WHEN LOUIS ARMSTRONG and the All Stars entered a New York City recording studio on December 3, 1963, it was a quick detour in yet another stretch of grueling one-nighters. As in the old days, the purpose of the session was to take an unpromising show tune and turn it into gold, here as a favor to Jack Lee, a friend of Joe Glaser’s. The song was from a musical that hadn’t even opened yet. Armstrong was hired to record the show’s title tune, “Hello, Dolly!,” for added publicity. Glaser claimed that five companies turned him down before he got approval from Kapp Records, a small label run by Dave Kapp, brother of Jack Kapp, the man who had founded Decca Records and who’d overseen so many of Armstrong’s recordings in the 1930s and early 1940s. It was to be a quick session, just a momentary pause in between more stretches of one-nighters. “There was no two or three days’ rehearsing,” Danny Barcelona remembered. “That’s how we did ‘Dolly.’ You know, we happened to be in town—‘Okay, be at the studio at so and so.’ We do two numbers, we’re out of town.”1
Some stories about the recording of “Hello, Dolly!” have made it sound like Armstrong went into the studio blind, not knowing what he was about to record. However, in Armstrong’s reel-to-reel tape collection is one that consists of nothing but demo versions of two songs from Jerry Herman’s score, “Hello, Dolly!” and “Penny in My Pocket,” as well as Bobby Darin’s recording of “A Lot of Livin’ to Do.”2 Throughout the tape, Armstrong’s voice can be heard faintly in the background as he sat there, listening to each song multiple times to get the feel of it. By the time he arrived at the studio, “Penny in My Pocket” had been cut from the show, leaving Armstrong with only two songs to perform.
“A Lot of Livin’ to Do” was up first. The song was from the score of Bye, Bye Birdie, a Broadway musical from 1960 that had been turned into a popular movie released earlier in 1963. The tune seemed to fit Armstrong like a glove, featuring a hip vocal and ending on a swinging trumpet solo capped by a final, fat high note. Everyone in the studio was pleased, including Jack Bradley, who felt that the song could turn into a hit if it were properly promoted.
Next up was “Hello, Dolly!” Billy Kyle had sketched a simple arrangement of it off of a lead sheet. The All Stars sailed through the tune, but no one was impressed, least of all Armstrong. Though Armstrong might have familiarized himself with a demo version of the song before heading to the studio, he was clearly dismayed at having to record such a trifle. Arvell Shaw, who had rejoined the band on bass in 1963, remembered Armstrong asking, “ ‘You mean to tell me you called me out here to do this?’ He hated it, you know?”3 Some tinkering would have to be done to make the record salvageable. Dave Kapp’s son Mickey was running the show, and he offered up some changes, which were added to Armstrong’s copy of the “Hello, Dolly!” lead sheet, now housed at the Louis Armstrong House Museum.4 For the vocal reprise at the end of the record, Louis scratched out the lyrics “Take her wrap” and wrote in “Golly gee.” Another line, “Find her an empty lap” was also replaced in Armstrong’s hand with “Have a lil faith in me.” But there was one more change to the lyrics marked on Armstrong’s lead sheet, and it wasn’t in the trumpeter’s handwriting. For the titular lyrics, “Hello, Dolly. Well hello, Dolly,” someone else—probably Mickey Kapp—scratched out the second “Hello” and wrote, “it’s Louie.” It was only a suggestion, but, as Kapp later recalled, Armstrong’s reply was, “It’s not Louie, it’s Louis!”5 With the recording light on, Armstrong sang a take in his own fashion: “Hello, Dolly, this is Louis, Dolly.” The accented “s” on the last syllable of his name left no doubt as to where Armstrong stood in the “Louis” versus “Louie” debate on how to properly pronounce his first name.
