IN SEPTEMBER 1968, Armstrong’s regular doctor, Alexander Schiff, thought it might be time for Armstrong to see a specialist, so he sent him to see Gary Zucker of Beth Israel Hospital in New York. Armstrong’s legs were swollen and he had great difficulty breathing when he arrived at Zucker’s office. When told that it looked like heart failure, Armstrong “practically ran out of my office,” according to Zucker. For two weeks, Armstrong disappeared with the rumor circulating that he was living it up in Harlem, partying with fans from the old days, and refusing to believe anything was wrong. “It was a kind of last exfoliation and it nearly killed him,” James Lincoln Collier wrote. “By the end of perhaps two weeks his whole body was swollen with fluid, to the point that he had trouble walking and could not get his shoes on his swollen feet.”1 Armstrong, finally realizing he was no longer made of iron, returned to Zucker, who deduced that Armstrong’s weakened heart had put too much strain on his kidneys, allowing fluid to build up in his body, causing the swelling. A heavy dose of diuretics reduced the swelling, but Armstrong would be forced to stop performing until he fully recovered.
When the news reached DownBeat magazine in October, it put the blame on Armstrong’s weight loss. “Louis Armstrong was hospitalized in New York City Sept. 17 for what was initially described by a spokesman as ‘an examination and tests,’ ” the article read. “Subsequently, DownBeat learned that the 68-year-old trumpeter was apparently suffering from exhaustion due to excessive loss of weight. After a week in an intensive care unit at Beth Israel Hospital, Armstrong was reportedly making an excellent recovery … It was expected that the trumpeter would rest at least until early November. A number of scheduled appearances, including a major one in Vienna, Austria, have been cancelled at presstime.”2 For the time, the rest seemed to do Armstrong some good, as he related in a letter to some friends in December: “I’ll soon be back on the mound wailing away again, as usual. I really enjoyed the rest at home for a change. Been so busy through the years—I did not realize how nice it is to sorta lay around home and cool it awhile. I didn’t realize how tired I was.”3
But Armstrong wasn’t out of the woods, yet. As 1969 began, Armstrong’s health continued to deteriorate. In February, he went back to Beth Israel with more heart problems. Zucker didn’t want to take any chances and kept Armstrong at Beth Israel until April. Zucker began talking to Armstrong about retirement, a subject Armstrong wouldn’t even begin to think about. “He made it abundantly clear that the only thing that was important to him was to continue to make music,” Zucker said. “If he couldn’t make music then he was through, and life wasn’t worth anything.”4 Though Louis had occasionally seemed weary and beaten in interviews in the late 1960s, he knew that this was the only life for him, once telling an interviewer, “If I ever quit—or even think about it—I’m dead. That’s the way to start to die, by stopping. I just keep on going. For me, it’s the only way.”5
As much as it probably hurt to see his prize client in such bad shape, Joe Glaser knew the end was near. He told his friend Cork O’Keefe that he planned on visiting Armstrong in the hospital to tell him it was time to finally slow down a bit or even retire. But before he could do so, Glaser suffered a debilitating stroke in the spring and also wound up in Beth Israel, where he immediately fell into a coma. Lucille Armstrong thought it would be best to keep this information from Louis, as she knew it would upset him and possibly harm his recovery; but the plan failed when Dizzy Gillespie and Tyree Glenn came to the hospital to visit both men. Upon visiting Louis, they said, “We came by to give blood for Joe Glaser.” A surprised Armstrong asked, “Blood for Joe Glaser for what?” “Why man,” they said, “Joe Glaser’s sick as a dog right around the corner in the hospital here.”6
“Well, the worst thing they could have told Louie was that,” Lucille Armstrong remembered. “And when the doctor came Louie chewed the doctor out. By the time I got to the hospital he had enough left in him to chew me out.” Armstrong, too weak to walk, demanded to be taken to Glaser’s intensive care unit in a wheelchair. “I went down to see him and he didn’t know me,” a shaken Louis told Lucille. Glaser passed away on June 4, never having emerged from his coma. A month later, Armstrong wrote to blues pianist Little Brother Montgomery, “Man, I was a sick ass. Yes, my manager + my God Joe Glaser was sick at the same time. And it was a toss up between us—who would cut out first. Man it broke my heart that it was him. I love that man which the world already knows. I prayed, as sick as I was that he would make it. God Bless his Soul. He was the greatest for me + all the spades that he handled.”7
