Celebrating Jazz
Jazz Appreciation Month - April 2007
Louis Armstrong
1901-1971
Also known as: Satchmo Armstrong
Birth: August 4, 1901 in Louisiana, United States
Death: July 6, 1971
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Armstrong, Louis ("Satchmo") (Aug. 4, 1901 - July 6, 1971), jazz musician and entertainer, was born in New Orleans, La., the son of Mary Ann and Willie Armstrong; his father was a day laborer. The date of his birth is questionable. He always claimed to have been born on July 4, 1900, a date he gave to a draft registrar in 1918. Recent research gives good documentation for the 1901 date. However, several of his early associates insist he was born about 1898, a date that squares better with events of his youth. Early chroniclers have given Daniel as his middle name, but Armstrong himself denied it.
His father, Willie, rose to become straw boss in a turpentine factory. Willie abandoned Armstrong's mother, probably about the time of his birth, and Armstrong remained bitter toward him until the end of his life. His mother (usually called Mayann) was about fifteen at the time of Armstrong's birth. She did domestic work and was probably a part-time prostitute as well. While Armstrong was still an infant, she moved into a rough vice district, leaving him in the care of his paternal grandmother, who worked as a laundress and domestic.
After the birth of his sister, when Armstrong was about five, he moved back in with his mother. Armstrong was raised in extreme deprivation, both emotionally and physically. Surrogate "stepfathers" came and went as Mayann changed boyfriends. Some were kind to Armstrong and some were not. At times he had to scavenge for food in garbage cans or eat remains of dinners scraped off restaurant plates by a stepfather who worked as a waiter. He went barefoot much of the time and owned little more than the shirt and pants he put on in the morning. Mayann was wayward and frequently left Armstrong to take care of himself and his baby sister.
Despite this rearing, Armstrong often spoke of his youth with fondness. He was apparently well liked, or made himself so, by the prostitutes, pimps, gamblers, and toughs of the neighborhood. He sang in a street-corner quartet for pennies, sold newspapers, ran errands, and apparently felt relatively secure in this rather vicious environment. It is worth noting, however, that he did not return to his hometown for nearly ten years after he left it and subsequently visited only for professional reasons.
Critically important to his career was the fact that the vice district was awash with honky-tonks featuring the new hot music aborning in New Orleans. The bands in the tonks were usually small, rough, two- to four-piece combinations, but Armstrong also heard the five- to seven-piece dixieland bands that were developing the classic New Orleans style. He became entranced by music and decided early to make it his career.
He was, however, far too poor to buy an instrument. Probably in January 1913, he was arrested for a minor offense and committed to a home for wayward boys, referred to in jazz literature as the "Waifs' Home." (There is evidence that he had served an earlier term in this institution.) Such institutions typically had bands, and here Armstrong learned the rudiments of brass technique. On his discharge, in about June 1914, he worked at day labor and sat in with local bands occasionally, especially in the neighborhood honky-tonks. At first he used borrowed horns, but eventually he acquired a battered instrument of his own, which allowed him to practice. In time he was hired to work regularly at various of the tonks.
Armstrong was shy about putting himself forward, and throughout his life compensated by putting himself in the hands of dominating men who could blaze trails for him. One of the first was cornetist Joseph ("King") Oliver, who became a leading figure in jazz. Armstrong later spoke in vague terms of Oliver as his mentor, but their playing styles were diametrically opposed, and it is doubtful that Oliver had much influence on Armstrong's approach to jazz. Oliver's principal contribution was emotional support and practical advice.
Oliver was coleader of a band organized by Edward ("Kid") Ory, accounted the best jazz band in New Orleans. For some years jazz musicians had been leaving the city, attracted by more money and better conditions in Chicago and the West Coast, and in 1918 Oliver left for Chicago. He arranged for Armstrong to replace him with the Ory group. Armstrong went on quickly to establish himself as a comer, playing on the famous riverboats and gigging around New Orleans with the better black bands, occasionally working at day labor to earn more money for the family, of which he was now the sole support.
In 1922 Oliver brought him to Chicago to work with the legendary Creole Jazz Band. Armstrong was only second cornetist, but the few solos he was allowed to play on the influential recordings made by this group, especially "Froggie Moore," show a rhythmic spring beyond the somewhat stiffer two-beat rock of his fellow musicians.
In 1918 Armstrong had married a New Orleans prostitute named Daisy Parker. In Chicago he became involved with the Oliver group's pianist, Lillian Hardin. Armstrong divorced Daisy in 1923 and married Lillian the next year. She came from a middle-class background and had modest training in classical music. She recognized Armstrong's enormous musical gift and pressed him to move from under the shadow of Oliver. In 1924 Armstrong went to New York to join the talented band of Fletcher Henderson. Armstrong's solos with this group astounded musicians for the brilliance of his technique, the intensity of his swing, and the imaginative construction of his melodic line. Although largely unknown to the public, he was becoming an admired figure in the world of popular music.
In 1925 Armstrong returned to Chicago, again at his wife's urging, where it was arranged for him to make records under his own name, aimed at the black audience. In this casual fashion the famous "Hot Five" series of about five dozen sides was cut between 1925 and 1928. These records are considered by many critics to be the single most important body of work in jazz. They were rivaled in influence only by the early records of Charlie Parker and the boppers; hardly a musician in jazz was untouched by them.