After listening to the playback, Darensbourg recalled, Armstrong said, “I don’t like that. Can’t something just be done with this record to kind of pep it up a little or do something?”6 Trummy Young suggested a banjo player he knew who lived nearby, Tony Gottuso. Gottuso showed up and, after a few attempts, nailed the introduction that would serve as the record’s opening wake-up call. Armstrong and the All Stars left the studio to head to a concert, but session producer Mickey Kapp still wasn’t finished. After dubbing in Gottuso’s banjo introduction, he added discreet strings to the record. When Kapp sent a copy of it to Glaser, Glaser exclaimed to his associate Cork O’Keefe, “Listen to that, Cork, it’s a fucking hit!”7
The Broadway musical Hello, Dolly! opened on January 16, 1964, and Armstrong’s single was released soon thereafter. By then the All Stars were returning from another trip abroad, ringing out the old year, 1963, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and heralding the new in Bermuda. After co-hosting The Mike Douglas Show for a week, Armstrong and the All Stars headed for the American Midwest. On a bus every day in the middle of nowhere, the band was unaware of what was happening: meant only as the flip side of “A Lot of Livin’ to Do,” “Hello, Dolly!” had stirred a huge sensation. Soon, inexplicably, the All Stars started hearing audiences chant “Hello, Dolly! Hello, Dolly!” at live performances. Nobody in the band immediately recalled the tune they had recorded nearly two months before. “ ‘Hello, Dolly!’? What’s ‘Hello, Dolly!’?” asked Barcelona. “I never heard of it.”8 Joe Darensbourg also was baffled. “ ‘Hello, Dolly!’?” he remembered thinking. “I had forgot about the tune completely.”9 Finally, when the audience request was repeated evening after evening, Armstrong turned to Arvell Shaw and wondered, “What the hell is ‘Hello, Dolly!’?” Shaw replied, “Well you remember that date we did a few months ago in New York? One of the tunes was called ‘Hello, Dolly!’; it’s from a Broadway show.’ ”10 Armstrong asked, “Any of you guys remember this damn tune?” Nobody did, and as with “Mack the Knife” in 1955, the band boy had lost the sheet music, so Armstrong had a record flown to where they were. The band reacquainted itself with the song and performed it live for the first time later that night. “He had to take about eight curtain calls, so he knew right then he had a hit,” Darensbourg remembered. “They wouldn’t let him off the stage.”11 “The first time we put it in the concert, pandemonium broke out,” according to Shaw.12 “Oh my God, people, I don’t know, they knew it,” says Danny Barcelona, “We hit the first note—Billy hit the first note on the piano—and they’re already clapping, they knew what it was.”13
“Hello, Dolly!” hit the Cash Box Top 100 singles chart on February 22, ranked sixty-eighth. One week later it jumped to number thirty-five and the week after to twenty-two. By March 14, it had climbed to number fifteen, before landing in the top ten at number eight on March 21. During the initial rise of “Hello, Dolly!,” Armstrong spent time in a New York hospital as he had trouble with his left foot. Armstrong had trouble with varicose veins and was diagnosed with phlebitis, which would plague him for the rest of his life (but it also gave him a funny line, as he quoted his doctor telling him, “Man, you’ve got very-close veins!”). However, it was in the hospital where Armstrong really got to experience the impact “Dolly” was having, especially regarding the seemingly simple change suggested by Mickey Kapp. Armstrong said
The nurse that came in when I had phlebitis in the hospital say, “I bought ‘Hello, Dolly!’ just because you said ‘Hello, Dolly, this is Louissss.’ ” She went and bought the record just from [that]. She ain’t heard the rest of it!14
Two nights after getting out of the hospital, Armstrong was the mystery guest on the CBS game show What’s My Line? Signing in simply as “Satchmo,” Armstrong turned in one of the most entertaining segments in the history of the popular, long-running show, the trumpeter doing his best to disguise his famous sandpaper voice before the blindfolded panel. When his identity was revealed, regular panelist Arlene Francis asked him to sing “Hello, Dolly!” As the audience cheered wildly, Armstrong delivered an entire chorus a capella, swinging, mugging, and waving his handkerchief. It was his first performance of the song on television.