Naturally, Glaser’s will became the object of much scrutiny. For thirty-four years, his partnership with Armstrong existed on the sole basis of a handshake. There were no documents to officially show every dollar Glaser made off Armstrong. Armstrong was always happy as long as he had enough money to do whatever he needed, and Glaser saw to that. But critics of Glaser couldn’t help feeling that he spent the better part of those decades ripping off his star client. “But, in some mysterious way, Joe’s will made Louis a rich man,” according to Ernie Anderson. “This seemed to be the work of Oscar Cohen, who was now President of Associated Booking Corp. and twenty per cent owner of the agency, operating under pressure from Lucille.”8 Armstrong received all of Glaser’s shares in his music publishing firm, International Music. According to Collier, “Glaser had also set aside money in savings accounts and trust funds, all of which was turned over to the Armstrongs after his death.”9 Of course, being a booking agency to the end, ABC split Armstrong’s total sum in two—“That was fair enough,” according to Lucille, since Armstrong and Glaser were “essentially partners”—and took an extra 15 percent commission. But even with this, Armstrong did well: he “told Bobby Hackett, who was very close to him, that it amounted to ‘a bit more than two million dollars,’ ” Anderson related. “It was not all in cash, one item was a piece of prime real estate on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.”10 It’s impossible to know exactly how much Glaser made off of Armstrong and how much of that Armstrong received. But it’s certain that for all of its faults—and there were many—the relationship worked, and from the time their partnership started until the end of Glaser’s life, Armstrong had everything he wanted. Louis himself summed it up on a later appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, saying, “Everybody loved Joe Glaser. Everybody … And to me, he was Jesus.”11 When Joe Glaser died in 1969, part of Louis Armstrong died with him.
The combination of Glaser’s death and the inability to perform sent Armstrong into a tailspin. While recuperating in the hospital before Glaser passed, Armstrong fought off depression by telling his doctors and nurses stories about the old days, especially about growing up in New Orleans. On March 31, Armstrong decided to write some of these memories down in a document titled “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, La., the Year of 1907.” Under the title, Armstrong wrote, “Written by Louis Armstrong—Ill in his bed at the Beth Israel Hospital.” When Glaser passed away two months later, Armstrong picked up the manuscript and added a dedication to his deceased manager:
I dedicate this book
to my manager and pal
Mr. Joe Glaser
The best Friend
That I’ve ever had
May the Lord Bless Him
Watch over him always
His boy+disciple who loved him dearly.
The memoir was apparently inspired by Dr. Zucker’s humming of “Russian Lullaby,” a song Armstrong was taught to sing by the Karnofsky family while a boy in New Orleans. The Karnofskys had taken Armstrong in, given him a job delivering coal, taught him to sing “from the heart,” and even helped him buy his first cornet. Armstrong went on to write about how he would always love Jewish people because of how people like the Karnofskys and even Joe Glaser treated him throughout his life.
Fueled by depression, Armstrong used this document, which he referred to as a “book,” to air out some grievances, especially when it came to issues of race. After he had been such a popular attraction to black audiences for years and years, by 1968 Armstrong’s audience had become almost entirely white. Writing twenty years later, Gerald Early explained why the black audience abandoned Louis in his later years:
It was because of his adamant refusal to change, his strenuous insistence that he should continue to perform as if social and cultural history in America had stopped in 1930 that he went from being praised as a black cultural hero to being denounced as an Uncle Tom. He had not changed, but the world and especially black America clearly had … In a way, his black audience was right for throwing him over because he was an Uncle Tom. He did say, after all, that he needed to be “some white man’s nigger,” that is, taken under the protective, paternalistic wing of a white man who would “look out for him.”
