. Their duets are just as memorable, especially “Summertime” and “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” arguably their greatest performance together (exquisite “whipped cream and sandpaper” indeed!). The high point of the album, however, is “Oh Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess?,” a solo performance by Armstrong more emotionally powerful perhaps than anything he had previously recorded. In the notes to Let’s Do It, Dan Morgenstern writes, “ ‘Oh Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess?’ one of the opera’s most moving arias, is an Armstrong vocal masterpiece. In theory, it is far beyond his range, but he was a tenor in his youth, and he handles the tessitura splendidly. Or, in plain Nineties English, he sings the shit out of it. He would have made some Porgy on stage!”20 Granz said, “I think Louie’s fantastic as an artist and I thought he had a certain quality … When I finished doing something, I would go back and see Ira Gershwin, who’s a friend of mine, and Ira and I would play it and Ira was overwhelmed by the poignancy of Louie’s voice, the quality when he was singing ‘Oh Bess,’ I mean, it was to cry, it was marvelous, and I thought Louie would be fantastic for this album which he … was.”21
Porgy and Bess would not be released until 1959, so as to coincide with the motion picture produced by Samuel Goldwyn. When reviews of the album finally appeared, they were among the best of Armstrong’s career. Patrick Scott wrote, “Both have sung better before (though not together—this is a big improvement on their earlier collaborations for Verve), but seldom in recent years has either of them, especially Mr. Armstrong, sounded so interested in—or challenged by—the material at hand.” Scott added, “And on two numbers—‘A Woman Is a Sometime Thing’ and ‘There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York’—Mr. Armstrong turns in extended trumpet solos which are not only this album’s highlights but the best work he has put on record in years.”22 “Indeed, as the tracks progress, you think [Fitzgerald] is cutting Armstrong—only to turn around and believe that Armstrong is cutting her. The truth, of course, is that they are outdoing themselves,” wrote DownBeat, which gave the album five stars. “As for Armstrong … well, this is an Armstrong the younger generation has had little chance to know. Though his voice is one of the most unpromising instruments any man ever chose to work with, what he does with it here is remarkable. Like a Rubinstein saddled with a battered old upright, he overcomes his instrument by sheer force of innate musicianship, and achieves a degree of acting realism that is seldom heard this side of Frank Sinatra or some of Maria Callas’ better performances.” Armstrong was proud of the work, too. When asked in 1960 to name his favorite records, Armstrong said, “I thought that Porgy and Bess I made with Ella was a very good album.”23 During a 1968 BBC radio program, he chose “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” as one of eight records he would bring to a mythical “desert island.”
As for Fitzgerald, she recalled: “It never seemed like we were really recording, because he was always so happy. And he came in like it was nothing to it, he’s just going to have a ball. And I would always mess up because I’d be so fascinated watching him that I would—sometimes I wouldn’t come in on time on my song, you know, because he’d go through the whole motion just like he were really singing [it], you know, ‘Sing it, Ella,’ you know. And … he’d be talking and cracking and making jokes … you don’t know whether you should sing or laugh. But that’s the kind of guy he was.”24
In mid-August 1957, between the making of Ella and Louis Again and Porgy and Bess, Granz had teamed Armstrong with the big band and strings of Russell Garcia for two albums, I’ve Got the World on a String and Louis Under the Stars. Garcia’s arrangements were somewhat bland, incongruent with Armstrong’s style, unlike Gordon Jenkins’s. Armstrong does his best with the material, though when he picks up the trumpet it is clear he was going through a rough patch. Granz, however, was in no position to postpone the sessions, as Armstrong’s schedule allowed for little recording time. Granz would later say:
Normally with a trumpet player you have trouble [with] your lip well you just don’t even think of recording, but I think we did Louie, I think it was on the big band date where it was really kind of [a] drag because even the band was sympathetic to Louie. His chops just weren’t right and I would like to have canceled it completely but Louie insisted that we could do it if we did it and spaced it and gave him some breaks in between and then had him sing some solos that we might have done instrumentally. That wasn’t a problem as far as I was concerned because I enjoyed his singing equally to his playing, so, if he sang a number instead of playing it, it was okay with me and with him too.”25
Recording for Granz in Los Angeles every day and performing every night with the All Stars in Las Vegas had taken a huge toll on the trumpeter’s chops. As Garcia remembered of one of the sessions recorded after an evening of blowing, “The next morning he came in and pointed his trumpet against the wall. He tried to blow through it, but air came out from the sides of his lips. No sound. He’d keep this up, and then all of a sudden—bang, the sound would come, and his lips would be vibrating and he’d be off and doing fine.”26 The 1999 two-CD reissue of this material includes a great number of alternate takes and rehearsals, and one can hear Armstrong struggling, playing air notes here and there while cracking others. When he musters up all his strength and powers over the ensemble on “Stormy Weather,” the results are breathtaking. Though in severe pain, Armstrong was not about to concede anything.