It was clear that Armstrong had made peace with his initial reservations about “Hello, Dolly!”; he now owned it. “It was his big number from then on and he started liking it, singing it, kept improvising on it and he’d even do a little dancing to it,” Darensbourg wrote. “A lot of people thought ‘A Lot of Living’ was a better number than ‘Hello, Dolly!’ Matter of fact, I did, too.”15 But the question of which was better was now irrelevant: Armstrong was riding the wave of the biggest hit of his career. With “Hello, Dolly!” creeping up the charts, producer Mickey Kapp called the All Stars to a Las Vegas studio to record a follow-up album to the hit single. To re-create the sound of “Hello, Dolly!” the All Stars were augmented by Glen Thompson’s banjo. As the formula would have it, Kapp saddled Armstrong with more show and film tunes; some worked (a gorgeous “Moon River”), others didn’t (a hokey “You Are Woman, I Am Man”). However, the former outnumber the latter. Armstrong beams on “I Still Get Jealous” and “Be My Life’s Companion,” on which he gives a shout-out to wife Lucille. Armstrong also took the opportunity to wax definitive versions of some songs he’d popularized, such as “Blueberry Hill” and “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.” While the original versions of these songs are still more famous, Armstrong’s performances on this date are enhanced by maturity. To me, the revisions transcend the originals. Too, Armstrong’s trumpet playing was in exceptional form throughout the sessions, as evidenced by a propulsive extended solo on “Jeepers Creepers.”
Sadly, the album lacks a sound that had been integral to the All Stars for more than a decade: Trummy Young’s trombone. After eleven years with the band, Young had left on New Year’s Day. Young’s wife had gotten more than a little tired with his continual absence from home, and was pressuring him to settle down and help raise their young daughter. The situation became even more tense when Young’s wife fell ill. “So finally when I found my wife was sick, I left the band, and Joe Glaser got so mad with me, he hardly spoke to me, you know, about that, because he wanted to give me more money,” Young said. “I said, ‘No, I got to go home. My wife is sick.’ And so it’s a good thing I did because I found out my wife had cancer, and we caught it, you know, just in time.”16 Young moved back to Hawaii, where he would remain until his death in 1976, returning to the United States only now and then for an occasional jazz party or festival. “Trummy and Louie had a very special relationship,” according to Dan Morgenstern. “They got along beautifully. They were the closest friends, I think, throughout the All Stars, more than Jack [Teagarden] and Louie … There was a special thing between them … Trummy just, you know, he understood who Louie was … They were really close. And when Trummy left, that left a big hole in the group, and it was a blow to Louie, you know.”17 “I think out of all the people I played with, Louis did more for me,” Young reflected in 1973. “He inspired me when I listened to him. He was truly a great artist. The nights that Louis was on, you would never hear anything like that again. I used to forget to come in on my part sometimes. Just listening he would make you cry when he played pretty things. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling like this. A lot of other musicians feel this same way. If there’s any such thing as a giant in this field, he was it.”18
A double blow was dealt Armstrong when Jack Teagarden died on January 15, 1964, at fifty-eight. The official cause of death was pneumonia, but he had been a heavy drinker for many years, which all but certainly had contributed to his premature death. Teagarden had planned to rejoin the All Stars as Young’s replacement. “What a character!” Armstrong said of Teagarden during a radio interview the following year. “And he was getting ready to come back to the band when he died. Yeah, he was getting ready to come back. He got all tired of all that rat race, you know, hustle and bustle.”19 In his later years Teagarden had always maintained a hectic schedule, largely attributable to the great success he had enjoyed as a member of the All Stars. The constant traveling and the gargantuan appetite for booze had finally taken their toll. Armstrong would always be quick to cite Teagarden when asked to name his favorite musicians. When one listens to one of their duets, such as “Rockin’ Chair,” the extraordinary bond between two jazz legends is immediately apparent.
