Stomp Off, Let's Go: The Early Years of Louis Armstrong by Ricky Riccardi

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Though Louis Prima recorded widely and well throughout the '30s, achieving great popularity and visibility, his name is often conspicuous by its absence from standard jazz histories. Dealing with him seriously means confronting one aspect of New Orleans jazz which chroniclers, almost as a point of honor, seem to find distasteful.

That, of course, is the matter of showmanship. The flamboyance of Prima's latter career, in which his identity as a trumpeter became almost totally subordinate to his role as a high-energy showman, seems to offend those who would represent Jazz as an art music of solemnity and unstinting high purpose. The Las Vegas image, the raucous sound of Sam Butera and the Witnesses, the risque badinage with singer Keely Smith—such make it all too easy to mistake this showbiz aspect of Prima for the creative substance, ignoring his past achievements and core musicianship.

Far from being exclusive to such as Prima, the idea of hot music as an arm of highly commercialized show business runs throughout the early years. It's present in the singing, dancing, and impromptu comedy skits of the dance bands, including those that prided themselves on their dedication to jazz. Its absence is a root cause of the failure of the great Jean Goldkette orchestra, an ensemble which either stubbornly resisted advice to "put on a show" or acquiesced in a manner landing somewhere between perfunctory and downright hostile.

For New Orleans musicians, especially, showmanship was—and remains—a fact of life. Was it not Louis Armstrong, above all, who understood the relationship between music and entertainment, and never wavered in his application of it, even in the face of critical hostility? "You'll always get critics of showmanship," he told British critic Max Jones. "Critics in England say I was a clown, but a clown—-that's hard. If you can make people chuckle a little; it's happiness to me to see people happy, and most of the people who criticize don't know one note from another.""

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- Richard Sudhalter, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz, 1915-1945. [1999]

I had no idea that the reverse chronology that Ricky Riccardi, Director of Research Collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum, used to write his Pops Trilogy wasn’t intentional until I read the following in the Acknowledgement that closes Stomp Off, Let's Go: The Early Years of Louis Armstrong - “It was never my intention to write the Armstrong saga in reverse chronological order, but it ended up being a blessing thanks to the sudden accessibility of several important sources that turned up in the last decade.”

Here Ricky’s statement of non-intent within the contents of the full extract:

“The more I learned about Armstrong, the more it seemed that everyone agreed about the greatness of his early years; it was after 1928 when the biographers, critics, historians, and fans disagreed regarding his later career path: did he sell out? Did he go commercial? Did he waste his talent? Was he nothing but an Uncle Tom? I knew my response — a resounding no to each of those questions — and sought to learn as much as I could about Armstrong's post-1928 career, interviewing friends of his and the surviving musicians in his band, and eventually listening to all 700+ reel-to-reel tapes compiled by Armstrong himself, now a part of the Louis Armstrong House Museum, where I have served as director of research collections since 2009.

The results were two books, What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong's Later Years and Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong, as well as a slew of CD, LP, and streaming reissues I co produced and/or wrote notes for, shining a big, broad spotlight on Armstrong's post-1928 career. I toyed with the idea of writing about his early years, but I felt that after his own Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans and the work of writers such as Gary Giddins, Laurence Bergreen, Thomas Brothers, Terry Teachout, Brian Marker, Gunther Schuller, and Robert O'Meally, there wouldn't be much more to add to the story.

If I had written about Armstrong's early years first and done the trilogy in strict chronological order, I would only have been able to rehash what had already been in print for many decades. It was never my intention to write the Armstrong saga in reverse chronological order, but it ended up being a

a blessing thanks to the sudden accessibility of several important sources that turned up in the last decade.”

These recently “turned up important sources” include:

[1] a copy of Louis Armstrong’s original typewritten manuscript for Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans as discovered by Michael Stearns the son of Monroe Stearns who served as the editor for Prentice Hall which published Louis autobiography,

[2] a 1960 draft copy of Lillian Harding Armstrong’s autobiography as told to Danish Jazz writer and historian Chris Albertson which allowed Lil’s voice to play a bigger role in the telling of Pops’ story,

[3] the acquisition of drummer Zutty Singleton's personal photo collection, some of which was used to populate the images used in Stomp Off, Let’s Go,

[4] Yoshio Toyama - “The Satchmo of Japan” - 1973 interview with Louis sister, Beatrice “Mama Lucy” Collins
[5] Bruce Raeburn at Tulane Hogan Jazz Archives “made available hundreds of interviews with Jazz pioneers,”

[6] Melissa Webster also at Tulane’s Jazz Archives “helped me access the research of the late Tad Jones who had been working on the definitive book of Louis Armstrong’s early years, 

[7] the research of James Karst about whom Ricky states: “ Since Tad Jones' passing, no one in New Orleans has made as many ground-breaking discoveries about Louis Armstrong’s early years,”

[8] access to the William Russell notes of the interviews he conducted for the 1939 book Jazzmen courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection.

All of which provided Ricky with a kind of primary-source-heaven to tell a more accurate and enhanced story of Pops’ formative years.

And what an inspiring story it is made even more so by Ricky’s wonderful ability as a storyteller. He never gets in the way and lets the story tell itself.

As Ricky unfolds it year-by-year we witness a heart rending example of a classic Horatio Alger rags-to-riches tale with an ascendancy replete with colorful chapter titles that include “Blessed Assurance [1912],” “Destined to be Great [1914-1915],” “The Memory of the Bullies and Trouble Makers [1916],” “Just Wasn’t My Time to Die, Man [1917],”  “Had to Eat [1917-1918], “Descending the Sky Like a God [1919-1920],” and “Big-Headed Motherf***ers, [1924 -1925].”

Ricky takes us on a journey that helps us understand the circumstances and influences that shaped the musician that Louis grew up to be. While doing so, he also stresses that his values as embodied in “Pops - The Musician as Entertainer” - never changed even if his repertoire did. 

