A PACKED THEATER IN CHICAGO is in attendance to cheer on one of the most beloved musicians in town, Louis Armstrong. Armstrong walks to center stage, a devilish grin on his face; his eyes widen. He picks up his trumpet and begins blowing a tune from a current Broadway show. The audience goes wild at the mere sound of his horn. Armstrong creates a dazzling solo on the popular song, eliciting shouts from the crowd each time he hits a high note. As he finishes, he launches into a novelty number showcasing his talent as a singer and then transitions to a swinging scat interlude, his eyes closed. As he mugs ever so slightly, the crowd applauds his vocal inventiveness.
Armstrong disappears offstage and returns in tails, a pair of glasses, and a funny hat. Impersonating a preacher, he tells some of Bert Williams’s finest vaudeville jokes and delivers a satrical monologue, before resuming on his trumpet. The band plays “Sugar Foot Stomp”—a good old one—and Armstrong swings out with chorus after chorus of blues playing. When he finishes, he bows and grins, closes his eyes, and unleashes a smile to end all smiles.
Was this 1957, or 1967—the latter part of Armstrong’s career when he was derided by some as an Uncle Tom? No, the year was 1927. The Broadway number was Noël Coward’s “Poor Little Rich Girl,” one of Armstrong’s big features with Erskine Tate’s orchestra at the Vendome Theatre. The novelty song he scatted was “Heebie Jeebies” and the preacher routine harked back to his childhood in New Orleans, where he won applause for impersonations and sermons at the local church. A 1927 review found among Armstrong’s personal scrapbooks read, “Erskine Tate’s orchestra at the Vendome Theatre last week was a ‘wow.’ Louis Armstrong, who is one of [Heebie Jeebies’] pet writers, led the members of the popular orchestra in a ‘prayer’ with his cornet. During his ‘offering’ he wore a high silk hat, frocktail coat and smoked glasses. The fans are still giggling over the act as it was far the most amusing one ever seen here.”1 Such a review was not uncommon for Armstrong: “But when Luis [sic] Armstrong sang ‘My Baby Knows How,’ to Charles Harris, who slipped a wig over his head and played the role of the baby that Luis was singing about, the fans laughed themselves dizzy. The number was the best Tate had offered since Luis ‘preached the Gospel’ some weeks ago.” Yet another described him with admiration: “This talented musician plays, sings and dances.”2
Louis Armstrong won audiences over with showmanship, laughter, and sublime music, starting as early as 1927. It is the Armstrong of that year who is usually made out to be the serious artist, celebrated for the groundbreaking Hot Five and Hot Seven—recordings that announced the singularity of jazz as a true American art form. So it was no surprise that Christopher Porterfield’s 2006 Time magazine review of Armstrong’s 1920s work exclaimed, “Forget the Satchmo who sang and mugged his way through his later decades, wonderfully entertaining as he was. This is Armstrong the force of nature—exuberant, inspired, irresistible.”
The truth is, Louis Armstrong was a force of nature from the time he first picked up his horn as a teenager until the day he died in 1971. Yet the myth of the “two Armstongs” continues: the young serious artist and the old entertainer. In fact, Armstrong had always been a master showman. Every aspect of his character, including love of entertaining, was formed during his childhood in New Orleans, singing and scatting in a vocal quartet before even learning to play the cornet. When he joined the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra in New York in 1924, Henderson only grudgingly allowed Armstrong’s Bert Williams vaudeville routines on stage, fearing they were too rough around the edges for the predominantly upscale audience. This rankled Armstrong for years: “Yeah, but Fletcher didn’t dig me like Joe Oliver,” Armstrong recalled in a 1960 interview. “He had a million-dollar talent in his band and he never thought enough to let me sing or nothing. He’d go hire a singer, that lived up in Harlem, that night for the recording the next day, who didn’t even know the song. And I’d say, ‘Well, let me sing.’ ‘Nooo, NOOOO!’ All he had was the trumpet in mind. And that’s where he missed the boat. In those days, all Fletcher had to do was keep in his band the things that I’m doing now.”3
Even at age twenty-four, Armstrong was confident of his “million-dollar talent” to sing and entertain as well as play the trumpet. When he joined Erskine Tate’s symphony orchestra in Chicago in 1925, Armstrong’s popularity skyrocketed, leading to the vaunted Hot Five recordings for the Okeh label. The Hot Fives and the later Hot Sevens brim with funny bits, though the humorous songs are usually given short shrift.