Away from the confines of the studio, where he could take as many breaks as needed, Armstrong could not hide his lip troubles during live performances. In the midst of the Garcia sessions, he had to perform with battered lips at a major concert at the Hollywood Bowl. “Doc [Pugh] and Louis didn’t know what to do,” Ernie Anderson remembered. “The lip was in tatters. They couldn’t cancel the concert. Yet that seemed the only logical recourse. If they cancelled they’d have to call Joe Glaser in New York first. Of course Joe didn’t know Louis was having lip trouble.” Anderson called a Latin-American doctor who, though he barely spoke English, was able to realize how important his client was and how important the show was to him and wrote a prescription for hydrocortisone salve. “It was now about two o’clock in the afternoon,” Anderson recalled. “The concert was at eight. At two-thirty I had the ointment and I took it up to Louis. ‘What do I do with it?’ Louis asked. ‘Just rub it on your lip,’ I replied. Some people are just more sensitive than others. Louis began very gently to rub the salve onto his lip. ‘I feel it,’ he cried. ‘I really do feel it and it’s good stuff.’ And then he began rubbing it all over his face.” After a break for dinner, Anderson and Pugh returned to the hotel to a startling surprise: Armstrong warming up on the tune “Wyoming.” Anderson remembered, “He played a beautiful show that night and got a rave review in the Los Angeles Times.”27
Throughout the summer of 1957 Armstrong persisted with his hectic schedule, traveling the long, hard road night after night as the band continued bringing in more money than ever before. However, this led to a run-in between Armstrong and Frenchy Tallerie. According to a letter Armstrong wrote to Joe Glaser on August 25, 1957, Tallerie was taking advantage of Armstrong. “Why won’t Frenchie pay me on one niters according to the raise you gave me? It really doesn’t make sense,” Armstrong wrote. “My expenses are almost triple and … he still gives me the same ole money which is a drag. He short changed me fifty dollars per nite since we left the Sands. All the work that I did at the Hollywood Bowl. He gave me the same old money which isn’t right at all … I dig him and his way back plays huh. Am way ahead of him. Please Mr. Glaser impress on Mr. Tallerie that a raise is a raise no matter how you slice it. I won’t mention the whole thing daddy but since I am the poorest and need the morest.” In retrospect, it was humiliating for Armstrong—in the midst of such a grueling stretch—to have to fight for a fifty-dollar raise he was promised, but such were Tallerie’s underhanded ways. Armstrong didn’t blame Glaser, who was suing one of his former clients, boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, at the time. He ended the letter by writing, “Hope that everything turns out OK with you and your boy Ray Robinson. Some people fail to realize when they have the dearest friend in the world in their corner until after its too late. A big hello to Mother Glaser. An don’t let nothing drag ya daddy. You still have ole Satchmo an that’s for sure. Your Boy, Satchmo.”28
On the evening of September 17, everything came to a head: the Knoxville explosion, the Newport fiasco, the grueling one-nighters, the beat-up chops, the need to fight for extra money, as well as a lifetime of racial injustice. That day, Armstrong and the All Stars arrived in Grand Fork, North Dakota, for an evening performance. Earlier he saw on television news about the school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas. Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to prevent black children from entering the Little Rock Central High School. Armstrong watched the fearful expressions on the children’s faces, the vicious heckling of the white crowd, and footage of a white man spitting in the face of a black girl. After the reports from Little Rock, Armstrong met in his hotel room with a student reporter from the University of Arkansas, Larry Lubenow. “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” he said. “It’s getting so bad, a colored man hasn’t got any country.” The rest of the interview found Armstrong calling President Dwight Eisenhower “two-faced” and denouncing him for having “no guts” for allowing Faubus to run the country.29 Fifty years later, Lubenow told the full story of his interview to journalist David Margolick. Armstrong had called Faubus “a no-good motherfucker” and sung his own version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” with such obscenity-laced lyrics as “Oh say, can you motherfuckers see by the motherfucking early light,” until he was hushed by Velma Middleton, who was also in the room. Lubenow realized he had struck gold, but to protect Armstrong he changed “motherfucker” to “uneducated plowboy” with Armstrong’s approval in his final copy.30 Lubenow approached the Associated Press about running the story, but they demurred until he provided proof that Armstrong had spoken so bluntly. Lubenow returned to the hotel the next day and showed Armstrong the story. “That’s just fine,” he said. “Don’t take nothing out of that story. That’s just what I said and still say.”31 At the bottom, he wrote “Solid” in big letters, his own unique stamp of approval. Armstrong then continued his diatribe, calling the use of National Guard troops to prevent school integration at Little Rock “a publicity stunt led by the greatest of all publicity hounds.” And about performing in the Soviet Union, Armstrong said he would not: “The people over there ask me what’s wrong with my country, what am I supposed to say?”32