Early did end his essay by acceding, “Yet if Armstrong ever felt outrage or despair over this abandonment because he thought that black folk had misunderstood him and judged him unfairly, he would have been right, too.”13
Armstrong was outraged and in despair and let all of his hurt out with the mighty power of his pen. While discussing his admiration for the Jewish people, Armstrong wrote that he believed blacks had it better than Jews, “But we didn’t do anything about it. We were lazy and still are. We never did try to get together, and to show the younger Negroes such as myself to try and even to show that he has ambitions, and with just a little encouragement—I could have really done something worthwhile. But Instead, we did nothing but let the young up starts know that they were young and simple, and that was that. Never a warm word of doing anything important came to their minds.”14 Armstrong’s words only grew more cutting as he continued. “Negroes never did stick together and they never will. They hold too much malice—Jealousy deep down in their heart for the few Negroes who tries. But the odds were (are) against them.” Armstrong was justifiably proud of where he came from and what he made of himself, all because of hard work and common sense. Yet the knocks from the black community had obviously hurt him no end. “Those days were like some of these Modern days—one Negro who has no ambitions, or any intention of doing the right things, will bring sufferings to a whole Flock of Negroes that is at least trying to live like Human Beings,” he continued.
Because they know within themselves that they’re doing the wrong things, but expects everybody just because he is a Negro to give up everything he has struggled for in life such as a decent family—a living, a plain life—the respect. This Trifling Negro expects him to give up everything just because of his Ignorant, Lazy Moves. Personally I think that it is not fair. And the Negro who can’t see these foolish moves from some over Educated fools’ moves—then right away he is called a White Folks Nigger. Believe it—the White Folks did everything that’s decent for me. I wish that I can boast these same words for Niggers. I think that I have always done great things about uplifting my race (the Negroes, of course) but wasn’t appreciated.15
Armstrong’s document wasn’t made public for another thirty years, at a time when he was still unappreciated by many for his role as a racial pioneer. Though undoubtedly motivated by depression and ill health, Armstrong’s unflinchingly raw 1969 document features a hurt and betrayal that are very real. And as Early concluded, he was right, after all, to feel that way.
Even though he was back home and feeling a little better (his weight was up to 155 pounds, having hit a low of 124 pounds the previous November16), Armstrong’s depression occasionally made its way into published interviews. “I never did want to be no big star,” he told a New York Times reporter. “It’s been hard goddam work, man. Feel like I spent 20,000 years on the planes and railroads, like I blowed my chops off. Sure, Pops, I like the ovation, but when I’m low, beat down, wonder if maybe I hadn’t of been better off staying home in New Orleans.”17
Around this time, Louis and Lucille received visitors from France, Louis Panassié, the son of Hugues, and his wife. The Panassiés visited the Armstrongs for a casual dinner and, naturally, Armstrong let his tape recorder roll. The results more than sufficiently conveyed the state of Armstrong’s being. He’s unusually low-key throughout the visit, often letting Lucille take charge in discussing Armstrong’s various ailments. Armstrong did talk about seeing a proctologist and was pleased with the results. “See, it was in my favor, taking that laxative every night to keep my system cleaned out, because I went to that examination, you know, where they turn you upside down and they put that long iron pipe in your booty, your behind, you know, and you could hear me hollering for five hundred kilometers,” he told the Panassiés. “When [the doctor] finished, he said, ‘Thank God, you have no disease and no cancer or anything.’ So don’t let nobody tell you I had disease, because between that and Swiss Kriss and that piece of iron down there, that told everything, kept all the disease. So this kidney trouble and heart problems come from other things, like overwork, no rest, probably had one nip too much.” Looking back at his life, he solemnly intoned these unthinkable words: “Now all I got to do is scan my life back and see what I was doing wrong. Like I didn’t get enough rest. I was always afraid I was going to miss something.”18 After dinner, Armstrong put on some music. He didn’t reach back to the Hot Fives and Sevens. Instead, he played a recording he had made during a BBC television show with the All Stars the previous summer before he grew ill. For the rest of the tape, Armstrong barely spoke, obviously depressed and sorely missing the world of show business.