Louis’s primacy as an entertainer is stressed over and over.

As early as the age of eleven, Louis was hamming it up with his friends as part of a Barbershop quartet the benefits of which were, as Ricky recounts it:

“Armstrong couldn't have known it at the time, but harmonizing with his friends developed his ear and provided an invaluable music education that would last a lifetime. Though he rarely liked to get into the nuts and bolts of music theory, in one interview from 1954, Armstrong shared advice he gave to a young trumpet player who struggled to improvise. "I said, 'Well, all you gotta do is think of you singing in a quartet and if somebody's playing the lead on a trumpet, you just play the second to every note he hits, the same as if you're singing a duet,'" Armstrong related. "He said he never thought of it that way. That's the only way to look at it."

Thus, for the rest of his career as both a vocalist and a trumpeter, Armstrong fell back on the lessons he learned in the quartet. When he needed to play or sing lead, he always had the melody front and center in his mind; when he needed to blend in an ensemble, it was never a problem; and even when he was improvising, the lead would be running through his head at all times, allowing him the freedom to create new melodies as if he was "singing a duet." Historians and critics have long debated whether Armstrong played like he sang or sang like he played but the truth is both were connected to the same soul. "You make the same notes, you know, like the horn," Armstrong explained about his singing. "That's why we could scat and do things like that I always would sing. I was singing before I played the horn, see." Armstrong's later bassist Arvell Shaw once said of him, "He would have been a singer regardless if he had played trumpet or not."

Although it may be hard to credit, as early as the age of thirteen, Pops was also an astute observer of trends in popular music, for example:

"It's a Long Way to Tipperary" achieved worldwide popularity after Irish tenor John McCormack recorded it in November 1914, a few months after the start of World War I. The Onwards choice of "Tipperary" is yet another example of men like Oliver and Perez playing the most popular songs of the era, a lesson not lost on Armstrong.” [Emphasis mine.]

Another feature of Ricky’s writing that I find to be particularly helpful is the way in which he summarizes certain milestones in Pops’ career. For example:

“The story of the Karnofskys buying a cornet for Armstrong would not be widely known until Gary Giddins published it in his 1988 book Satchmo. Thus, Finola's statement does seem to tie everything together: in late 1914 or early 1915, Armstrong returns to live with Mayann, works on the coal cart with Morris Karnofsky and selling newspapers for Charlie Wilson, falls under the spell of Joe Oliver at Pete Lala's, spots a cornet at Uncle Jake's pawn shop near the Karnofskys' new residence at 427 South Rampart, gets the Karnofskys to advance him the money for the instrument, and pays it off with funds earned from both the coal wagon and from selling newspapers.

However it happened and whenever it happened, Armstrong never forgot the importance of the Karnofsky family in his early life. "As I said before I must have been born with talent," he wrote in 1969. "All that I needed was a little encouragement to bring it out of me. And they did thank God. I was just a kid trying to find out which way to turn. So that Mayann and Mama Lucy could feel proud of their Louis (me). Not trying to be too much, just a good ordinary horn blower. The Jewish people sure did turn me out in many ways." Armstrong would wear a Star of David around his neck for much of his adult life, a way of remembering the impact the Karnofsky family made on him.”

Or when in 1917, King Oliver joins the Original Creole Band for the grand opening of the Royal Gardens [to become more famous as the Lincoln Gardens] in Chicago, Ricky writes:

“Louis Armstrong was also at the train station that day to see Oliver off. He called it "a sad parting" but also summed it up as "that's Show Business for you." He had no time to sulk because he had to go to work. "The minute the train pulled out, I was on my way out of the Illinois Central Station to get back up on my cart, and continue to deliver my load of coal, when Kid Ory called to me," Armstrong recalled.

Ory told Armstrong he "had heard a lot of talk about Little Louis" and that the boys in the band "told him to go get Little Louis to take Joe's place," Armstrong recalled. "I went to see him and told him that if he got himself a pair of long trousers I'd give him a job," Ory said.

Louis was ecstatic and immediately ran home to share the news with his mother. "I had been having so many bad breaks, until I just had to make a beeline to Maryann," he wrote. "She was the one who had always encouraged me to carry on with my cornet playing, since I loved it so well." "Within two hours, Louis came to my house and said, 'Here I am. I'll be glad when 8 o'clock comes. I'm ready to go,'" Ory said. Looking back, Ory reflected, "There were many good, experienced trumpet players in town, but none of them had young Louis' possibilities."

Armstrong's whole life had seemingly been building up to this moment. Shooting off the gun on New Years Eve, learning the cornet in the Waif's Home, playing for Ory at the Labor Day parade, the encouragement of the Karnofskys, the lessons and mentoring of Oliver, the protection of Black Benny and Slippers, the countless hours of playing honky-tonks such as Pons's and Matranga's with the countless bullets sizzling past him, the excitement of the Brown Skin Jazz Band, the battles with Kid Rena, all of it had led him here.

He was ready.”

The last third of the book deals with developments in Louis’ life that led to his fame with more of Ricky’s excellent summations on hand. For example:

in 1919, Louis began an association with Fate Marable’s band on the Streckfus Mississippi River Steamboats and aside from his famous gravel voice which he got from a persistent cold while on the river boats, Ricky observes:

"There was a saying in New Orleans," drummer Zutty Singleton once said. "When some musician would get a job on the riverboats with Fate Marable, they'd say, 'Well you're going to the conservatory.'" Armstrong's three seasons with Marable represented his conservatory years in every sense of the word. He entered the world of the riverboats in 1919, armed with only a trout sandwich and a jar of olives, unable to read arrangements, too bashful to take a featured solo, derided for puffing when he blew, all while doing his best to ignore racist comments from ignorant passengers. By 1921, he was reading, soloing, singing, scatting, dancing, playing slide whistle and slide trumpet, doing comedy, coining slang, inspiring youngsters, and "descending the sky like a god" in the words of Jack Teagarden.”