Armstrong’s words were soon in every newspaper and on every newscast in the country. No one could quite believe good ol’ Uncle Tom Satchmo, the smiling, grinning Negro, could say such things. Frenchy Tallerie, of all people, took it upon himself to tell the press Armstrong “was sorry he spouted off.” Upon hearing Tallerie’s remarks, Armstrong called the Pittsburgh Courier and said, “As much as I’m trying to do for my people, this road man, Tallerie, whom I’ve respected for 20 years, although I’ve suspected him of being prejudiced, has worked with Negro musicians and made his money off them, has proved that he hates Negroes the first time he opened his mouth, and I don’t see why Mr. Glaser doesn’t remove him from the band.” After giving Tallerie hell and temporarily firing him, Armstrong insisted, “I wouldn’t take back a thing I’ve said. I’ve had a beautiful life over 40 years in music, but I feel the downtrodden situation the same as any other Negro. My parents and family suffered through all of that old South and things are new now, and [no] Tallerie and no prejudiced newspaper can make me change it. What I’ve said is me. I feel that.” He continued, “My people—the Negroes—are not looking for anything—we just want a square shake. But when I see on television and read about a crowd in Arkansas spitting on a little colored girl—I think I have a right to get sore … Do you dig me when I still say I have a right to blow my top over injustice?”33
At the time of the uproar, the State Department had been trying to organize a tour of Russia for Armstrong, but he now told an interviewer that if he ever did go, “I’ll do it on my own.” The Associated Press reported, “In Washington the State Department declined to comment on Mr. Armstrong’s statements. Officials made no attempt, however, to hide the concern they caused … They said Soviet propagandists undoubtedly would seize on Mr. Armstrong’s words.”34 The next morning, television cameras met Armstrong at an airport. Asked, “What are you going to tell the Russians when they ask you about the Little Rock incident?” Armstrong responded without a hint of a smile, “It all depends what time they send me over there. I don’t think they should send me now until they straighten that mess down South. And for good. I mean not just to blow over. To cut it out … Because they’ve been ignoring the Constitution … They’re taught it in school, but when they go home their parents tell them different. Say, ‘You don’t have to abide by it because we’ve been getting away with it a hundred years. Nobody tells on each other. So don’t bother with it.’ So, if they ask me what’s happening if I go now, I can’t tell a lie … [That’s] the way I feel about it.”35
This was a defining moment for Louis Armstrong. Criticized for years for being an Uncle Tom and for not supporting his race, he finally spoke out about the injustices his people were facing. He had probably hoped to stir passion about the Little Rock incident and get support from others in the black community. Some did just that. Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American wrote: “If you were shocked by Louis Armstrong’s blast at President Eisenhower and the government, what do you think about this laborer? Occupant of this space had long since given up on Satchmo as anything but a toothy throwback to a better-to-be-forgotten era. Maybe I can agree he’s not overrated as a musician now. And I guess even his singing will sound better from here on, at least for a while. We ain’t prejudiced.”36
But Armstrong’s stance drew more criticism, harsher than usual. “Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong, justly famous Negro trumpet player and jazz singer, plays what the boys in the trade call a ‘gang o’ horn. But in politics, it is evident now, he blows sour,” a California newspaper editorial read. It continued, “He made a grievous error however, when he put his horn down and blasted President Eisenhower, ‘the government,’ and various other persons and places for their handling of the Negro problem … For Armstrong to charge the President with ‘no guts’ because he has taken the orderly road is to indulge in pointless insult.”37 Another article used the opportunity to attack Armstrong’s stage shows: “At any rate, Satchmo hardly qualifies as an expert on what contributes to the advancement of the colored race; if he did, he would long ago have divorced himself professionally from Velma Middleton, whose tasteless (nay, vulgar) performances with the Armstrong band rate as ‘handkerchief-head’ with progressives, and do anything but elevate the prestige of the Negro in our society.”38 The Chicago Defender reported that “though not organized, there’s a growing boycott of records by Louis Armstrong and other Negro artists who criticized the handling of the Little Rock school integration dispute … Without making any public announcements, disc jockeys in Memphis, Little Rock, Jackson, Miss., Charleston, S.C., and Nashville indicated they just would not spin any platters made by Negroes.”39 Armstrong did receive support for his remarks from Eartha Kitt, Marian Anderson, and Pearl Bailey, but their records, too, were boycotted.40