Armstrong spent the rest of 1969 recovering at home in Corona. Friends frequently came by to visit and he delighted in entertaining the local children. Reporters caught up with him in July for his sixty-ninth birthday celebration. He used to celebrate his birthdays with big public performances at places such as the Newport Jazz Festival or Lewisohn Stadium, but now he spent it with Lucille, some friends, and some of the neighborhood children. “The kids and some of the cats (Satch’s jazz colleagues) are always poppin’ by, but mostly I’m taking it nice and easy ’till September,” Armstrong said, adding, “I’ve never had a rest like this in my life.”19 By October, Armstrong still wasn’t ready to perform again, but he was spotted on national television during game five of the World Series, cheering on the New York Mets with Lucille. Twelve days after watching the Miracle Mets clinch the World Series in Queens, Armstrong made his first small steps back to performing. John Barry, the composer behind the music of all the James Bond films, personally visited Armstrong in New York to present him with an opportunity to sing a brand-new song to be featured in the next Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Armstrong was honored that Barry had selected him to perform the song, “We Have All the Time in the World.” However, the younger fans of the film might have been puzzled by the choice, as Barry admitted. “ ‘All the Time in the World’ is my own personal favorite,” he said. “I think that might have had a lot to do with the experience we had in New York with Louie Armstrong and that afternoon we recorded it. It wasn’t the popular choice at the time, because we always used, you know, the Tom Joneses, the Nancy Sinatras. And I said, ‘Look, it’s about a man singing about the September of his years.’ And I thought Louie Armstrong singing ‘We Have All the Time in the World,’ it just rung true and [producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli] loved the idea, there were no arguments. But to work with this guy in the studio, he was the sweetest, humblest guy.”20
Armstrong had not set foot in a recording studio for over a year. The song’s lyricist, Hal David, could sense that Armstrong was still recovering, but he remained impressed by his innate professionalism. “He was a sick man at the time,” David said. “After he did his first take, he came over to me and, you know, ‘Did I do it good? Don’t be afraid to tell me, I want to do it good.’ ” In the end, Armstrong was more than just good. Always known for his gravelly singing, the year off seemed to wear down his voice more than ever, as it now sounded, in the words of Gary Giddins, “burned to a husk.” But if anything, the extra rawness and fragility of his health made him connect even deeper with the song’s emotions. Armstrong was truly in his September years, just thankful to be alive, and the joy and love in his voice is contagious throughout the performance. Armstrong loved the song and was happy to have had the opportunity to record it. “He came across and he thanked me for asking him to sing the song in the movie, which—I mean, I was in such awe of the gentleman that the fact that he took it upon himself to sing the song for us, we were so honored that he should come across and very gently say, ‘Thank you,’ ” Barry remembered. “It was a testament to the gentleman, the kind of gracious gentleman that he was.”21
The song had little impact upon the film’s release, probably because the audience expected and wanted to hear a younger star performer. However, almost twenty-five years later, it was used on a Guinness beer commercial in the United Kingdom and soon vaulted to the top of London’s music charts. Since then, it’s become one of Armstrong’s best-known later recordings, and, along with “What a Wonderful World,” a favorite at weddings. Yet nobody ever mentions that another song was recorded at the same session: an updated version of Armstrong and Billy Kyle’s old 1955 composition “Pretty Little Missy.” Torrie Zito wrote a beautiful string-laden arrangement of the tune and cut its regular tempo in half, adding an effective organ and underpinning it all with a gentle, loping shuffle. Armstrong responded with one of the happiest vocals of his entire career. But more unexpected are the sixteen bars of trumpet he plays. Armstrong hadn’t performed live in a year, but that trumpet was his life, and he still managed to practice a little every night. On “Pretty Little Missy,” he sounds slightly rusty on a couple of high notes, but otherwise he sounds stronger than he did on some of the records he made in 1966 and 1967. He even concludes with the patented sign-off phrase he used to end so many of his records, both vocally and on the trumpet. He didn’t know it at the time, but it was the final trumpet solo he would ever take inside of a recording studio.