This dismissal of Armstrong’s later years can be traced back to Gunther Schuller’s 1967 work Early Jazz, which systematically solidified the jazz canon of the 1920s. With a background in classical music, Schuller had no patience for Armstrong’s comedic tendencies and instead focused chiefly on his trumpet playing. Subsequent jazz histories followed Schuller’s lead, rightfully praising tunes like “West End Blues” and “Potato Head Blues,” but at the expense of less serious works such as “Irish Black Bottom” or “That’s When I’ll Come Back to You.” Twenty years later, Schuller followed Early Jazz with The Swing Era, in which he continued to praise Armstrong’s trumpet playing, but grew increasingly weary of his showmanship. By the time he addressed Armstrong’s later years, Schuller was despondent. “But the end was not what it should have been,” he wrote before suggesting that “as America’s unofficial ambassador to the world, this country should have provided him an honorary pension to live out his life in dignity, performing as and when he might, but without the need to scratch out a living as a good-natured buffoon, singing ‘Blueberry Hill’ and ‘What a Wonderful World’ night after night.”
Schuller was wrong. Armstrong didn’t resent singing “Blueberry Hill” every night. When asked in 1968 what single record he would take to a desert island, Armstrong responded, “I’d like to take ‘Blueberry Hill,’ ’cause right now, it’s like ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ in America when I sing it.”4 While Armstrong’s trumpet playing may have grown less exhibitionistic over the years, his singing, swinging, mugging, clowning, and playing the hell out of his horn were the same in 1955 as they were in 1925.
In a 1956 interview Armstrong discussed his longtime drummer Sid Catlett, but might subconsciously have been talking about himself. “Take a man like Sid,” he said. “He never did get his just praise like he should. He would get a write-up, sometime they’d say, ‘Well, he’s more showman now’—showmanship and blah blah. But they ain’t figuring out them notes are comin’ out the horn. And if you stand up there and play and don’t smile or something or show that you’re relaxing, then they call you a deadpan or—I don’t know.”5 Armstrong knew he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. In the late sixties, when riding the wave of “Hello, Dolly!,” Armstrong was asked about the critics of his style of performing. “Aw, I am paid to entertain the people,” Armstrong responded. “If they want me to come on all strutty and cutting up—if that makes ’em happy, why not?”6
Some writers accused Armstrong of coasting in his later years, relying on the same songs every night, mugging excessively, not really playing the horn as he once did. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As Dan Morgenstern has said, this period was in fact the most taxing of Armstrong’s career:
He’s out there all the time. He is the master of ceremonies. He is the lead singer. He is the lead player. He’s there on everything. He will be sure to close those ensembles with something that demands a little bit in the way of chops and he’s there from beginning to end. So that happens at a time in his career when he’s already, you know, this is … what, 1947? So he’s already in his late forties. This is a time when … a brass player of his range and using the kind of, not a non-pressure system but the kind of embouchure and technique that he has, which is very taxing. It’s almost incredible what he can do, you know, and continued to do.7
Armstrong once said, “I never tried to prove nothing, just always wanted to give a good show. My life has been my music; it’s always come first, but the music ain’t worth nothing if you can’t lay it on the public. The main thing is to live for that audience, ’cause what you’re there for is to please the people.”8 Armstrong didn’t consider the venues he played or the size of the audience; he always gave everything he had. “I don’t give a damn how many come in, if it was one or one thousand,” he said in 1960. “I ain’t goin’ play no louder or no softer, and I ain’t goin’ play no less. I might play a little more, but always up to par.”9 According to Humphrey Lyttelton, the British trumpet player and author, “Those who worked under him would often declare that, if the curtain went up on a show to reveal only a handful of customers in the house, their hearts would sink. They knew that he was about to work them twice as hard.” When a reporter once made the mistake of assuming that Armstrong took it easy when confronted with smaller crowds, Armstrong replied indignantly, “You don’t take it easy, never! One of those guys might have hitch-hiked three hundred miles to hear your band for the first time. He don’t do that to see you take it easy!”10
Armstrong lived for his fans, not for the hardened jazz critics who wanted to hear “West End Blues” every night. He was an international figure and the most beloved jazz musician of all time on the strength of his music and his personality, by being Armstrong “the artist” and Armstrong “the entertainer.”