As to where Louis’ career stood when he got the call in 1921 to leave New Orleans to join his beloved Papa Joe Oliver in Chicago at the newly renamed Lincoln Gardens, Rickey astutely puts it this way:

“Armstrong was leaving with a musical education that would get him through the rest of his career. "He was gathering knowledge all the time," Danny Barker said of Armstrong's New Orleans years. "When Louis went to Chicago, Louis was prepared."76 His cornet style now dipped into four separate buckets: the tone of Bunk Johnson, the fire of Joe Oliver, the high notes of Henry "Kid" Rena, and the harmonic knowledge of Buddy Petit. He had mastered their styles, mastered what was called "jazz," mastered the blues, which he played for countless hours in the honky-tonks.

But there was so much more to his musical upbringing than just blues and jazz: the experience of playing ragtime from the "red back book"; playing waltzes, rhumbas, foxtrots for dancers; learning Art Hickman and Paul Whiteman arrangements directly from the records; interpreting the latest pop music hits in every band he played in; singing and harmonizing with his quartet; scatting and playing slide whistle and slide cornet on the riverboat; instilling his heart into funeral marches with the Tuxedo and Excelsior Brass Bands; humming along with the Yiddish lullabies sung by the Karnofsky family; gobbling up the operatic stylings of Enrico Caruso, Amelita Galli-Curci, and Luisa Tetrazzini on his Victrola; reciting Bert Williams's comedic monologues; singing all those songs about "Katie" and her assorted body parts. Armstrong's goal was to be a complete musician, one who could master every style, and he achieved it by the age of 21.

When a friend spotted him at the train station and asked, "Where are you going, Dipper?" Armstrong responded with pride: "Yeah man, I'm going up to Chicago to play with my idol, Papa Joe."”

Ricky is also fond of setting up “surprises” in his narrative with transitional statements like -

“Oliver also occasionally took Armstrong out on the town to hear Chicago's other jazz bands. One night they ended up at Bill Bottoms's Dreamland Café, where the orchestra was led by violinist Mae Brady. Oliver pointed at the band's pianist and told Armstrong, "That there is Miss Lil."

Oliver couldn't have known it at the time, but that simple gesture would change the sound of twentieth-century music — and eventually drive Louis Armstrong out of his band.” [Emphasis mine].

He follows this provocative statement with the chapter entitled “The Hot Miss Lil [1922-23] which of course sets the stage for their union as a couple and the resulting landmark Hot Five and Hot Sevens recordings under Pops’ leadership which “changed the sound of twentieth-century music.”

In his closing chapters of Stomp Off, Let’s Go, Ricky discusses these recordings in a way that makes them an informal track-by-track annotated discography. But this is not just any annotated discography, this one is brimming with a staggering bunch of original insights like the following one about Cornet Chop Suey:

 “But two caveats must be mentioned when discussing Armstrong's ‘ideas’ on "Cornet Chop Suey"—they weren't improvised, and they might not even have been his to begin with.” [!]

Or this fascinating assessment of what the introduction to West End Blues may represent in terms of a broader perspective of Louis’ life:

“The "introduction" turned out to be an unaccompanied trumpet cadenza that would soon take its place as one of the most iconic moments of twentieth-century music. In about 13 seconds, Armstrong drew on nearly everything that had inspired him up to this point in his career: the blues he immersed himself in in New Orleans, the tone of Bunk Johnson, the chromaticism of Buddy Petit, the classical patterns shown to him by Lil Hardin, the high notes of Kid Rena and B. A. Rolfe, the operatic stylings of Enrico Caruso, the drama of everyday life itself, the strength garnered from working on the coal cart, the hunger forged from not knowing where his next meal was coming from, all coming together to service a composition by Joe Oliver.”

The concluding chapters are also full of interesting anecdotes including Louis and Bix Beiderbecke jammin’ in Louis’ Chicago hotel room when Bix was in town with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra, Pops’ engrossing interest in the “sweet music” of the Guy Lombardo Orchestra and Armstrong’s time on the sweet music band headed up by Carroll Dickerson.

The closing Epilogue recounts the roles of Lil Hardin and King Oliver as the “architects of Louis’ stardom,” the incredibly nostalgic 1949 reunion with Captain Joseph Jones of the Colored Waif’s home in New Orleans and contains this poignant description of Louis’ New Orleans roots in the book’s closing paragraph:

“Armstrong may have never moved back to New Orleans, but the lessons he learned in that city were present every time he stepped on stage or in a recording studio.

‘You know, I never did leave New Orleans,’ he claimed in 1950. ‘Right now I keep the essence of New Orleans every time I play.’

“‘They say, 'Where would you live?'” Armstrong asked in a tape-recorded conversation made in 1965. "I said I don't care where, I'm born in New Orleans, that's my hometown. That's it. I don't care where, I'll go to Guadalupe, wherever it is— [I'm a] New Orleans boy, and that's it."

Thus, it was fitting that the last words he sang on stage at the Waldorf in 1971 was the phrase "Boy from New Orleans." Armstrong knew what it meant to miss New Orleans, to love New Orleans, to celebrate New Orleans, to be hurt by New Orleans, and to hate New Orleans —but through it all, he knew that in many ways, he was New Orleans, with all of its complexities.

And over 50 years after his passing, he's still New Orleans.”

Aside from being a totally delightful reading experience, Ricky’s Pops trilogy deserves to be cherished by every Jazz fan because with a nod to Dizzy Gillespie when asked about Louis’ influence on his playing: “No him, no us.”

My trilogy of the Jazz equivalent of The Greatest Story Ever Told is up on my bookshelf right next to The Bible and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

Where are you going to put yours?