Armstrong must have felt revitalized by the return to recording. In December, he told Esquire magazine, “There’s no such thing as on the way out. As long as you are still doing something interesting and good. You are in business as long as you are breathing.”22 A short time later, Armstrong was back on the big screen once again. His short cameo scene in the movie Hello, Dolly!, which was filmed in 1968, was finally released on December 16, 1969. Audiences would cheer when Armstrong’s beaming face appeared to sing a chorus of the title tune with Barbra Streisand. As the lyrics of Armstrong’s biggest hit said, it was so nice to have him back where he belonged. Just two days later, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was released, featuring Armstrong’s voice singing “We Have All the Time in the World.” Just like that, after sixteen months of recovery, Louis Armstrong was in the public’s mind again. He knew he was too weak to go back to performing with the All Stars, but he still had a need to entertain, to be in front of the public. Louis Armstrong was about to make his comeback. On January 13, 1970, Armstrong began the New Year by appearing on Dick Cavett’s late night talk show. Armstrong, probably eager to show the world that he hadn’t slowed down, actually brought along his trumpet, performing two original compositions, “Someday You’ll Be Sorry” and “Pretty Little Missy.” Unfortunately, his chops weren’t ready for the comeback, especially on the former, which featured a new arrangement that had him taking two full choruses up front, a shorter solo in the middle, and even a closing coda. In 1960, it would have been a piece of cake, but it was entirely too much for the Armstrong of 1970, who sounded almost like a beginner in his reading of the melody, his tone thinner and his pitch sounding a little sour and nowhere near as golden as it once did. As he soldiered on, his playing began boasting equal amounts of good ideas and faltering execution. And in his final coda, apparently out of gas, he had to pull the trumpet off his lips and instead sang the final note. It was a painful struggle for the man who was once the greatest trumpet player in the jazz world. Armstrong’s doctors soon told him that he would have to cut out the trumpet playing entirely, and after his shaky performance on national television he probably agreed that that would be the best idea. For the time being, he would go back to practicing after dinner.
But he could still sing and he could still talk, which made him a worthwhile guest on many television talk shows. He spent the first part of the year cracking up audiences and singing songs on The David Frost Show, The Tonight Show, and The Mike Douglas Show. He usually told stories about growing up in New Orleans or about Swiss Kriss. He was especially lively on the Frost show in February, discussing his upbringing in New Orleans with tales of prostitutes and the frequent gunfights he witnessed. Frost asked him, “Is that a good atmosphere for a musician?” Armstrong, without missing a beat, answered, “Well, I thought it was lovely,” breaking up the audience. Before he was done, Armstrong talked about stealing as a child, getting into trouble with the police, and eventually getting thrown into the Colored Waif’s Homes. He ended the show lit only by a spotlight and, backed only by Billy Taylor’s piano, sang a stunningly poignant version of “What a Wonderful World”; he had come a long way from that rough beginning in New Orleans. Before singing it, Armstrong said about the lyrics, “They mean so much.” Few people could really know the meaning of the phrase “wonderful world” as much as Louis Armstrong.
Though many black listeners and hardcore jazz fans had abandoned him, Armstrong’s overall popularity had never diminished. But the serious illnesses of 1968 and 1969 made him appear more mortal than ever. Also, everyone knew that in July, Armstrong would be celebrating his seventieth birthday (though truthfully, he’d be turning sixty-nine in August). Because of these circumstances, he began getting more respect than ever before. Armstrong co-hosted Douglas’s show for an entire week while every other guest, including young artists such as Tom Paxton and the Four Tops, talked about what an honor it was to be on the same program as such a legend. Douglas talked about going to a Tom Jones tribute at the Friars Club in April when Armstrong received a tremendous standing ovation. Fellow guest Sammy Davis Jr., who once criticized Armstrong over his Little Rock comments in 1957, now took great pains to convey to the audience just how important Armstrong was to the world.