When Eisenhower finally sent troops to Arkansas a few days after the controversy began, Armstrong commented, “This is the greatest country. Things are looking better than before.”41 He also sent the following telegram to the White House:
MR PRESIDENT. DADDY IF AND WHEN YOU DECIDE TO TAKE THOSE LITTLE NEGRO CHILDREN PERSONALLY INTO CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL ALONG WITH YOUR MARVVELOUS TROOPS PLEASE TAKE ME ALONG “O GOD IT WOULD BE SUCH A GREAT PLEASURE I ASSURE YOU. MY REGARDS TO BROTHER BROWNWELL42 AND MAY GOD BLESS YOU PRESIDENT” YOU HAVE A GOOD HEART.
YOU CAN CONTACT ME THROUGH MY PERSONNEL MANAGER MR JOE GLASER 745 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK. AM SWISS KRISSLY YOURS LOUIS SATCHMO ARMSTRONG.43
Armstrong had changed his position about Eisenhower: “That man has a soul. He has done as much as Lincoln did and more than any other president between them did.” And about going to Russia, he now said, “I’ll go anytime they want me.”44 Still, Armstrong’s September tirade continued to haunt him. Sammy Davis Jr. attacked him. “You cannot voice an opinion about a situation which is basically discrimination, integration, etc.,” said Davis, “and then go out and appear before segregated audiences … which Louis Armstrong has done for many years.” Davis said he agreed with Armstrong’s sentiment, but not with his “choice of words.” Davis also took Armstrong to task for using the word “darkies” on his 1951 recording of “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.”45 Even Harlem’s best-known politician, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr., claimed Armstrong was embarrassing his race. Four years later, Armstrong would write about his Little Rock comments in Ebony: “When I made that statement, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell was interviewed over TV. He was asked about what I said. He told the TV reporter he didn’t agree: ‘Louis Armstrong isn’t up on current events.’ Well, I may not be up on current events, but I’m up on head-whipping.”46 Even Nat “King” Cole blasted Armstrong in the press.
This lack of support scarred Armstrong for the rest of his life. In 1972, Lucille Armstrong recalled, “But the press, you know, they interviewed Adam Clayton Powell, they interviewed Sammy Davis—and I don’t mind calling names because it’s on record—they put Pops down because they said he was a musician, he didn’t know what he was talking about … He felt it deeply, he really did.”47 In 1959, Armstrong expounded on the response from the black community in a private conversation with entertainer Babe Wallace. Though he rarely spoke about the Little Rock incident, he bragged to Wallace that he “caught ’em napping.” He then added, “But some spades, you know, all spades are always going to ham it up. ‘Nigger, you better stop talking about them white folks!’ I said, ‘Kiss my ass.’ That’s what you got to watch. That’s what was happening.”48
What probably hurt Armstrong most was the lack of support he received from musicians. Since the dawn of bebop, younger musicians had lambasted Armstrong for “Tomming” and for his popularity among white audiences. But now, when he had publicly taken a brave position—one they should have agreed with—not a single musician from the jazz world had stepped forward to support him. “Although Charles Mingus gave Orval Faubus a permanent role in jazz history with his 1959 composition, ‘Fables of Faubus,’ Mingus was one of many boppers and post-boppers who did not bother to stand beside Armstrong when he publicly denounced official racism,” wrote Krin Gabbard.49 “Not one of the younger musicians who had accused him of Tomming in the past publicly came to his defense,” add Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns.50
One person who did show unflagging support throughout the controversy was Joe Glaser. Pierre Tallerie wrongly tried to get Armstrong to back off his statements, but the trumpeter faced no such opposition from Tallerie’s boss, Glaser. More than money or friendship or anything else, Armstrong admired Glaser because he provided one major thing: “Protection. And the [Little Rock] statement I made, I mean, I know Joe’s going to back me,” Armstrong told Wallace during their private conversation in 1959. “I didn’t even write him, I didn’t say nothing, he didn’t even know I was going to do it. He wasn’t going to turn me around. So he couldn’t do that, so right there he say, ‘Well, whatever he said, he don’t waste words, and I’m with him a hundred percent.’ That’s all I want to hear, what he’s got to say.” Armstrong added, “Shit, Joe Glaser ain’t say nothing yet to discourage me. And when I made that [Little Rock] statement and letters come in by the sacksful, he took his time and sorted the good ones from the bad ones. He kept all the bad ones and say, ‘You keep the good ones, I’ll answer the bad ones.’ From the South. You know, there’s a lot of diehards. Shit.”51