For order information, go here.

‘St. Louis Blues’: W.C. Handy’s Singular Song of Woe

 

Today, Nov. 16th, is the 150th anniversary of the birth of W.C. Handy and JazzProfiles is proud to celebrate it with this piece by the distinguished scholar and curator, John Edward Hasse.

Born 150 years ago this month, the composer fused the pain of love with a rich musical form to craft the most enduring blues of all time.

By John Edward Hasse

Nov. 10, 2023 Wall Street Journal

“In 1893, cornetist W.C. Handy, broke and hungry in St. Louis, had reached a low point in his life. When he encountered “a woman whose pain seemed even greater” than his, he heard her mutter, “Ma man’s got a heart like a rock cast in de sea.” In 1914, now a successful Memphis bandleader, Handy drew on her words, he said, as well as on his imagination and his familiarity with African-American folk culture to write “St. Louis Blues.” “The wail of a lovesick woman for her lost man,” as Handy called it, the piece went on to become one of the most familiar, widely performed American songs of all time. Its opening lines became part of the soundscape:

I hate to see the eve-ning sun go down,

Hate to see the eve-nin’ sun go down.

’Cause my baby, he done left this town.

In respectable households in late 19th-century America, music such as the blues and ragtime were considered disreputable. The son and grandson of preachers who frowned upon secular music, Handy—who was born 150 years ago on Nov. 16, 1873, in Florence, Ala.—had studied classical music and conceded that he “took up with low forms hesitantly.”

As he traveled the South as an itinerant musician, Handy listened closely to the mélange of melodies in the air, began notating songs, and adapted some for publication. He titled his 1941 autobiography “Father of the Blues,” but he did not invent them. Instead, he was the first to notate, arrange, publish and popularize the idiom that previously existed only in aural tradition. He transmuted a fleeting form into something permanent. His songs primed the public’s ears for the down-home, country blues that record companies began issuing in the 1920s. The blues would become a mighty river that flowed through most styles of American music. As a form, its three-line lyric and 12 bars of music washed into country music, jazz, rock ’n’ roll and soul.

Handy gave the world a singular song: fresh, inspired and infectious. With its three themes, “St. Louis Blues” is much richer in musical form and contrast than expected. The first and third themes, both 12-bar blues, pique interest by offering breaks, and the final section includes some boogie-woogie bass figures. The remarkable second theme, a 16-bar strain, is in a minor key and in tango rhythm, a dance step that was wildly popular in 1914. The three different melodies, with their seemingly bent (or “blue”) notes, are singable and memorable.

With their slang and vivid imagery, the lyrics are catchy. While the tone of “St. Louis Blues” is lamenting, the act of singing such a blues provides catharsis for the singer and, by extension, the audience.

Handy promoted “St. Louis Blues” as both composer and publisher. In the 1920s, more than 60 jazz recordings were made of it, and the number increased in the 1930s. Ultimately, whether as a vocal or instrumental, “St. Louis Blues” became the second most recorded American song (“Star Dust,” by Hoagy Carmichael and Mitchell Parish, is first), with versions by artists as varied as Pete Seeger, Chuck Berry, Angela Brown, George Thorogood, Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong (who made it a signature tune), Sun Ra and Stevie Wonder with Herbie Hancock. As of 2023, more than 2,200 recordings have been made in the jazz tradition alone and hundreds in other genres.

The piece, poet Langston Hughes wrote in 1941, “is sung more than any other song on the air waves, is known in Shanghai and Buenos Aires, Paris and Berlin—in fact, is heard so often in Europe that a great many Europeans think it must be the American National Anthem.” During World War II, when the Nazis denounced jazz, musicians evaded the authorities by masking the song as “La Tristesse de Saint Louis” (“The Sadness of Saint Louis”), “Das Lied vom Heiligen Ludwig” (“The Song of Saint Louis”) or the Czech protest “The Song of Resetová Lhota.”

The song has taken on many guises. In 1940 pianist Earl “Fatha” Hines recorded it as “Boogie Woogie on St. Louis Blues,” in 1944 Glenn Miller’s band transformed it into “St. Louis Blues March,” and in 1955 Perez Prado made it into a mambo. The original can be heard in at least 40 motion pictures, most notably the 16-minute “St. Louis Blues” of 1929, in which Bessie Smith, in her only screen appearance, sings with affective power and majestic sorrow.

In a scene from the documentary “Satchmo the Great” that was filmed in 1956, two years before Handy’s death, the camera captures a touching moment when Louis Armstrong performs “St. Louis Blues” in an overblown orchestral arrangement conducted by Leonard Bernstein, while in the front row the aged, now-blind composer listens transfixed to his signature composition, dabbing tears from his eyes.

The song’s many ideas, compelling contrast, evocative lyrics and plaintive mood—along with Handy’s energetic marketing—combined to make “St. Louis Blues” the most significant and successful blues of all time.”

Mr. Hasse is curator emeritus of American music at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. His books include “Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington” (Da Capo) and “Discover Jazz” (Pearson).

Pleasants on Pops - Louis Armstrong by Henry Pleasants

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

I guess I should be grateful to the Whippanong Library of the Morris County Free Library system in New Jersey for a remainder of Henry Pleasants The Great American Popular Singers [1974] as I was able to buy it as a used edition for a very modest price.

On the other hand, it is sad to note that such a definitive book by an educated, recognized authority on the subject is no longer available to a wider public.

Henry Pleasants received his early training as a professional musician at the Curtis Institute in his native Philadelphia. For over thirty-five years he served as music critic and contributor to leading newspapers and musical journals both in the United States and abroad. Besides writing The Agony of Modern Music, Serious Music—and All That Jazz and The Great Popular Singers, he edited and translated volumes of criticism by Eduard Hanslick and Robert Schumann as well as The Musical Journeys of Louis Spohr. Mr. Pleasants also served as London music critic for the International Herald Tribune and London editor of Stereo Review.