Yet Armstrong’s mugging and eye rolling, his joy while entertaining, did embarrass many young black musicians in the 1940s and beyond. Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, a master showman himself, referred to Armstrong in a 1949 DownBeat article as a “plantation character.” Discussing Armstrong’s theme song “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” saxophonist Joe Evans, who played with Armstrong for a short period in the early 1940s, said, “Lyrics like ‘when old Mammy falls down on her knees’ and ‘hearing darkies singin’ and the banjos ringin” weren’t politically correct among young modern black musicians like me.”11 Miles Davis later wrote about Armstrong and Gillespie, “I hated the way they used to laugh and grin for audiences. I know why they did it—to make money and because they were entertainers as well as trumpet players … I didn’t look at myself as an entertainer like they both did. I wasn’t going to do it just so that some non-playing, racist, white motherfucker could write some nice things about me.”12 The thing Davis probably didn’t realize is that the “non-playing, racist, white” critics he spoke about gave Armstrong some of his worst reviews during the latter part of his career. What Davis, the other younger musicians, and the critics didn’t know was that Louis Armstrong didn’t care about pleasing other musicians or good reviews. In the last twenty-five years of his life, there was no other musician or entertainer who made so many people happy all over the world. “They know I’m there in the cause of happiness,” Armstrong said of his audiences, “And I don’t worry what nobody thinks.”13
Even if younger blacks were embarrassed by Armstrong’s stage demeanor as reinforcing racist stereotypes, his own feelings about racism were otherwise expressed to close friends backstage and in private. A good example of this can be heard on a private tape recording Armstrong made with his friend Benny Hamilton in Portland at the beginning of 1952. The subject matter turned to Josephine Baker. The legendary entertainer and civil rights pioneer made a rare trip to the United States in 1951 and refused to perform in front of segregated audiences. While this was to be applauded, Armstrong didn’t think she had gone far enough. “When this gal made all that stink, not only at the Stork Club, but she goes down in Miami and she raise all that hell because the colored people couldn’t come to see her act,” Armstrong said. “But she don’t raise hell so the colored people could come in the place after she leaves. So you know she’s vain.” He continued:
And if she had talent, she wouldn’t raise no hell at all. She wouldn’t have to open her mouth. Her ability would speak for itself. See what I mean? And you can take anybody that’s inferior and raise a whole lot of goddamn hell for no reason at all. But she’s going to come over here and stir up the nation, get all them ofays—people that think a lot of us—against us, because you take a bunch of narrow-minded spades, following up that jive she’s pulling—you understand?—then she go back with all that loot and everything and we’re over here dangling. I don’t dig her.14
This passage is key to understanding Armstrong’s views on racism. Trumpeter Lester Bowie summed up this side of Armstrong’s persona in the 1989 documentary Satchmo. “The true revolutionary is one that’s not apparent,” Bowie said. “I mean the revolutionary that’s waving a gun out in the streets is never effective; the police just arrest him. But the police don’t ever know about the guy that smiles and drops a little poison in their coffee. Well, Louis, in that sense, was that sort of revolutionary, a true revolutionary.”