Armstrong wasn’t kidding about letters from the South. Glaser might have prevented them from reaching his prized client, but that didn’t stop newspapers from publishing such incendiary words. The Herald-Journal of Spartanburg, South Carolina, did just that with a letter to the editor from reader Alexander T. Goodale. “Reference is made to an Associated Press dispatch printed in the Herald which quoted the statements of one loud mouth Negro known as (Satchmo) Louis Armstrong, whose ancestors came to this country from the jungles of Africa,” Goodale wrote on September 22. “The inhabitants possessed only the level of intelligence found in a region of primitive ignorance and savage environment. He is indebted to the white race for all he has accomplished and he owes a debt of gratitude to America for the privilege of sharing in the freedom and prosperity he enjoys in the United States … I think it is the duty of the press and the officials of both national and state governments to join in righteous indignation until such low specimens are brought before the bar of justice and forced to apologize to the American people—or be given a one-way ticket to Africa where he belongs.”52
A month after the controversy erupted, Glaser announced that Armstrong would perform at a nonsegregated dance the following March at the University of Arkansas. “I’ll go wherever he (Glaser) says,” Armstrong said. “The only thing I resent, is that Gov. Faubus will be listening to those beautiful notes that will come from my horn. He doesn’t deserve them.” Glaser bragged, “Armstrong will play with a mixed band for a mixed audience for a big fat fee.”53 The day after the report appeared, the University of Arkansas backed out of the concert, claiming the school’s students had canceled the date. Glaser’s response was typical: “Who cares? … We don’t have to return the contract if we don’t want to. The university signed it. But we’ll send it back. I have nothing against the boys at the university. We have them hooked if we want to be nasty, but we wouldn’t do that to a bunch of nice guys. I think this is the result of Gov. Faubus. He definitely put the pressure on them. It’s all pretty silly, but who cares?”54
Glaser continued to book Louis overseas in the ensuing years, but Armstrong made sure to stress that those trips had nothing to do with the State Department. Regarding the proposed trip to Russia, Armstrong told Babe Wallace in 1959 that he had no qualms with the Soviet Union, because he was a musician, not a politician. “I said, ‘Well, what do you want me to tell these people when I go over there? It’s all right? Bullshit!’ How many Russians we jammed with in New York in the good days, all nationalities up in Harlem? … And then they ask me, ‘Did the state department send you?’ And I say, ‘You know no state department sent me over here. It’s the fans.’ ” Armstrong also grew tired of being questioned about Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, saying, “What the hell, if he’s there [at an Armstrong concert], he’s likely to appreciate it like everyone else.” He knew that an official State Department–sponsored tour would be peppered with these kinds of questions, and that was something he did not want to deal with. “You see, I told them, you want to go through that kind of shit, have [Secretary of State John Foster Dulles] do the talking, we do the blowing, that’s all. I ain’t going to make no speech for shit.”55
When the controversy died down, the Uncle Tom image once again supplanted the Armstrong of Little Rock, denouncing injustice. He never could understand it, especially as one of the most influential African-Americans ever. While recovering from a life-threatening illness in 1969, Armstrong reflected on the Little Rock incident. “I think that I have always done great things about uplifting my race, but wasn’t appreciated,” he wrote. “I am just a musician, and still remember the time, as an American citizen, I spoke up for my people during a big integration riot—Little Rock, remember? I wrote Eisenhower. My first comment, or compliment, whatever you would call it, came from a Negro boy from my hometown New Orleans. The first words that he said to me after reading what I had said in the papers concerning the Little Rock deal—he said as we were sitting down at a table to have a drink. He looked straight at me and said, ‘Nigger, you better stop talking about those white people like you did.’ Hmmm. I was trying to stop those unnecessary head whippings at the time—that’s all.”56