From Jolson to Streisand, The Great American Popular Singers presents essays on the singers whose artistry, innovative styles and sheer vocal accomplishments made American popular song uniquely what it was— the true people's music of the Western world.

Henry Pleasants shows us through the lives, careers and evaluation of their musical art, why singers as different as Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, Johnny Cash, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee, Elvis Presley and over a dozen others, are closer to the tradition of bel canto — the basis of all great singing — than are all but a very few classical singers.

Mr. Pleasants finds this great vocal tradition alive in every field of popular music: in country singers (Hank Williams), gospel singers (Mahalia Jackson), blues singers (Bessie Smith and B. B. King), movie and theater singers (Judy Garland and Ethel Merman) and in scores of other singers who are introduced and put in perspective around these central figures.

"The  best of them,"  he comments, "—and some who have not been quite the best — may, in singing for their supper, have harvested a feast. But their familiar designation and dismissal as mere entertainers has discouraged a just appreciation of their artistic accomplishment.” 

No one reading The Great American Popular Singers can ever again think of popular singers as less than they really are: not merely entertainers but, as is so vividly shown in twenty-two brilliant profiles and introductory chapters, musical artists working in a great vocal tradition.

As a case in point, I’ve yet to find an analysis and explanation of what made Louis Armstrong a great vocalist that approaches the following treatment by Henry Pleasants in terms of coherence and cogency.

At long last, Pops gets his due as one of the greatest influences in American popular singing in the 20th century, as well as, a recognition of the his uniqueness as a song stylist.

“The Bessie Smith legend dates from her fatal injury in an automobile accident, and has been nurtured by tendentious accounts of what happened between the time of the crash and her death in a Clarksdale, Mississippi, hospital a few hours later. Not until many years had passed would a retrospective assessment of her artistic stature grant her a more satisfactory immortality.

How different the destiny of Louis Armstrong! He had been, at the time of his death, on July 6, 1971, a living legend for half a century, not just to his own black people, nor to the American people as a whole, but to millions of people around the world. He had been, probably, the most famous musician of the century. When a Johannesburg, South Africa, newspaper, in the summer of 1970, polled fifty-six persons at random to find out how many could remember the names of the Apollo 11 astronauts, one girl identified not Neil Armstrong, but Louis Armstrong, as the first man to set foot on the moon.

An exceptional, if charming, notion! The very word legend seems to imply semifiction, or history distorted and inflated by fancy. But Louis Armstrong, lunar adventure aside, had been everything the legend held him to be: the greatest of early jazz cornet and trumpet players; a unique and improbable vocalist; an exuberant and extrovert celebrity; a showman of genius; and an American ambassador more widely known and more warmly accepted than anyone who ever left the White House with a letter of accreditation in his pocket.

It was all true. It was all attractive. Yet, in the end, it was all wrong. Not factually wrong, but wrong because the legend was unjust to the man. Most legendary figures, being only human, fail to live up to the legend. The failure is condoned or denied because the legend, for sentimental or political reasons, is preferred to the truth. In Louis Armstrong's case it was the other way around. The truth surpassed the legend — and challenged credulity!

It must seem not merely improbable, but sheerly impossible that any one man could have exerted so original and so decisive an influence on the evolution of Western music, least of all an essentially unlettered black trumpet player from the slums of New Orleans. But he did. Almost everything we have heard in the past forty years in jazz [1974 at the time of this writing], and in a great amount of popular music not usually associated with jazz, short of folk and rock, derives from Armstrong. As jazz encyclopedist and critic Leonard Feather has written:

“Americans, unknowingly, live part of every day in the house that Satch built. A riff played by a swinging band on television, a nuance in a Sinatra phrase, the Muzak in the elevator, all owe something to the guidelines that Louis set.”

It was he who liberated the improvising virtuoso jazz musician, as soloist, from the tight collective improvisation of New Orleans jazz. It was he who, by his own example on trumpet, pushed back the technical boundaries of traditional musical instruments. It was he who broke the stereotyped rhythmic procedures of early jazz. It was he, more decisively than Bessie Smith, who established those characteristics of American popular singing that distinguish it from any kind of singing based on traditional European conventions and example.

That he should have exerted so decisive an influence on the art of the American popular singer must seem, at first glance, paradoxical. Louis, although certainly one of the most popular singers of the century, was always thought of primarily as an instrumentalist, as a trumpet player, as one who abused his vocal cords to spare his much abused chops. The common view of his singular vocalism is that it proceeded from his playing, that he sang as he played insofar as limitations of vocal compass would permit. One is tempted to suggest that it may have been the other way around, that his playing was an extension of his singing.

His instrumental virtuosity was, I believe, deceptive. The high notes, those devastating excursions above high C, unique and unprecedented in their time, diverted attention from the pervasive oratorical character and eloquence of his playing. Among those whose attention was diverted, and disastrously, were the jazz players of the next generation, and not only the trumpet players. They equaled and even surpassed him in range and dexterity, but they overlooked or ignored or disdained his roots in song.

An important contribution to the vocal or rhetorical aspects of Louis' musicality may be identified, I would suggest, in his association with the "classic" blues singers in the 1920s. The records he made with Bessie Smith are the most familiar example. But he also recorded with many others, among them Chippie Hill, Ma Rainey and Clara Smith.

More was involved in this than Louis' influence upon them or theirs upon him. Jazz and blues converged in the 1920s, much as swing and rhythm-and-blues would converge briefly in Kansas City a decade later. Not only Louis Armstrong, but also Red Allen, Sidney Bechet, Jimmy Harrison, Coleman Hawkins, Fletcher Henderson, James P. Johnson, Tommy Ladnier and Don Redman, among others, worked behind the female blues singers of the time. This collaboration required a kind of playing markedly different from the polyphonic procedures of New Orleans jazz. The instrumentalist both complemented and commented upon the singer's vocal utterance, perpetuating the call and response patterns of some African and early American black idioms, and evolving a concept of instrumental attack, phrase and cadence that would become one of the most distinctive and also one of the most attractive characteristics of jazz.