But Armstrong didn’t show up just to receive love. He sang during every show, material ranging from “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” from his recent Disney album all the way back to “I Surrender Dear,” which he first recorded in 1931. He put so much into his vocals that the trumpet wasn’t even really missed, even on songs he used to love blowing on, such as “St. Louis Blues,” proof that he could continue to have a thriving career without his horn. Armstrong even got to interact with all the other guests, swapping show-business stories with Cesar Romero, singing “The Whiffenpoof Song” with Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop, and talking about the music business with Artie Shaw, who delighted in telling a story about Armstrong: “Erroll Garner—and I found out it was true—Erroll Garner was listening to Louie when Louie played at Basin Street East, a club in New York at that time,” Shaw related. “And Erroll was going out past the dressing rooms, he saw Louie in the dressing room with the door open. He stuck his head in, he said, ‘Hey, Pops, how’s everything?’ And Louie said, ‘White folks still in the lead.’ ” Armstrong literally doubled over with laughter remembering his line. Armstrong’s wit showed no signs of slowing down throughout the week. When Shari Lewis remarked that she didn’t know how Armstrong came up with his scat-singing improvisations, he replied, “You get hungry, you’ll do it!” Later in the week, Pearl Bailey called the show for an on-air phone conversation with Armstrong. When she asked if President Lyndon Johnson was the one who named Armstrong a goodwill ambassador, Armstrong replied, “Eisenhower, Johnson—one of them boys there,” sending the audience into hysterics.
On the final day of the week, Douglas asked Armstrong to name the five most admired people in his life. In addition to the expected choices of Lucille, King Oliver, Joe Glaser, and his mother, Armstrong now added Dr. Gary Zucker to the list. “And there’s my doctor, Dr. Gary Zucker, that’s the man that really brought me back to breathe again, because I was in bad shape when he took hold of me and brought me down to intensive care,” Armstrong said. “Very serious, you know. When you go down there, you’re getting ready to say bye-bye to the world, you know that. And this man brought me on in there and after he finished, he took me out of intensive care and put me on the floor where all the VIPs was. My room was among them. And when I was so sick, they’d come to see me, and when I got a little better, he had me to go around and visit them and we had a nice time. Then finally, he called Lucille, my wife, who took me home, and for the two years I stayed out, she’s the one that nursed me very beautifully, you know, took good care of me. I still visit Dr. Zucker once a week.” Armstrong was now singing on television again, but his horn was still on his mind. “I asked Dr. Zucker, I says, ‘What about the horn?’ So he reminded me of the Lord when Gabriel was getting ready to make some riffs on that horn—the Lord said, ‘No, Gabe, not yet, hold it! I’ll tell you when!’ ”
In May 1970, Armstrong began working on a new project, his first studio album in over two years. The album became known as Louis Armstrong and His Friends and was produced by Bob Thiele. Though Joe Glaser had died, his successor, Oscar Cohen, had very much the same mentality as his former boss: get Louis Armstrong a hit record. Thus, when planning Satchmo’s seventieth-birthday album, Cohen turned to Thiele, who was now running the Flying Dutchman label, which featured records from an eclectic mix of musicians ranging from Johnny Hodges and Oliver Nelson to Gato Barbieri and Gil Scott-Heron. Thiele enlisted Nelson to arrange and conduct the Armstrong sessions. Nelson was originally a modern-jazz saxophonist, but he soon became better known as a composer and arranger. By the late sixties, he was doing a lot of film and television work, and that “commercial” sound began to creep into his jazz writing, something that can be heard especially on the dated arrangements he turned in for Thelonious Monk’s Monk’s Blues album (1968) on Columbia. Still, he loved Armstrong and was quoted in the July 1970 issue of DownBeat as saying, “We couldn’t have had what we now know as American music without him. He created a style and he opened up this whole thing.”
Nelson definitely had that commercial sound down and the combination of his orchestrations and Thiele’s talents as a producer looked as if they could give Armstrong one last hit. Unfortunately, that’s where Louis Armstrong and His Friends failed. Of the album’s ten performances, only five are home runs: two beautiful standards, “Mood Indigo” and “My One and Only Love,”; an autobiographical take on “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In” titled “Boy from New Orleans”; a soulful remake of “What a Wonderful World”; and a moving version of the civil-rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” But Armstrong could only do so much with the rest of the material, which included inferior songs such as “His Father Wore Long Hair” and “This Black Cat Has Nine Lives,” the latter ending with the rumbling Armstrong voice letting out a gravelly “Meow!”: not one of his finest moments.