Armstrong admitted as much in a 1964 Ebony profile titled “The Reluctant Millionaire.” In it, Armstrong discussed how he hadn’t performed in New Orleans in years because they didn’t allow an integrated band. “I can’t even play in my own hometown ’cause I’ve got white cats in the band,” he said. “All I’d have to do is take all colored cats down there and I could make a million bucks. But to hell with the money. If we can’t play down there like we play everywhere else we go, we don’t play. So this is what burns me up everytime some damn fool says something about ‘Tomming.’ ” Armstrong imparted more of what Bowie would call his “revolutionary” philosophy: “I know what it is; they want me to get out and walk up and down the street holding signs,” he said. “This is something I’m not gonna do. Not because I don’t believe in it. I think if some young cat feels that’s his way of helping out, that’s what he ought to do. But me, if I’d be out somewhere marching with a sign and some cat hits me in my chops, I’m finished. A trumpet man gets hit in the chops and he’s through. If my people don’t dig me the way I am, I’m sorry. If they don’t go along with me giving my dough instead of marching, well—every cat’s entitled to his opinion. But that’s the way I figure I can help out and still keep on working. If they let me alone on this score I’ll do my part, in my way.”15
Ebony’s stunning profile of Armstrong—complete with a picture of the trumpeter reading LeRoi Jones’s Blues People—was a follow-up piece to a 1961 article that similarly featured Armstrong discussing racial issues. “I can have lunch with President [Juscelino] Kubitschek in the presidential mansion in Brazil,” he said in 1961. “But I can’t walk into a hotel dining room in the South and order a steak or a glass of water, as any ordinary white man can do.” Armstrong shared stories of the racism he encountered on the road. “Not long ago, when we arrived late at a Midwest hotel to claim our reservations, the desk clerk told us, ‘Sorry, we’re all filled up,’ ” he recounted. “[Pianist] Joey Bushkin … kept hammering away at the desk clerk, who apparently made the reservation without knowing that Louis Armstrong was a Negro. The clerk finally let us stay. If it weren’t for Joey we would have slept in the street. I felt bad. The mattress was soft, the carpeting thick, but I didn’t appreciate the joint. To come from a concert where people are cheering you, taking your autograph, and then be given the icy brush by a hotel clerk can hurt real bad.” Armstrong also learned to be wary of wealthy white fans as well: “I don’t socialize with the top dogs of society after a dance or concert. Even though I’m invited, I don’t go. These same society people may go around the corner and lynch a Negro … The main thing is I don’t want anybody to hug or kiss me. Just treat me like a man.”16
The Ebony articles demonstrated Armstrong’s astute awareness of race relations in the United States, yet the jazz community ignored his sentiments. In a 1962 Playboy interview, Miles Davis praised Armstrong as a musician but spoke out against the practices of “Uncle Toms” in the jazz world. Duke Ellington read the Playboy article and agreed in a somewhat bitter interview in 1964, alongside his writing partner Billy Strayhorn. Ellington said, “[Miles] said if somebody wants to send some good representative down South, send Uncle, er, er, send Louis down there because he’ll make everybody happy! Suppose they enjoy it? It interferes with the race problem, you can’t sell your race for your personal gain.” Strayhorn responded, “He gets, Louis Armstrong gets, a big contract [based on the Uncle Tom thing] and he [Ellington] gets nothing, because he represents the opposite.” Ellington said, “It’s a matter of dignity, it’s a matter of embarrassing the race.”17 The “Uncle Tom” accusations followed Armstrong around throughout the 1950s and 1960s. He addressed them in the 1961 Ebony article: “Some folks, even some of my own people, have felt that I’ve been ‘soft’ on the race issue. Some have even accused me of being an Uncle Tom, of not being ‘aggressive.’ How can they say that? I’ve pioneered in breaking the color line in many Southern states (Georgia, Mississippi, Texas) with mixed bands—Negro and white. I’ve taken a lot of abuse, put up with a lot of jazz, even been in some pretty dangerous spots through no fault of my own for almost forty years.”18 As late as 1967, Armstrong expounded on the topic with Larry King. “Why, do you know I played ninety-nine million hotels I couldn’t stay at? And if I had friends blowing at some all-white nightclub or hotel I couldn’t get in to see ’em—or them to see me,” he said. “One time in Dallas, Texas, some ofay stops me as I enter this hotel where I’m blowing the show—me in a goddamn tuxedo, now!—and tells me I got to come round to the back door. As time went on and I made a reputation I had it put in my contracts that I wouldn’t play no place I couldn’t stay. I was the first Negro in the business to crack them big white hotels—Oh, yeah! I pioneered, Pops! Nobody much remembers that these days.”19