That Louis Armstrong never forsook or slighted the musician's oratorical responsibility is attributable also to the sensible and restraining influence of Joe "King" Oliver, whose band he joined in Chicago in 1922. He emphasized his debt to Oliver in countless interviews.

Louis rejoiced, of course, in a prodigious facility. As a young man fresh from New Orleans, determined to make his mark in the big city, he was tempted to show off. What Oliver told him runs like a central theme through everything that Louis ever said about his development as a musician and about his musical philosophy.

"Joe would listen to my horn,' he told Steve Allen in a radio interview late in his career, "and I was fly, making all kinds of variations like they're tryin' to call bebop. I instigated all that, 'cause I was so fast with my fingering. But Joe Oliver said: 'No, play lead, play more lead on that horn so the people can know what you're doing.'"

Similarly, he told Geoffrey Haydon, in a television interview for BBC filmed to coincide with his seventieth birthday on July 4, 1970: "I was just like a clarinet player, like the guys run up and down the horn nowadays, boppin' and things. I was doin' all that, fast fingers and everything, so he used to tell me: 'Play some lead on that horn, boy.' You know?" And in the same vein: "Ain't no sense playing a hundred notes if one will do. Joe Oliver always used to say, "Think about that lead!' "

What Joe Oliver was talking about was melody line, or tune. Louis never became a tuneful performer, either on trumpet or as a singer, in the sense of faithfully adhering to the prescribed notes of a song. He made a stab at it in the early 1930s when his prodigious accomplishments on cornet and trumpet, and the unprecedented vocalism of his 1929 recording of Fats Waller's "Ain't Misbehavin'," swept him from the black entertainment world tributary into the white American popular music mainstream. The records he made then reveal a young man stylistically ill at ease, seeking to adapt his own musicality to the sweet, vapid, sentimental white popular songs and styles of the time.

Fortunately he failed. Whether as trumpeter or as singer, his musical individuality was too strong, his manner too vigorous, his inventive impulse too sheerly irrepressible. He came close enough to achieving adaptation to make some bad records. He never made a record that was not unmistakably Armstrong, although there are echoes here and there of Al Jolson, Bing Crosby and some of the black female singers who were working more closely to white styles than Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey had worked. Nor did he ever make a record on which he was not conspicuously superior to both the song and the arrangement. But he made many that were marred by creative inhibition and stylistic insecurity.

He solved the problem, eventually, by ignoring white conventions and recasting white music in his own personal and musical image. His heeding of King Oliver's counsel saved him from disaster. It is likely that he never in his entire career sang or played a familiar tune note for note, bar for bar, from beginning to end. But neither did he ever spurn the tune and its chord structure as a frame of melodic and harmonic reference. The modern jazz musician rejects both tune and chords as a frustration of his individual creative freedom, as a violation, so to speak, of a musician's right of free speech. Louis Armstrong had no fear of traditional discipline. It was a challenge both to his invention and his ingenuity. He could accept it with relish and zest. In so doing he set precedents that would become the conventions of American popular singing and give to the singer creative opportunities—and creative responsibilities, too—that he had not enjoyed in Western music since the latter part of the eighteenth century.

Adjectives trotted out to describe the sound of Louis Armstrong's voice have included "hoarse," "rasping" and "gravelly," the last of these being probably the most apt. Humphrey Lyttelton, in a BBC tribute on Louis' seventieth birthday, came up with "astrakhan." I should not have thought of "astrakhan" as a descriptive adjective, but it impressed me at the time as singularly felicitous. The image that has occurred to me most frequently in listening to his later records is that of someone singing through a gargle.

However one chooses to describe his voice, there is no mistaking it. An axiom in the study of singers has it that the great, as opposed to the merely very good, are immediately recognizable. A Caruso, a McCormack, a Tauber—one knows them within eight measures, just as one knows Nat Cole, Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra and Bessie Smith. None was more distinctive, more readily identifiable, than Louis Armstrong.

This probably explains why he had no imitators. He was imitated, of course, but always with a parodistic purpose. The listener knew what the imitator was up to—that it was impersonation rather than emulation. Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra each inspired a generation of emulators, some of them admirable. Red Allen, Jack Teagarden and Jabbo Smith worked close to Louis in style, but they didn't sound like him, although Jabbo Smith may have tried.

What made the sound of his voice so utterly unique was, I venture to suggest, the cumulative effect of night after night, month after month, year after year, of bad singing; bad, that is, in traditional terms of vocal production. His voice had not always been so hoarse, so rasping, so gravelly. He had, at the outset, a reasonably agreeable quality and a reasonably extensive range, roughly two octaves from A flat to A flat. This would represent, in European music, a low tenor or a high baritone.

Louis comes through, on his early records, more tenor than baritone, and that was, I suspect, the beginning of his vocal infirmities. Every once in a while, a fine, free baritone escaped him in the middle of his range, revealing what I hear as the natural color and pitch of the voice. Had he elected to sing conventional ballads in a conventional way, he would have chosen keys at least a third below those in which he actually sang them.

He might have got away with those higher keys, for a time, at least, if he had known how to move from one register to another, to negotiate the "passage," to disguise register breaks and to cover the tone as he moved up the scale. But he knew nothing of such matters. Preferring to work in the upper fifth of his range, he was continually under vocal strain. He did not seem to mind. He may even have liked it. Many black singers, particularly those least susceptible to European musical conventions, have shown a predilection for the sense and sound of exaltation, exhortation and incantation that require a vocal production somewhere between singing and shouting, and achievable only by raising both voice and pitch. Louis Armstrong was one of these.