To fill the trombone chair, Armstrong delved into the past and hired Russell “Big Chief” Moore, a member of the trumpeter’s big band from 1945 until its demise in 1947. An imposingly large man, Moore was one of the few full-blooded Native Americans in jazz, a member of the Pima tribe. His punchy style of playing was congruent with the styles of other New Orleans musicians such as Red Allen and Sidney Bechet, and he got along with Armstrong well. “Louis, he’s so congenial and so great and he taught me a lot of stuff, things about performance and projection,” Moore said. “It was beautiful just to be with him. Louie and I never had a cross word. He’s the same on the bandstand and he’s the same off the bandstand, too, and all the guys in the band respected him as a leader and as a musician and on top of all, a human being. He treated everybody the same way … We could tell that he’s one of the greatest.”20 According to Moore, “At a later time I heard that they were after Vic Dickenson, too. But Joe Glaser said, ‘No, no, no, I don’t want Vic Dickenson, he got no personality. Get me Chief. Get me Chief.’ So Arvell decided he would call me and get in touch with me.”21 After a spell of negotiation with Glaser, Moore joined the band in Bermuda, before “Hello, Dolly!” took off, and immediately made an impact on his fellow All Stars. When asked about Moore, Jewel Brown simply started laughing happily and said: “He was one big old fun guy … Big Chief was a great big ol’ guy, boy, I tell you. I used to tell him, ‘Boy, you need to work some of that off doing your war dance!’ Boy, I tell you, he was something else. He was a big old bundle of fun.”22
For his part, Moore was ecstatic about joining the band: the All Stars of this period were “a beautiful group”; the Hello, Dolly! album sessions in Las Vegas were “beautiful, beautiful.”23 He admitted that the album went off without a hitch because the band had already been playing many of the songs night after night. “I venture to say that on all my engagements with Louie, with the small band, we played this so often, you know,” he remembered. “Each one knows what to do and sometimes I have nightmares of the same thing all over and over and over, but what we did over and over and over, I never regretted it. I never regretted the nightmares because it was beautiful working with Louis, that we were doing what we did on the albums, we did it all the time, because that’s the way people like us. That’s the way the people liked Louie. Believe me, it was wonderful to work with Louie again.”24
Even as the Hello, Dolly! album was being readied for release, Armstrong appeared on the ABC variety show The Hollywood Palace to perform both “A Lot of Livin’ to Do” and “Hello, Dolly!” By now both songs had become staples of the All Stars’ repertoire, but “Dolly” was getting four or five encores each night. On the charts, it continued gathering momentum, hitting number two in Billboard and Cash Box by the end of April. At the time, it seemed impossible that it would reach the number one position: the Beatles had ruled it since their arrival in the United States in February. Their “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had been the number-one song in America for seven weeks; it was supplanted by “She Loves You” for two; and “Can’t Buy Me Love” was next to ascend to number one. Armstrong himself admitted to being a fan of the Beatles. In a 1965 interview, he said, “I buy the Beatles. Everything they put out, I got ’em in my house and I put ’em on tape. They’re very good—they swing. They’re good boys. Yeah, and they made a wonderful reputation, which they deserve. Because they put everything in it. And I thought it was awful nice. They upset the world!”25 As much as the charts were now ruled by the lads from Liverpool, at the height of Beatlemania a beloved New Orleans jazz trumpet player, more than sixty years old, would shock the music world with a corny Broadway show tune.
On May 9, “Hello, Dolly!” hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. The next week, it hit Cash Box’s number one. The New York Post estimated that the song was being played ten thousand times a day in North America. Everywhere one went, “Hello, Dolly!” could be heard in the background. But why? Why not any other recording Armstrong had made over the years? Gary Giddins is eloquent in his explanation of the record’s success:
The trite song, which has had virtually no life beyond Armstrong and the show itself, was an unswinging set piece on Broadway, pompous and logy. Armstrong had transformed dross into gold once again, and even got to play a full chorus of trumpet. The banjo was an ingenious touch … The eight-bar banjo intro, oddly electric and percussive, worked like an alarm clock to introduce a performance unlike anything else on the Top Forty … Louis’s rhythm section and the backing by Trummy Young and Joe Darensbourg were right on the money, and his trumpet solo and burnished vocal were ringingly, inimitably Armstrongian. The whole performance was casually flawless.26
