The story of Louis Armstrong

A boy from the Battlefield

Louis Daniel Armstrong was born in New Orleans on the fourth of August 1901, although for most of his life he told people it was the Fourth of July 1900. His mother, Mary Albert, known as Mayann, was only about sixteen and came from the small town of Boutte, Louisiana. His father, William Armstrong, walked out soon after a daughter, Beatrice, nicknamed Mama Lucy, was born. Louis spent his first five years with his grandmother before going back to his mother in a rough, poor neighborhood known as the Battlefield, near Rampart Street. At six he started at the Fisk School for Boys, one of the few schools open to black children in a segregated city. By eleven he had left school for good.[1] [2] [3] [4]

One family made a lasting difference. The Karnoffskys were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania who ran a junk and coal business, and they gave young Louis work helping their sons Morris and Alex collect rags and bones and deliver coal. They fed him, looked out for a boy with no father at home, and he later wrote that they taught him how to live with determination. He also noticed that other white people looked down on them too. Riding their wagon, he blew a cheap tin horn to attract customers, which may have been his first public performance. Morris advanced him money toward a cornet from a pawn shop. Their old building, later a tailor shop, stood until Hurricane Ida destroyed it in 2021.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Louis also sang for coins in a street corner quartet with other boys, and the Karnoffsky mother's lullabies and the music of the church stayed with him. But the streets were hard. On New Year's Eve 1912, he took a pistol belonging to his mother's partner and fired a blank into the air to celebrate. Police arrested him on the spot. He spent the night at the juvenile court and the next day was sent to the Colored Waif's Home for Boys. Life there was spartan. There were no mattresses, meals were often little more than bread and molasses, and the director, Captain Joseph Jones, ran the place like an army camp and used corporal punishment.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The home's music teacher, Peter Davis, did not trust him at first. Louis later remembered being given fifteen lashes on the hand for breaking a minor rule, and he stayed scared of Davis for a long time. But Davis started him in the vocal group, moved him on to percussion and the bugle, and finally handed him a cornet, drilling him in breath control, pitch and tone. In time he made Louis the leader of the home's band, which marched in parades and played picnics around the city, and the teenage cornetist caught the attention of the trombonist Kid Ory. On the fourteenth of June 1914, Louis was released to his father and stepmother, but he never felt welcome there and soon went back to his mother.[1] [2] [3]

Honky tonks, a first marriage and the riverboats

Back home, Louis shared a bed with his mother and sister and took whatever work he could find. Selling coal in Storyville, the city's red light district, he heard early jazz spilling out of the dance halls and brothels. He landed a job at a dance hall owned by Henry Ponce, a man with ties to organized crime, and a tall drummer called Black Benny became his guide and bodyguard. Around the age of fifteen, Louis acted as a pimp for a woman named Nootsy. It ended violently. She stabbed him in the shoulder, and his mother nearly choked her to death in return. Through it all he kept listening, especially at Pete Lala's, where the great cornetist Joe Oliver, known as King Oliver, was playing.[1] [2]

Oliver became the closest thing Louis had to a father. He gave the boy pointers on the horn and took a real interest in him. Louis called him Papa Joe, and years later wrote that jazz would not be what it is without him. When Oliver left New Orleans for Chicago near the end of the 1910s, he handed his young protege his chair in Kid Ory's band, widely seen as the best in town. Louis also played second trumpet in the Tuxedo Brass Band. The cornetist Bunk Johnson later claimed that he, too, had taught the boy to play by ear, but Louis always gave the credit to Oliver.[1] [2] [3] [4]

While playing at a club called the Brick House in Gretna, Louis became a client of Daisy Parker, a sex worker there. He kept going back, found out she had a common law husband, and married her anyway at City Hall on the nineteenth of March 1919. The marriage was stormy, and they separated in 1923. The couple took in a three year old boy named Clarence, whose mother, Louis's cousin Flora, had died soon after giving birth. A head injury early in life left Clarence mentally disabled, and Louis looked after him for the rest of his life. Clarence was still his adopted son when Louis died.[1] [2] [3]

Then came what Louis called going to university. The pianist Fate Marable led the dance band on the Streckfus steamboats that worked the Mississippi, and after spotting Louis in a New Orleans club he hired him for the river excursions. Marable insisted that his players learn to read music on sight, and on the boats Louis worked through written arrangements of everything from hot numbers to light classics, while Marable let him improvise his own breaks. People in New Orleans joked that joining Marable meant going to the conservatory. The drummer Baby Dodds was on board too. By about twenty Louis could read music well and had started singing on stage. He and Dodds left the boats in 1921 after a disagreement over musical style.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Second cornet in Chicago