At the beginning the Hot Fives group employed, in the main, New Orleans musicians and used the standard New Orleans format of cornet, clarinet, and trombone over a rhythm section. (Beginning in about 1926 Armstrong gradually switched from the mellower cornet to the more brilliant trumpet.) But as it became clear that Armstrong was the selling point, he was brought more and more to the fore. The last of the series of recordings are Armstrong showcases, with the other musicians merely supporting actors. Early in the series Armstrong began to sing. His success with the public, especially on "Heebie Jeebies," encouraged his recording directors to feature his singing.
Among the best of these performances are the ebullient blazing hot "Hotter Than That," the rather introspective "Big Butter and Egg Man," and "Cornet Chop Suey," which features a sequence of breaks that trumpeters everywhere learned. Perhaps the most admired of all are three from 1928, "Tight Like This," "Muggles," and "West End Blues." "West End Blues," considered by many to be the greatest jazz record ever made, opens with a long, flawless cadenza and ends with a majestic solo, near tragic in feeling. In these recordings, Armstrong displayed an emotional range that no other jazz musician had ever possessed. The impact of these recordings on the jazz world was overpowering. Armstrong did not invent the jazz solo nor was he the first commanding soloist in the music. But so powerful a player was he that his method became the model for jazz.
Various business managers, recording directors, and music industry entrepreneurs into whose hands Armstrong put himself set out very quickly to move him into the commercial music business. He began to attract a substantial audience of white jazz fans, and the strategy was to move him from the black to the white market. Armstrong, who did not think of jazz as an art or of himself as an artist, was quite willing to reach out for fame and wealth. Under the guidance of his managers he began playing and singing popular tunes, some of them classic standards but more of them novelties and banal love tunes. He gave up the New Orleans small-band format entirely and fronted a standard big dance band, heavily featuring his playing and singing. Through the 1930's and much of the 1940's, Armstrong led a series of musically weak bands, attracting audiences as much for his singing as for his playing. He appeared in movies and on radio, and by the mid-1930's he was one of the most popular entertainers in America.
Questions remain about the quality of the music Armstrong made during this period. He was employing a much sparer line than he did when he played with the Hot Fives (in part to save his badly abused lip), and many of the recordings from this period, such as "Star Dust," "Struttin' with Some Barbecue," "E'vntide," and "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea," contain masterly jazz solos, as good or better than all but the greatest of the Hot Five material. But on these records he had constant recourse to the upper register for showy effect, overused the half-valve, and too frequently relied on favorite phrases or musical figures that had become Armstrong clichés. Even so, there were few musicians in jazz who could equal Armstrong's work even at his weaker moments. It is simply that on the whole, his playing at this time did not come up to his earlier work standards.
By the late 1920's Armstrong's marriage to Lil Hardin was breaking up, and they separated around 1932. While they were still married, he had become involved with Alpha Smith. He married Smith in 1938. They divorced in about 1940. Shortly after his marriage to Smith he began courting a Cotton Club dancer named Lucille Wilson. They married in 1942 and were still married at the time of Armstrong's death. Armstrong had no children.
At the end of World War II the swing band movement collapsed, taking Armstrong down with it. The new bop movement was drawing away young jazz fans. Indeed, to many of the boppers and their followers Armstrong was the enemy--the very image of an Uncle Tom.
Fortunately for him, he was now in the hands of a tough, hard-talking manager with gangland connections, Joe Glaser, who had been important in structuring Armstrong's popular success in the big band era. Glaser had no interest in artistic concerts; he wanted only to make money.
There was at that time a revival of interest in dixieland jazz, which had been dormant for fifteen years. In 1947 Glaser put Armstrong in a group of jazz all-stars, playing a semblance of the old New Orleans style. Armstrong's personality and warmth were enough to attract a new generation of fans. Through the 1950's and 1960's his fame spread, until by the end of his life, he was a star. He had hits with "Blueberry Hill" and "Mack the Knife," among others, but it was the ordinary pop tune "Hello, Dolly!" that put him over the top. In 1964 his recording of the song pushed the Beatles out of the number-one spot on the Billboard chart.
As his success grew, Armstrong came under attack from militant blacks who wanted him to speak out against racial inequality. For years he avoided doing so; his audience was largely white, many of them southerners. Then, in the fall of 1957, angered by a television broadcast of whites howling at black children attending a newly integrated school, he made a scathing verbal attack on the American government for failing to take more action in the matter. His comments were widely published, and although Armstrong never became anything approaching militant in racial matters, he did thereafter occasionally take stands on racial issues.
By the late 1960's Armstrong was doing more singing than playing. It was what his audiences wanted, and, in any case, years of abuse had badly damaged his lip. He stuck to tried and true material: his hits and such jazz standards as "Indiana" and "Muskrat Ramble." There is no doubt that on occasion he could still play brilliant jazz, as he did, for example, in "Satchmo: A Musical Autobiography of Louis Armstrong," issued in 1957. But for Armstrong, pleasing the public was his first concern, and artistic considerations came in a poor second.
The deprivations of Armstrong's childhood, particularly the absence of his father, left him with a need for approval. It must also be borne in mind that Armstrong grew up at a time in which show business was virtually the only escape from poverty for blacks, a culture that lacked the romantic European notion of the artist who sacrifices all for his art. To Armstrong, the whole point of being a musician was to please audiences. Nonetheless, his place in music history rests not on his popularity as an entertainer but on the body of jazz masterpieces made between 1924 and 1936, which in considerable measure shaped American jazz.
-- James Lincoln Collier
SOURCE CITATION
Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 9: 1971-1975. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994.