His procedures as a trumpet player provide the clue. He played higher than anybody had ever played a cornet or a trumpet before him. It was not just the odd, climactic, high E flat, E or F. He played consistently high. The performance was not without its purely exhibitionistic side. He obviously reveled in his ability to astonish. He wasn't, as a young man, above carving the competition. Sam Price, a pianist who worked with most of the great jazzmen of the 1920s and 1930s, remembers an encounter between Louis and Jabbo Smith in Chicago: "Louis played about 110 high Cs, and sheet, that was it; and Jabbo could play."

But the stunting was, I suspect, a by-product. Louis, early in his career, probably didn't know how high he was playing, or that what he was playing was assumed to be impossible. Playing high and recklessly was simply a satisfactory outlet for a musically exuberant and ebullient nature. One of his favorite words was "wailing"—and he used it in special contexts, notably and memorably when he told the Pope, who had asked if he and his wife, Lucille, had any children: "No, but we're still right in there wailin', Daddy!"

He was a wailer as a vocalist, too, and no singer can wail in the middle register. So, singing in a manner which came naturally to him, he sang unnaturally high. Wailing on the trumpet takes its toll on the lips, or, as Louis would have said, the chops. This could be countered by salves. The toll on the vocal cords and the muscles and cartilages of the throat was beyond remedy. The upper A flats, Gs and F sharps of the early records did not last long. To an opera singer the loss would have been a disaster. To Louis it mattered very little. If one note was no longer available, he had others to put in its place.

An example of his resourcefulness, of his inexhaustible fund of musical invention, is afforded by a comparison of two recordings of "Ain't Misbehavin'," the one made in 1929, the second in 1955. On the first, there are many high Gs. On the second there are none. But the two performances sound very much alike, and both are in the same key—E flat. Louis knew what he wanted to do with that song, and what he wanted did not essentially change in twenty-six years. If he could not get it one way, he could get it another. The casual listener, hearing the two records one after another, will not be aware that anything is missing, that anything was changed.

The earlier recording of "Ain't Misbehavin'" is instructive, too, as an example of how, with the great singers, the essential elements of their greatness are evident in their earliest work. It is true of early-Crosby, of early Sinatra, of early Fitzgerald, of early Presley and of early Ray Charles, They may waver a bit as they hit midstream. They may give inferior performances, make inferior records and flounder stylistically as they seek to widen repertoire, to accommodate their native musicality to the requirements of commercial fashion, and to escape being typed as singers of one particular kind of song.

 

Everything that made Louis Armstrong great is present in this earlier recording of "Ain't Misbehavin'." He subsequently made many inferior records with less congenial material before finally learning to discipline not himself, but the song.

He also learned a lot about his own singing. He never learned to sing. He would have been finished as a singer if he had. But he reacted instinctively to what was best in his singing. His phrasing was always as exemplary as it was original, including the trumpet-derived scatting. His improvisatory flights were almost always just right. But his diction, initially, was negligent and slovenly.  He was thinking instrumental, granting that his trumpet playing was rooted in vocalism. As he grew older he learned about the music of language. His diction improved. He mastered the art of milking text. He must have sensed, again probably instinctively, the musicality of his own speech. As his technical prowess and physical resources waned, both vocally and instrumentally, he became more of a talker and less of a wailer.

In the end, as seems to happen with all great singers, he also became the creature of his own distinctive characteristics. He fell into mannerism. His enunciation became meticulous and over articulated. His swoops, slurs and growls became the cliches of predictable artifice rather than the unpredictable expressions of irrepressible artistic impulse. But so profound was his musicality that his procedures, even as mannerisms, still worked. There had always been too much music in his speech to suffer constraint by a mere tune. He had never been, as I have noted, a tuneful musician. As he became even less tuneful with the years, he became somehow more musical.

This was his legacy to those who came after him. All, with the exception of Billie Holiday, were more tuneful than he. They had better, more agreeable, more extensive voices. But from him they learned to escape the strictures of the printed notes and the prescribed rhythms, to distort meter in favor of a more flexibly musical prosody, to work out of syllables rather than words, to take the melodic and rhythmic structure of a song apart and put it together again so that the singer talked as he sang and sang as he talked.

They were untroubled by what remained throughout Louis Armstrong's career, his principal shortcoming as an artist and especially as a singer—his lack of emotional identification or involvement with whatever he was singing about. I was often moved by him both in personal performance and on record, but my response was one of sheer delight with his genius, his taste, his invention and his own obvious pleasure in making music. He was always a joyous, jubilant musician. The toothy smile, the waving white handkerchief, the invitation to the audience to sit back and enjoy some of the "old goodies," the gay palaver with his sidemen — all this was genuine. All this was fun.

It would be unjust, probably inaccurate, to suggest that he was ever anything but serious in his approach to a song. But it may be permissible to suggest that he rarely, if ever, took a song seriously. His identification with the music was intimate, his relationship with the textual content casual and detached, often conveying an undertone of benevolent raillery. But the devices of his musicianship have proved both valid and invaluable to those who have taken their songs more seriously than he — or made you believe they did — notably Frank Sinatra.

Louis Armstrong's importance to musical history is difficult to overestimate, and responsible critics and historians have not shied away from hyperbole. Andre Hodeir, for example, in his Jazz, Its Evolution and Essence, has said of the records Louis made with the Hot Five and the Hot Seven between 1925 and 1928: "I wouldn't go so far as to state that Louis Armstrong was the man who 'invented' jazz, but listening to these records might make me think so."