In 1922 an invitation arrived from King Oliver. His Creole Jazz Band was playing the Lincoln Gardens on the South Side of Chicago, a club that admitted black customers only, and he wanted Louis on second cornet. Chicago was booming, and for the first time Louis could live on music alone, with his own apartment and his first private bath. He began a lifelong habit of writing letters to friends back home. On the bandstand he and Oliver worked out duet breaks, where the band dropped away and the two cornets played together as if reading each other's minds. White musicians who could not get into the club would stand near the front door just to hear them.[1] [2] [3]

On the fifth and sixth of April 1923, the band took the train to the small Gennett studio in Richmond, Indiana, to make its first records. It was acoustic recording, with the musicians blowing into a large horn connected straight to the needle cutting the master. Louis played so loudly that he drowned out his boss, so he was moved to a far corner about fifteen feet away. The pay was poor, the room was cramped and there had been little rehearsal, yet these records carried the New Orleans ensemble style to a national audience. They also include his first recorded solos. Stories spread that he could hit two hundred high Cs in a row, and rival trumpeters queued up to challenge him in cutting contests.[1] [2] [3]

The band's pianist was Lil Hardin, a Memphis born musician who had studied at Fisk University and could read anything put in front of her. At first she found the new arrival far too country, with his old fashioned clothes and his hair in bangs. She took him shopping, changed his look, and a romance grew, to the surprise of bandmates who had been courting her without success. When Louis's mother came up to Chicago in the summer of 1923, having heard he was broke, hungry and sick, Lil found and decorated an apartment for her. Both of them first had to end earlier marriages. They married in February 1924 and spent their honeymoon on tour with the Oliver band.[1] [2] [3]

Lil believed her husband was wasting his gift as a sideman. She urged him to study classical pieces and play them in church concerts, to handle his own money, and to stand up for himself. She also questioned the extra money Oliver had been holding back from his players. Louis adored his mentor and was happy to stand next to him every night, but in 1924 the Creole Jazz Band fell apart in rows over touring and music, and the two men parted on good terms. That autumn Louis accepted an offer from Fletcher Henderson, who led the top black dance orchestra in New York. Lil stayed in Chicago, working first with Oliver and then leading a band of her own.[1] [2] [3] [4]

New York, then the Hot Five

Louis joined Fletcher Henderson's orchestra when it reopened at the Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan on the thirteenth of October 1924. Roseland admitted white dancers only. He switched from cornet to trumpet to blend with the section, and Don Redman rearranged some of his old Oliver material for the band. Louis never felt fully at home with the tight written charts or with what he saw as the airs of some of his bandmates, and Henderson brushed him off when he asked to sing on a record. Yet his solos, built on the chords rather than just the melody, transformed the band. The tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins soaked up his rhythm, and Duke Ellington's musicians came to Roseland just to hear him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

New York also made him a busy studio player. He backed the great blues singers of the day, including Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter and Bessie Smith, and his cornet behind Bessie on St. Louis Blues in 1925 was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. With the pianist and producer Clarence Williams, an old friend from New Orleans, he recorded in the Blue Five and the Red Onion Jazz Babies alongside the soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet. On Cake Walkin' Babies from Home the two stars trade ever bolder breaks, a musical duel historians still argue about. Those sessions were their only recordings together until the 1940s.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

By the summer of 1925 Louis was unhappy in New York, and Lil made a plan to bring him home. She talked the owner of the Dreamland Cafe in Chicago into paying him seventy five dollars a week, twenty more than Henderson paid, and advertised him, to his embarrassment, as the world's greatest. She also told the OKeh record company he was coming back, and OKeh agreed to build a recording group around him. Louis called three old New Orleans friends, the trombonist Kid Ory, the clarinetist Johnny Dodds and the banjo player Johnny St. Cyr, with Lil herself on piano. On the twelfth of November 1925, Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five made their first records.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Hot Five was a studio band that seldom played in public, yet it became the most famous jazz group in America. At a session in February 1926, Louis sang Heebie Jeebies and, partway through, broke into wordless syllables, the style called scat. He did not invent scat, but his record made it a sensation, and young musicians everywhere memorized his phrases. The clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow and a friend were so excited they drove fifty three miles to play it for Bix Beiderbecke. At night Louis doubled in Erskine Tate's orchestra at the Vendome Theater, playing for silent films and jazzed up classical overtures, and learning how to hold a big audience.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1927 Louis moved to the Sunset Cafe, managed by Joe Glaser, in a club where Al Capone was a silent partner. There he became close friends with the pianist Earl Hines, whose trumpet style piano matched his own thinking. Adding tuba and drums, he expanded the group into the Hot Seven and recorded Potato Head Blues, with its famous stop time solo. Hines took over from Lil at the piano, and on the twenty eighth of June 1928 they recorded West End Blues, which opens with an unaccompanied trumpet cadenza that critics still call a landmark in American music. Playback would have ruined the wax master, so they only heard it weeks later, and then sat listening for nearly two hours.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The voice, the mob and the hard years