The sessions were, by all accounts, a joyous celebration. A birthday cake was served before the recording went down in the studio, and over 250 guests came in to pay their respects to Pops. Rock journalist Al Aronowitz was in attendance and painted a good picture of the atmosphere of that first day of recording. “As the party dwindled, many remained as an audience for the session, and there were rows of folding chairs,” he wrote. “Tony Bennett was sitting in one. Leon Thomas and Bobby Hackett and Eddie Condon also stayed. Ornette Coleman sat dangling his feet over the edge of the stage, sucking up a whistle every time he thought sick, old Pops hit a home run or made a shoestring catch. Miles [Davis] told me that it was as if the songs, the arrangements and the register of the orchestra had been designed to make it easy for Satchmo … But Satchmo fooled everybody by doing some unexpected fancy footwork.”23 Aronowitz also remembered Miles Davis remarking, “He don’ sound like a dyin’ man,” after hearing Armstrong sing. True, his voice is raspier than ever before on this recording, but his heart shines through, though apparently Miles was so concerned, he went up to Armstrong between takes and whispered, “Isn’t the orchestra too low for you?” Armstrong responded that he didn’t care about that and, after conversing for a while, shouted, “Always glad to see you, Miles!” as Davis walked back. When Davis was ready to leave, he told Aronowitz, “They take advantage of his age. When you’re that old, they really drain you to make you sound as if you’re in heaven. It don’t matter. He’s got so much soul, he makes it sound good anyway.”
Armstrong’s soul really shines through on “We Shall Overcome,” which remains one of his most heartfelt recordings, benefited by a choir made up of many of the guests who dropped in to pay tribute to the aging performer. The idea to record the civil-rights anthem was Thiele’s, though he admitted he was skeptical about whether Louis would want to do it. “But when I mentioned it,” Thiele said, “Louis’ eyes lit up. He reached up and pulled down a tape of the Martin Luther King funeral that he’d made. We played it and he said he loved the way the choir sang the piece during the service. We talked a lot about King and religion. Louis said that when he was sick in the hospital, he knew he was near death and he talked to God. Louis is very sincere about this. He sincerely believes a lot of trouble in the world today is because people don’t take the trouble to talk to God. I think Louis is quietly religious. He told me he hopes the Lord does help the poor black man. Then he added—‘Not the poor lazy black man though.’ ”24
Armstrong was all business when it came time to actually record the tune with his star-studded choir. “Pops quieted everybody down and said, ‘Now I want all you people out there to sing like you never sang before. This is a beautiful song and it’s our song,’ ” wrote Ralph J. Gleason. “And they sang it with him. A guest at the party told me it was the most moving experience of his life. ‘Louis gave that song, which even if it is the hymn of the Sixties’ integration movement, is still a tattered and threadbare song, almost a cliche, the kind of vocal sound you would expect from the celestial chorus.’ ”25 Eyewitnesses claimed he had tears in his eyes by the end of the performance. To think about Armstrong singing those lyrics and all the obstacles he overcame to achieve what he did—poor childhood, racism, becoming the scorn of younger black musicians and writers—he overcame it all to become the greatest, most important jazz musician of them all.
By July 1, Armstrong was just days away from celebrating his seventieth birthday and he became a constant presence in the press. All the depression surrounding his illness was gone, as were any regrets he had about his hard life as an entertainer. “I think I had a beautiful life,” he said, before imparting his philosophy. “I didn’t wish for anything I couldn’t get, and I got pretty near everything I wanted because I worked for it. I don’t keep nothing that I can’t use right now, so everything I have I’m still enjoying it.” While he remained upbeat and cheerful, he also knew he wasn’t going to last forever. Cryptically, he began discussing his funeral, still dreaming of a New Orleans send-off. “They going to enjoy blowing over me, ain’t they? Cats will be coming from California and everywhere else just to play … If anybody plays a bad note, Lucille’ll slap ’em right in the face. She’ll take care of that for me. I don’t want no part of it. Once I cut out forget it.” Armstrong even discussed the afterlife, saying, “When I go to the Gate, I’ll play a duet with Gabriel. Yeah, we’ll play ‘Sleepy Time Down South’ and ‘Hello, Dolly!’ Then he can blow a couple that he’s been playing up there all the time. He wants to be remembered for his music, just like I do.”26
But before Armstrong could get that far, he had some celebrating to do. On July 3, he flew out to Los Angeles for a tribute concert arranged by promoter Floyd Levin at the Shrine Auditorium. Hoagy Carmichael was the emcee and Armstrong got to enjoy the entire show from a rocking chair onstage—an appropriate choice, as Carmichael wrote and sang on Armstrong’s original 1929 recording of “Rockin’ Chair.” The two reprised it as a duet and Armstrong even got to close the show by singing three numbers.27 As he later wrote Levin, “That was my happiest birthday!”