After May 16, “Hello, Dolly!” gradually began its descent down the charts—the Beatles were not to be denied. Still, according to New York’s WABC, “Hello, Dolly!” was the best-selling record of 1964. It was cause for celebration for both jazz and Armstrong fans, among them Frank Sinatra, who stepped into a recording studio on June 10, 1964, to cut his own version, backed by the Count Basie Orchestra and featuring an arrangement by Quincy Jones with new lyrics paying tribute to the trumpeter’s newfound success. “You’re back on top, Louie,” Sinatra sang. “Never stop, Louie / You’re still singing, you’re still swinging, you’re still going strong.” Sinatra’s sentiment was shared by a perennial Armstrong detractor, John S. Wilson of the New York Times, in a piece called “Still the Champ”: “There was undoubtedly a good deal of unexpected satisfaction among those beyond the age of Beatlemania when the Beatles’ reign of several months at the top of the list of best-selling popular disks was ended recently not by a younger and louder group of Superbeatles but by 63-year-old Louis Armstrong singing and playing ‘Hello, Dolly!,’ a tune so obviously melodious that you hum it on the way into the theater.”27
The “Hello, Dolly!” goodwill spread even to Patrick Scott, who had been withering about the All Stars in 1961. Scott’s July review of a Toronto gig was positive through and through: “Louis Armstrong, aged 64, demonstrated again last night at O’Keefe Centre that, in addition to being one of the world’s great comedians, vaudevillians and all-around showmen, he can still be the most heart-stirring performer in the history of jazz.” Of his trumpet playing, Scott wrote, “We have had many formidable trumpeters in our midst this season, but Armstrong’s one solo on ‘Struttin’ with Some Barbecue’ made them seem like children.”28
To some critics, of course, “Hello, Dolly!” hardly counted as jazz. Reviewing the same performance as Scott, Barrie Hale wrote, “It’s many, many years too late to lament the passing of the Hot Five and the Hot Seven, but what is often said should be said again. Those groups were jazz. The All Stars are Pop. But as a Pop group, the All Stars provide solid package.” All the same, in spite of his nostalgia, Hale was sufficiently observant to note that Armstrong was now drawing more fans than ever: “The pattern hasn’t changed in years and years, and regardless of the changes in the Showbiz winds, Louis continues to keep picking up new generations of audiences.”29 While he might be amassing new and a greater number of fans, Armstrong had not exactly been in a rut before “Hello, Dolly!” was released. When asked if she noticed a difference in Armstrong’s audiences before and after “Dolly,” Jewel Brown said, “They were always the same. I mean, we always had a full house before that and we always had a full house after that.”30
Joe Glaser reveled in the success of “Hello, Dolly!” At the height of its popularity, money was pouring in, and Glaser was coy when asked how much Armstrong had earned: “Hell, Pops hasn’t made less than a half-million bucks in any given year during the past 20 years … It’s between us and Uncle Sam how much he actually takes in, but I can tell you this, for tax reasons we won’t let it go over a million a year.”31 Armstrong was not one to keep tabs, as long as he had enough money to lavish on pretty much anyone who needed it. “We don’t tell many people this but it’s no lie,” Glaser said. “Pops actually gives away—I mean gives away—$500 to $1,000 every damn week. I don’t mean every month. I mean every damn week. We just hand it to him in a brown envelope and he chuckles and says, ‘O.K., this is some more of Old Pops’s pissing away money.’ He honestly gets his biggest thrill just giving away dough. He just gives it away—no strings attached. We don’t kick about it. Hell, any man who’s worked as long and hard as he has ought to get some pleasure out of life.” Armstrong put it this way: “Well, I don’t keep up with it too much, but I greases a few palms here and there. What good is all the dough doing me and Lucille just laying around accumulating?”32
Even as he mostly kept his fiercest opinions on race to himself, Armstrong was also guarded about dispensing cash. As to why he had not started a philanthropic foundation, Armstrong explained: “Me or Joe Glaser go out here and start setting up foundations and funds and all that kind of stuff and some cat gets the idea I’m trying to be Henry Ford or one of the Rockefeller brothers or somebody. Then he’ll want me to lay a whole pile of dough on his pet project. Then here comes the newspapers wanting to know why you did this or why you didn’t do that. You get yourself caught in a trick bag trying to play the big shot. I figure you lay a little here and a little there and everybody’s happy. That’s how I get my satisfaction. And let me tell you something, Pops. A man’s satisfaction is better than all the dough in the world.”33