One of those records was "West End Blues," of which Gunther Schuller, in his Early Jazz, has said:

“The clarion call of "West End Blues" served notice that jazz had the potential capacity to compete with the highest order of previously known musical expression. Although nurtured by the crass entertainment and nightclub world of the Prohibition era, Armstrong's music transcended this context and its implications. This was music for music's sake, not for the first time in jazz, to be sure, but never before in such brilliant and unequivocal form. The beauties of this music were those of any great, compelling musical experience: expressive fervor, intense artistic commitment, and an intuitive sense for structural logic.”

Armstrong's reaction to this kind of commentary was characteristic. When Geoffrey Haydon, in the BBC-TV birthday program mentioned previously, asked him if he had been aware when making these records with the Hot Five and the Hot Seven that he was doing something very important, he replied, "No, we was just glad to play. We weren't paid no money, just was glad to play." Music, as Schuller noted, for music's sake.

The lay music lover or jazz fan, accustomed to think of Louis Armstrong as an amiable and irrepressible entertainer, even as a venerable and lovable clown, would be astonished to learn of the extent of scholarly literature devoted to his music. No one could have been more astonished than Louis himself, or could have found it more bewildering, more incomprehensible. He was not an intellect. But his improvisator-explosions have been copied down note for note and bar for bar in countless books and periodicals, and have been subjected to the most painstaking melodic, harmonic and rhythmic analysis.

The significance of his innovations is implicit in the fact that none of this analysis really works. Notation is inseparable from the European conventions it was evolved to record and represent. It cannot reflect the myriad shadings of attack, color, vibrato, release and so on that distinguish Louis Armstrong's playing and singing. It cannot document the slight deviations from pitch, and their harmonic and melodic connotations. Nor can it reproduce, visually, rhythmic subtleties so foreign to the fractional subdivisions of units of time in the rhythmic organization of European music.

Armstrong's own career after 1930 helped to frustrate any just evaluation of his achievement outside an inner circle of sympathetic and perceptive scholars. By the end of the 1920s he was already a celebrity. Indeed, as early as 1925, when he was twenty-five, he was being billed, probably accurately, as "the world's greatest trumpet player." The role of celebrity suited both his talent and his disposition. He drifted, or was drawn, into the mainstream of popular music, playing anything and everything that came his way. He appeared in moving pictures—usually as Louis Armstrong. He played and sang with popular musicians and popular singers, and not always with the best. He clowned and mugged and rejoiced in such monikers as "Satchmo" and "Pops."

Whatever he played or sang, he did in his own way, and there is no denying that the "way" commonly transcended the "what." He even survived an "Uncle Tom" label that would have been fatal to any other black musician after the mid-1950s. "Sure, Pops toms," said Billie Holiday, "but he toms with class!" As Benny Green, the English jazz critic, pointed out in a seventieth-birthday profile for the London Observer:

“The complaints have all come either from purist critics or political rebels. There is not a single musician of any consequence who takes exception to the personality Armstrong projects on the stage, and for a very good reason. It takes a performer to know a performer.”

If he played and sang to the grandstand, and too often accepted the grandstand's image not only of Louis Armstrong but of jazz itself, he knew exactly what he was doing. "I belong to the old school, you know," he told the French journalist Philippe Adler in 1968, "to the guys who think only of pleasing the public. I gave up the idea of playing for the critics or for musicians long ago." To Geoffrey Haydon he said: "A musician has no business being bored as long as he's pleasing the public." To Max Jones, as recounted in Jones's Salute to Satchmo, he said: "You understand, I'm doing my day's work, pleasing the public and enjoying my horn."

The jazz world, whose snobbery is, if anything, even more distasteful than the complacent snobbery of classical music, never quite forgave him. Sometimes, granting an exception for a seventieth birthday, it seemed almost to have forgotten him — or abandoned him to popular music, although jazz musicians of the generation immediately after his were usually eager to honor their debt. The best of the popular singers, too, acknowledged what their phrasing owed to his example.

Twenty years before Louis' seventieth birthday, Bing Crosby told Ken Murray, in a Down Beat interview: "Yes, Ken, I'm proud to acknowledge my debt to the Rev. Satchel Mouth. He is the beginning and the end of music in America." Similarly, Billy Eckstine, speaking to Max Jones in the winter of 1970: "Everybody singing got something from him because he puts it down basically, gives you that feeling. It's right there. You don't have to look for it."

But to younger artists, further removed from the source in time and example, he seemed an anachronism, both as man and musician. Or he appeared, to put a better face upon it, as a legend. In one sense it was a mark of his stature. Where other musicians of his generation had either to adapt their style to changing fashion or perish, he could adhere to his own style and not only survive, but prosper. But there was tragedy in it, too. He lived to see what was unique and wondrous in his early work become the clichés of the mainstream. He saw the inspired distortions that were the secret of his genius distorted beyond recognition in the work of some of his successors. He did not enjoy the experience.

He made only one bitter record, a parody of the " Whiffenpoof Song," in which he had some wry fun at the expense of the be-boppers, and on that one subject there was no mellowing with the passage of time. He sang the "Boppinpoof Song" on a Flip Wilson television program in the spring of 1971, just a few months before his death. "What's scattin' but notes — but the right notes?" he asked Geoffrey Haydon. "Just to be scattin' and makin' a whole lotta noise and faces, slobbin' all over yourself? No. Let them notes come out right, you know?"

In the span of Louis Armstrong's life and career this bitterness was only a passing shadow.

My whole life [he said in a letter to Max Jones] has been happiness. Through all the misfortunes, etc., I did not plan anything. Life was there for me, and I accepted it. And life, whatever came out, has been beautiful to me, and I love everybody.

Even in the jails, in the old days in New Orleans, I had loads of fans. One morning on my way to court, the prisoners raked pans on their cell bars and applauded thunderously, saying "Louie . . . Louie Armstrong," until the guy who was taking me to court said: "Who are you, anyway?" I said to him, "Oh, just one of the cats."

And that's how it has always been.”