A few years after Louis Armstrong died, his widow, Lucille, was asked in a television interview if Louis was ever hurt by the negative way many in the black community portrayed him. “It hurt him greatly, because Louis has been one of the people all of his life,” she responded. “He’s never felt or wanted to be anything other than black.” She then recounted her husband’s public defamation of President Dwight Eisenhower during the 1957 Little Rock integration crisis, saying the President had “no guts” for allowing Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus control that situation. The interviewer was shocked; it was the first he had heard the story or that side of Louis. “Oh, you know, I mean, it’s a funny thing,” Lucille replied. “Nobody really stopped to really dig Pops, and it’s an unfortunate thing. He felt it deeply, he really did.”20 Armstrong was so aggrieved because he never forgot what he had had to endure because of the color of his skin. “You know, some times I sit around the house and think about all the places me and Lucille have been,” he said in 1964. “You name the country and we’ve just about been there. We’ve been wined and dined by all kinds of royalty. We’ve had an audience with the Pope. We’ve even slept in Hitler’s bed. But regardless of all that kind of stuff, I’ve got sense enough to know that I’m still Louis Armstrong—colored.”21
This book will reconsider the importance of Louis Armstrong’s later years, the most misunderstood period of the life of a genius. With apologies to James Brown, from 1947 to 1971, Armstrong was truly the hardest-working man in show business. He was sometimes criticized for playing the same songs night after night, but Armstrong had a show that worked, something that had taken him quite some time to perfect. This repetition allowed him to treat all of his audiences alike, whether he was playing in front of cognoscenti at the Newport Jazz Festival or in a high-school gymnasium in Hinsdale, Illinois. The blend of pure jazz, pop songs, comedic duets, and novelty numbers, all delivered by a New Orleans front line of trumpet, trombone, and clarinet on top of a hard-swinging rhythm section, was unlike anything else in jazz at that time. As Armstrong grew older, critics—with their need to pigeonhole artists—grew harsher in their condemnation of his music and stage presence. The negative comments could sometimes be stunning, as demonstrated in Wilfred Lowe’s review of a live Armstrong performance in 1954: “Armstrong, with his clowning, rolling eyes, suggestive growls and obscene asides … drags his choice of music from the heights of art to the level of blackface buffoonery.”22 Three years later, Whitney Balliett wrote, “A celebrated figure, Armstrong has recently begun offering in his public appearances little more than a round of vaudeville antics—clowning, bad jokes—and a steadily narrowing repertory.”23
Such criticisms still dog perceptions of his later career. Though Armstrong rarely addressed these issues, he had opinions about what he did onstage. Regarding his trumpet playing in his later years, Armstrong declared, “I’m playing better now than I’ve ever played in my life.”24 And on playing the same songs every night, his succinct rebuttal was, “Well, Beethoven didn’t change his too much, did he?”25 To critics who claimed Armstrong used clowning to win applause, Armstrong rebuked, “Well, it’s nice, but you don’t get no more hands than you would if you get that note right. The note’s what counts—I don’t care if you stand on your head.”26
Armstrong particularly had no tolerance for those who wished he would “go back to the way he used to be” in the 1920s. Most of those critics built an impression of the good old days solely from listening to records; Armstrong lived through them and could tell reality from myth. “What they say about the old days is corny,” he said in 1966. “They form their own opinions, they got so many words for things and make everything soooo big—and it turns out a—what you call it—a fictitious story. And when these writers come up so great they know every goddam thing, telling you how you should blow your horn. That’s when I want to shoot the son-of-a-bitch. Just because they went to Harvard or Yale, got to make the public realize how superior they are, so what they do to plain old jazz!”27 And when he was knocked for playing “set” solos in his later years, Armstrong was dumbfounded, as that was exactly how he—and many of his generation—had done it in the 1920s! “I do that song ‘Hello, Dolly!’ the same way every night ’cause that’s the way the people like it. And even back in the old days it was like that—when everybody was supposed to be improvising. Who knows who’s improvising? All trumpet players can hear what you play and they can play the same notes.… And always, once you got a certain solo that fit in the tune, and that’s it, you keep it. Only vary it two or three notes every time you play it—specially if the record was a hit. There’s always different people there every night, and they just want to be entertained.”28