It is very conceivable that Joe Glaser was taking advantage of Louis financially, but as has been demonstrated elsewhere in this narrative, Armstrong always knew the score and would stand up for himself when he really felt cheated. But this son of New Orleans, who grew up dirt poor in one of the roughest neighborhoods in that city, wasn’t about to start counting dollars and cents any time soon. He was just glad to be comfortable. “What’s money anyhow?” Armstrong asked soon after the release of “Hello, Dolly!” “You make it and you might eat a little better than the next cat. You might be able to buy a little better booze than some wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat, and when you die you’re just as graveyard dead as he is. So what’s the difference between me and some cat that’s making it at the Salvation Army Lodge? All I got was a little better roll of the dice.” Lucille Armstrong was definitely more materialistic, something her husband was quick to point out. “Now you take my wife, Lucille. She’s got everything she thinks she wants. She buys all them clothes from Paris and Rome and places. But them minks she wraps her fine self up in don’t keep her no warmer than some old lady wrapped up in gunny sacks and dirty rags.”34
Armstrong never had to worry about money anymore, thanks to Joe Glaser, which probably made it easier for him to overlook some of Glaser’s character flaws. Though Glaser loved Armstrong and made millions off the talents of black entertainers, he still proved to be a man of contradictions when it came to issues of race. Shortly before the recording of “Hello, Dolly!” a black trumpeter named June Clark fell gravely ill. Clark had retired from playing years earlier, but he remained a longtime part of Armstrong’s entourage. When Jack Bradley told Glaser that Clark was sick, Glaser grew upset and demanded they go visit Clark in the hospital immediately. On the way to the hospital, Bradley shared some gossip from the jazz world. Glaser asked, “Who told you that?” When Bradley responded that the information was given to him by a black musician, Glaser callously said, “Don’t ever believe anything they tell you.”35 Bradley was offended by Glaser’s comment but didn’t say anything. Minutes later, they arrived at the hospital and Glaser was sweet as could be to the ailing Clark, staying for hours and making sure Clark had everything he needed.
Glaser was one man that nobody could ever quite figure out. After the success of “Hello, Dolly!” writer Jimmy Breslin attempted to do just that in his piece “A Normal Day with Joe Glaser.” In it, he asked Armstrong about Glaser. “What can I tell you? Askin’ me about Joe is like askin’ a chile ’bout its daddy,” Armstrong said. “That’s what he is. He’s my daddy. He’s been my daddy for 40 years and we ain’t never gonna die, not one of us, so he goin’ be my daddy for 40 more years.” Breslin asked, “Did he make a lot of money for you, Louis?” Breslin then reported: “The laugh started down in his stomach, then it went through his body and he began to shake. It came out of him in a deep chuckle. ‘Next year, we gonna start on a new program,’ Louis said. ‘We gonna burn it in bonfires.’ ”36
More popular than ever before, the All Stars suffered yet another departure by one of its members in the summer of 1964: not in good health, Joe Darensbourg left. Darensbourg told Glaser to secure a replacement for him before a high-profile appearance at the 1964 World’s Fair, but it wasn’t easy. With no immediate prospect, Glaser threatened Darensbourg: if he didn’t play the World’s Fair gig, Glaser would not pay for his transportation home. Darensbourg insisted that he was prepared to incur the cost, though “I can go to the Musicians’ Union and they’ll make you pay for it.” Glaser backed down. “Joe knew it and he says, ‘Well, I’m just kidding. You know I’m gonna send you back home. We love you.’ All that shit.”37
Before leaving, Darensbourg had noticed a difference in Armstrong’s trumpet playing. “When I joined the band Louis was going strong, still playing well. It seemed to me after I had been there a couple of years his lip would get sore. He had quite a problem there,” he wrote. “The wonder of it was that his lip lasted that long.” While the pure tone of Armstrong’s trumpet playing was still there, as were its power and range, Armstrong was rapidly losing velocity. That his lip was giving him trouble at the apex of his popularity was no doubt disconcerting, but he could still provide many a spine-tingling moment night after night. Darensbourg distilled his impression of his former boss: “The man had so much strength and so much talent that the Lord himself must have picked him out. Yes, the Lord picked out Louis.”38
Darensbourg ended up playing the World’s Fair concert on June 30, but at a concert the very next night he was replaced by Eddie Shu, a talented multi-instrumentalist who had once studied violin, guitar, and harmonica. Later, he would focus on reed and brass instruments, chiefly alto and tenor saxophone. After serving in the army, Shu had played in the bands of Tadd Dameron, George Shearing, Buddy Rich, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Barnet, and Chubby Jackson before joining the Gene Krupa trio. Shu was an interesting choice in that he had very little experience playing New Orleans–style jazz and was unfamiliar with much of the All Stars’ repertoire. (According to Darensbourg, Shu got the job only because his father was a friend of Glaser’s.)
