Louis Armstrong

Their life

Born into deep poverty in New Orleans and sent at twelve to the Colored Waif's Home for firing a pistol on New Year's Eve, where he was handed a cornet. He did more than any other musician to turn jazz from ensemble music into a soloist's art: the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of 1925–28 invented a vocabulary that every instrument in American music subsequently borrowed, and his singing did the same for phrasing. He toured relentlessly for fifty years, was criticised by younger Black musicians for a genial stage manner they read as accommodation, and then in 1957 publicly attacked President Eisenhower over Little Rock in terms blunt enough to cost him a State Department tour — "the way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell."

Known for

• Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings
• Making jazz a soloist's art
• Scat singing and gravel-voiced phrasing
• "West End Blues" (1928)
• "Hello, Dolly!" and "What a Wonderful World"
• Speaking out on Little Rock

The road they walked

Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans in 1901 and grew up in a rough, crowded Black neighborhood known as the Battlefield. His father left early, and for stretches he was raised by his grandmother and by his mother, Mayann. As a boy he hauled coal, collected junk, and sang for pennies on the street. The Karnofsky family, Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who employed him, are remembered for helping him buy his first cornet. For most of his life he gave his birthday as July 4, 1900, a date that suited his legend. Baptismal records later showed he was born on August 4, 1901.

The city was full of brass bands, funeral processions, dance halls, and honky-tonks. Armstrong learned to play in the Colored Waif's Home, then to hold his own in the bars around Storyville's edge. Joe "King" Oliver became his mentor, and when Oliver left for Chicago, Armstrong took his chair in Kid Ory's band. He also played the riverboats on the Mississippi. In 1922 Oliver sent for him, and he joined the Creole Jazz Band in Chicago as second cornet. Within a few years the student was plainly the more startling player. A stint in New York with Fletcher Henderson's orchestra sharpened his sense of arrangement and ambition.

Back in Chicago, Armstrong made the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings for OKeh between 1925 and 1928. The records feature his long, shaped solo lines and his wordless scat singing, most famously on "Heebie Jeebies." They include "Potato Head Blues," "West End Blues," and the duet "Weather Bird" with pianist Earl Hines. In the 1930s, under manager Joe Glaser, he became a bandleader, film performer, and international star, touring Europe and later the world. After 1947 he led the smaller All Stars. His gravel voice and wide smile made him one of the most recognizable people on earth, and "Hello, Dolly!" reached number one on the American pop chart in 1964. Younger Black musicians sometimes judged his stage persona harshly. His blunt public remarks on Little Rock in 1957 showed how much feeling he carried beneath it.

How their story ended

Armstrong died on July 6, 1971, at his home in Corona, Queens, in New York City, a few weeks short of his seventieth birthday. He had been in declining health with heart and kidney trouble, and he was hospitalized in the spring of 1971 after performing in Manhattan. He had also been planning to get back on the road. He died in his sleep, apparently of a heart attack, in the house he had shared with his wife Lucille since the 1940s. Thousands of mourners filed past his casket in New York.

In their words

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