This work will, I hope, shatter the myths and wrongheaded assumptions that have distorted how people view the later years of Armstrong’s career. Armstrong’s own words, gleaned from dozens of interviews, television appearances, and private tape recordings, will finally tell his side of the story, one that has been unfairly misrepresented for decades. Armstrong understood his importance and often documented events with his reel-to-reel tape recorder, which captured over a thousand hours of audio over the last twenty years of his life. He recorded concerts, interviews, conversations, joke-telling sessions, even selections from his massive record collection.29 Armstrong recorded frank discussions of race and his feelings on marijuana. When he wrote an important letter to his manager Joe Glaser in 1954, Armstrong spoke the words into his tape recorder to ensure he had a copy in his collection. He would write indexes for his reels and note all the details in his tape catalogs. Today, because of the foresight of Lucille Armstrong, who made sure to save Armstrong’s belongings in the years after he died, these tapes—along with other private writings Armstrong composed and saved during his life, thousands of photographs, scrapbooks, sound recordings, and much, much more—are available to researchers at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, New York. It is through these tapes that Louis got to speak for himself about his life and music, recording it all “for posterity.” Armstrong ended one of his most candid tapes in 1970 by addressing an invisible audience he knew would be listening decades after he died: “Well, folks, that was my life, and I enjoyed all of it. Yes I did. I don’t feel ashamed at all. My life has always been an open book, so I have nothing to hide.”30 Some of these tapes will be quoted in the ensuing pages, and the results should surprise those who have viewed latter-day Armstrong as nothing more than a commercial Uncle Tom, a mere shadow of his younger self. Armstrong was equally jubilant offstage and on-, but he could display a short temper when he felt wronged, usually involving swaths of blue language that might make some readers blush. Armstrong never erased his tapes, even when they exposed this more explosive side of his personality, perhaps knowing the insight they would provide into a man more complex than his world-famous smile allowed.
Critics who routinely lashed out at Armstrong during his later years may have had the loudest voices, but in no way did they represent the majority. These were the years when Armstrong’s popularity peaked, when he was hailed the world over as “Ambassador Satch.” In this time, he was the subject of an Edward R. Murrow documentary; was a ubiquitous presence on television, radio, and in the movies; wrote a successful autobiography; recorded with strings, big bands, small combos, with everyone from Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington to Dave Brubeck and the Dukes of Dixieland. He knocked the Beatles off the top of the pop charts when it was least expected. In many ways, these were the most important years of Armstrong’s life. With a bruised lip and an almost inhuman, punishing schedule, Armstrong worked harder than ever before to attain new heights of popularity, staying relevant and in demand at an age when most performers start to fade. With each passing year, the popularity of jazz in America diminished while, simultaneously, the popularity of Louis Armstrong around the world only grew. Because many jazz critics can’t embrace popular acts—and because “new” is so often equated with “better”—a lot of Armstrong’s most lasting works of these years were repudiated.
Too often, the young Armstrong is referred to as a “genius” while the older one is written off as a “clown.” I don’t believe the qualities that make a person a genius fade over time; once a genius, always a genius. Louis Armstrong was not only a musical genius, but he was also a once-in-a-lifetime character, a civil rights pioneer, an unimpeachable icon of entertainment, and one of the most unique human beings to ever grace the planet. The story of Louis Armstrong’s later years is the continuing saga of an American genius who beat all the odds, rising up from the lowest levels of poverty to become America’s “Ambassador of Goodwill.” Armstrong once addressed that title in the late 1960s, telling a friend that it made him feel good. “It’s nice to hear that,” he said, “because—I mean—the kid has come a long way.”31
To paraphrase a song he once made famous, why not take all of him?