Still, Shu managed to define a role for himself. He brought a Benny Goodman–inspired conception to his clarinet playing that was unlike the more traditional New Orleans–based style of such Crescent City clarinetists as Darensbourg himself, Edmond Hall, and Barney Bigard. However unfamiliar with the repertoire he may have been, Shu’s contributions to the band were not inconsiderable. As one of Armstrong’s subsequent clarinetists, Joe Muranyi, would say: “Eddie Shu was a very good clarinet player—especially considering he was a saxophone player. He had a nice tone, nice and clean. And I don’t think his heart was really in that kind of music, but he did it pretty well. You won’t hear me putting him down, so you gotta take it as it comes and live in the present.”39
But audiences were not paying money to see Eddie Shu; they were coming for the maestro, Armstrong. Hugh Mulligan, who spent time traveling with the All Stars in the summer of 1964, summed up his experiences for the Associated Press; his story appeared, in various forms, in several newspapers during August. The All Stars were performing grueling one-nighters and Mulligan noticed Armstrong “slumping wearily” in the bus. When he approached the trumpeter, Armstrong was rueful: “What else am I going to do? A man’s got to do what he knows and loves.”40 Mulligan also caught Armstrong’s performance at a baseball stadium in West Virginia where the All Stars had to use the visiting team’s locker room to get ready for the show. “Any place to hang my trumpet, just so long as the folks still want to hear it,” Armstrong remarked.41 Armstrong seemed vaguely concerned with his own mortality. He talked about the jazz funerals that he played growing up in New Orleans: “It’s corny, I know, but that’s the way I want to go, with a band out to the cemetery and back. I told my wife Lucille to give the boys all the whisky they want, let them get snookered with ol’ Satch, just so long as they blow me on home.”42
On September 3, the All Stars entered Mercury’s New York City office to begin yet a new relationship with another label, with some recording sessions overseen by Quincy Jones. Armstrong recorded singles for Mercury until 1966, a series of erratic performances that tried too hard to fit the mold and achieve the success of “Hello, Dolly!” (banjo or guitar was added to insipid material). Not all the songs were failures; another number from Hello, Dolly!, “So Long Dearie,” showcased a powerfully infectious Armstrong vocal, the band swinging mightily from the start. The record became a minor hit for Armstrong, though it also was notable for the conspicuous absence of any trumpet playing. This didn’t bother Joe Glaser one bit. “Not a note on the trumpet,” Glaser told Jimmy Breslin. “He don’t blow a note on the trumpet. I said in 1939, when everybody said his lip was shot and he couldn’t play anymore and I wouldn’t let him hit 100 high C’s in a night, that one day Louis Armstrong wouldn’t even have to play the trumpet. Here it is. Sold 500,000 copies already.” Breslin then provided this memorable snapshot of Glaser enjoying his prized client’s work: “Joe’s fingers started to snap and he began to jiggle. Then he started to turkey trot around a leather chair, fingers snapping, feet shuffling, his voice, perhaps the worst voice in all of America, mumbling along with the song.”43
Armstrong’s Mercury sessions capture him in various states of physical fatigue, his chops in compromised condition. At times he was stunning, as on 1964’s “Pretty Little Missy” and 1965’s “Short but Sweet,” one of his finest records of the sixties. At others he sounded exhausted, as on a lackluster version of “When the Saints Go Marching In” from 1966. So it is that the Mercury sessions, suffering by comparison with the Columbia and Decca sides of the fifties, are mostly forgotten today.
After almost an entire year of performing in the United States, the All Stars, in November, went to New Zealand, Australia, India, and Japan on a month-long tour. International reaction to “Hello, Dolly!” was as wildly enthusiastic as in the United States: unbeknownst to Armstrong and the All Stars, the song had also become an international sensation. Danny Barcelona, accounting for its popularity, was agog: “And I don’t mean in the United States. I’m talking India, Korea, wherever, you know. I guess that record really hit, because doing it all through these different countries … as soon as they heard the first four bars, they’re already clapping, stomping. Yeah. Amazing, huh? First time I ever had seen something or heard something like that.”44
Having conquered the East, Louis Armstrong might have been on top of the world as the year ended, but he still wasn’t through playing the role of jazz’s greatest ambassador. After years of speculation, he and the All Stars were about to breach the Iron Curtain.