One week later, George Wein devoted an entire evening of the Newport Jazz Festival to Armstrong’s honor. Wein brought the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, the Eureka Brass Band, and the New Orleans Classic Ragtime Band to the festival from New Orleans, hired gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, and even scored five famed jazz trumpeters to pay tribute to Armstrong, including Dizzy Gillespie. Proving that any hard feelings were officially in the past, Gillespie opened his tribute by saying, “Louis Armstrong’s station in the history of jazz, all I have to say, is unimpeachable. If it weren’t for him, there wouldn’t be any of us. So I want to take this moment to thank Louis Armstrong for my livelihood.” Jackson summed up the feelings of everyone present when she said, “If you don’t love him, then I don’t think you know how to love.” Wein filmed the entire day’s events, including the rehearsal, which captured an incredibly shrunken Armstrong greeting his fellow musicians. The only snag in the rehearsal came when Wein told Armstrong he wanted him to appear on stage unannounced in the middle of “Pennies from Heaven.” Armstrong wouldn’t hear of it. “No, ‘Sleepy Time’ should be first,” he told Wein. “That’s my theme song!” After some more discussion, Armstrong emphatically said, “They expect ‘Sleepy Time,’ ” meaning his audience. Bobby Hackett agreed and told Wein, “Yeah, if that’s the way he feels.” Tyree Glenn was also on hand to stand up for his old boss, and finally Wein relented. The lyrics and theme of the song had made some younger audience members, black and white, uncomfortable for decades, especially after the uproar that surrounded his 1951 Decca recording. But it was his theme song, and no other song meant more to him, and that evening at Newport, Armstrong opened with “Sleepy Time.” “When he dressed up for that evening—he had on a nice brown suit, as I remember—and there was a glow in his face, a glow in his eyes, there was a glow in his skin,” Wein recalled. “And he just sang so beautifully and he projected, it was like, ‘Hey, I’m here again. I’m still here, I’m still Louie Armstrong and I’m still going to give you a great evening of music and entertainment.’ ”28
Armstrong continued making the rounds on television throughout the summer of 1970 and even found time to record another album in August, Louis “Country and Western” Armstrong, for the Atco label. Armstrong had backed legendary country music pioneer Jimmie Rodgers on a 1930 record and he had recorded covers of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Cold, Cold Heart” for Decca in the 1950s, so it wasn’t exactly unfamiliar territory. Armstrong seemed to enjoy himself, imparting tunes like “Miller’s Cave” and “Almost Persuaded” with great amounts of humor. Some songs, such as the Youngbloods’ “Get Together,” aren’t exactly a natural fit, but overall the album has some very nice moments, though it is almost forgotten today, having never been issued in the CD or MP3 eras. It would turn out to be Armstrong’s final album.
Armstrong still occupied most of his time in his Corona den, transferring music to his reel-to-reel player, listening to and annotating the tapes, and even decorating the tape boxes with artistic collages. “Been off two years and haven’t been bored yet,” he wrote to Max Jones in 1970. “When I get through sending out photographs, [illegible] tapes that I receive from fans. And I got reels up there that I am trying to listen to because there was tape of me forty years ago.” But Armstrong’s retirement was about to come to an end, and he couldn’t be more excited. “I am rehearsing, blowing the trumpet and getting ready to open at the International Hotel [in Las Vegas] for two weeks, sharing the bill with the great Pearl Bailey,” he wrote. “I will have my original All-Stars with me. We are rehearsing twice a week at my house. My doctor came to our last rehearsal to hear me blow and he was perfectly satisfied. Also, he examined me thoroughly to see if my blowing affected the old ticker, ya know. And the beats were perfectly normal—yeahhhh!”29