Louis Armstrong 1901-1971

"Louis Armstrong was the epitome of jazz and always will be." Duke Ellington

Louis Armstrong was the most influential jazz musician of his era.  He was born in the Storyville district of New Orleans on August 4, 1901.  His father, Willie Armstrong, was a laborer who abandoned the family a few weeks after Louis’s birth.  His mother, Mary Albert, called Mayanne, was fifteen years old when he was born.  She supported Louis and his sister Beatrice by working sometimes as a domestic servant, other times as a prostitute.  They had a tough existence living in New Orleans’s red light district, but young Louis was exposed to a dynamic culture of music:  jazz, as a musical form, was emerging in just that place, at just that time.  

As a little boy, Armstrong attended school briefly.  When he was about seven years old, he got a job on a junk wagon owned by a family of Lithuanian immigrants.  In his free time, Louis and three other boys formed a singing group and performed on street corners for tips.  On New Years Eve, 1912, Louis and some other boys were outside celebrating with other people.  It was customary to fire shots into the air at midnight, and people were doing this when Louis, who had never before fired a gun, borrowed a pistol from another boy and shot it into the air.  A policeman caught and arrested him.  He had experienced run-ins with the authorities in the past, so they sent him to the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys, where he lived for two years.  While this structured environment necessitated a major adjustment for Louis, the home had a music instructor who encouraged him to develop his musical talent.  He received instructions in singing, percussion, bugling, and the cornet, and he was the leader of the Waif’s Home's band by the time he was released at the age of 14.  

Armstrong found employment driving a coal cart.  One of his customers was a house of ill-repute, next door to a cabaret where Joe “King” Oliver, a successful cornet player, was a frequent performer.  Oliver befriended Armstrong and became a major influence in his musical development, as well as a father figure.  Eventually, Oliver invited Armstrong to play occasionally with his band.  Armstrong began to find work playing for small amounts of money in bars and nightclubs until he found employment playing in a musical group on a local steamboat, which enabled him to quit the coal cart job.  During this time in his life, he married Daisy Parker, a prostitute.  The marriage did not work out well.  

After a couple of years playing in several New Orleans bands, Armstrong received a telegram from King Oliver inviting him to join his Creole Jazz Band in Chicago.   Armstrong played second cornet to Oliver’s lead and began to gain a good reputation in the Chicago jazz world.  His playing was fresh and innovative.  One of the musicians in Oliver’s band was pianist Lillian Hardin.  She was intelligent and knowledgeable about the music business; she saw potential in Armstrong’s talent.  Armstrong divorced Daisy and married Lillian in 1924.  

Lillian urged Armstrong to leave Oliver’s band, which seemed to be on its way downhill.  They moved to New York, and he played in Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, lending his own style and talent to the different flavor of New York jazz.  He was a hit in New York and soon returned to Chicago to form his own band: first the Hot Five and then the Hot Seven.  Initially, Lillian played the piano, but in 1928, Earl “Fatha” Hines took her place.  Johnny St. Cyr played the banjo, Johnny Dodds the clarinet, Kid Ory the trombone, and Armstrong played the trumpet.  The band recorded their music throughout the 1920s, allowing a wider audience to become familiar with their music than had previously been common.  

Before Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven, jazz was played in an organized ensemble mode.  Armstrong introduced the concept of solos (in his case, trumpet solos) into the genre, and then went on to add improvisation to the solos.  These were major milestones in the development of jazz.  These concepts were picked up and expanded upon by other performers, until they became an integral characteristic of the music.  Armstrong also was the first artist to record scat singing—during a recording session in 1926, the sheet music for “Heebie Jeebies” fell off the stand, and instead of stopping the recording, Armstrong continued to sing, making sounds that imitated the instruments instead of singing words.  Scatting became a vocal form in jazz that was developed further by subsequent artists such as Ella Fitzgerald.  

Armstrong toured the world and became one of the best-known American musicians.  His marriage with Lillian disintegrated, and he married a Alpha Smith in 1938, who by all accounts seemed to be mainly enamored with his money and fame.  He took on Joe Glaser, who had connections with Mafioso Al Capone, as a manager.  Glaser managed Armstrong the rest of his life quite successfully, getting him parts in movies and making sure he always remained a major figure in the entertainment world.  During the Big Band Era of the late 1930s and early 1940s, Louis Armstrong and his Orchestra was one of the most popular swing bands.  

In 1947, he disbanded the large swing band and formed the All Stars, returning to the small ensemble format that had worked so well with the Hot Five and Hot Seven bands in the nineteen-twenties.  The All Stars was a popular and successful band, but the time for major musical innovations from Armstrong was over.  He was a huge star in Europe (it was the British press who coined his eventual nickname “Satchmo” by shortening his previous nickname, “Satchel Mouth”.) as well as in the U.S. for the rest of his life.  As he got older, he sang more often than he played, but his popularity did not wane—in 1964 he knocked the Beatles out of the number one spot on the charts with his recording of the show tune “Hello Dolly.”  When his hit “What a Wonderful World” rose to the top of the charts in Britain, he was the first musician with a number one hit who was actually older than the British Prime minister in office. 

In 1942 he divorced Alpha Smith and married dancer Lucille Wilson; they remained together for the rest of his life.  Armstrong was often criticized for his lack of involvement in the struggle for African American rights.  Some of the younger jazz performers (Miles Davis was one of these) criticized Armstrong for his willingness to perform in all-white venues, saying that he was willing to act like a clown to cater to white audiences.  Be that as it may, Armstrong broke through many color barriers, however, to be the first Black to perform in various places and circumstances, and he was the first Black to be considered a worldwide musical superstar.  

In 1957  he did become so at the report of a young Black girl in Little Rock, Arkansas, being refused entry to her local school, that he publicly criticized President Eisenhower and the U.S. Government for allowing such things to continue happening.   

For over 153 recordings of Louis Armstrong, click here.

Susan Robinson
6/18/01