In 1929 Louis moved to New York for good. He led the pit band for Hot Chocolates, an all black revue by Fats Waller and Andy Razaf, and when he played Ain't Misbehavin' on trumpet the response was so strong that he was asked to climb out of the pit and perform it on stage. His record of the song became his biggest seller so far. From the same show he made the first recording of Black and Blue, a song about color prejudice that the novelist Ralph Ellison would later place at the heart of Invisible Man. He also starred at Connie's Inn in Harlem, a rival to the Cotton Club and a front for the gangster Dutch Schultz.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His voice was rough, untrained and limited in range, yet he sang the way he played, stretching phrases, bending melodies and sometimes pitching a whole line on a single note. On records like Stardust and Lazy River in 1931 he reshaped songs that were already standards. The new ribbon microphones of the early thirties caught the warmth of his low register, and a young crooner named Bing Crosby studied him closely. NPR has pointed out that Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan all shaped their styles on his example. Crosby put it simply in 1950, calling Louis the beginning and the end of music in America.[1] [2] [3]

In 1930 he went west to play the New Cotton Club in Los Angeles, with Lionel Hampton on drums and Hollywood stars in the crowd. Louis smoked marijuana heavily for most of his life, and that year he was arrested outside a club for possession and spent nine days in jail before receiving a suspended sentence. Back in Chicago in 1931 gangsters pressured him to get out of town. He went home to New Orleans for a hero's welcome, sponsoring a local baseball team, but on opening night at the Suburban Gardens the white radio announcer refused to introduce him on air and walked off. After a tour across the country shadowed by the mob, Louis left for Europe.[1] [2] [3]

Europe made him an international star, but the strain showed. His aggressive attack and narrow mouthpiece dug into his lip, and during one European tour an ulcer got so bad that he stopped playing for about a year. He treated the damage with salves and even cut away scar tissue himself with a razor blade. His manager, Johnny Collins, left him short of money and tangled in contract disputes. In May 1935 Louis hired Joe Glaser, the tough former Sunset Cafe manager with mob connections, who cleared his debts and legal troubles. Glaser had a dark past. He had run brothels, and in 1927 he was convicted of raping a fourteen year old girl, a verdict overturned on appeal in 1929.[1] [2] [3]

With Glaser steering, Louis moved into films and radio. In 1936 Bing Crosby insisted that he be cast in Pennies from Heaven, overruled a reluctant studio boss, and made sure he got prominent billing. In 1937 Louis stood in for Rudy Vallee on a CBS network show, becoming the first African American to host a sponsored national radio broadcast. His private life was just as eventful. He and Lil had separated in 1931 when he took up with Alpha Smith, whom he had met while playing the Vendome. The divorce from Lil finally came through in 1938, and he married Alpha, but that marriage ended in 1942. In October 1942 he married Lucille Wilson, a performer at the Cotton Club.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

A home in Queens and the All Stars

In 1943 Louis and Lucille settled into a modest brick house in Corona, Queens, and it stayed his home for the rest of his life. When his tour bus pulled up, neighborhood children would crowd around to carry his trumpet and suitcases inside, then eat ice cream with Lucille while everyone watched westerns on television. His marriages produced no children, but he later said he had watched three generations grow up on that block. The house also became his private archive. In his den he kept the latest tape machines and recorded hundreds of reels of music, conversations and practice, decorating the boxes with collages he made himself.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

By the mid forties the swing era was fading, and big bands had become too expensive to keep on the road. A revival of interest in old New Orleans jazz pointed another way. On the seventeenth of May 1947 Louis led a small group at New York's Town Hall with the trombonist and singer Jack Teagarden, and the concert was a triumph. That August, Joe Glaser broke up the big band and launched Louis Armstrong and His All Stars, a six piece group of former bandleaders including Teagarden, Earl Hines on piano, Barney Bigard on clarinet and Sid Catlett on drums. Louis insisted the band be racially integrated from day one, and with changing lineups it would carry him through the rest of his career.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In February 1949 Louis became the first jazz musician on the cover of Time magazine. The occasion was a boyhood dream come true. He reigned as King of the Zulus at the New Orleans Mardi Gras, telling Time that after that he would be ready to die. The Zulu club's tradition called for the king to wear an outlandish costume and blackface makeup, a satire that few people outside New Orleans understood. Photos of Louis in that costume appalled many black readers across the country, and the black press gave him his first wave of largely negative coverage. Soon afterwards the young trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie described him as a plantation character that younger musicians resented.[1] [2] [3]

The generation gap was real. Modernists such as Charlie Parker and Miles Davis saw his mugging and showmanship as a leftover from minstrelsy, and Louis dismissed bebop as Chinese music. In early 1952 a new recording of his theme song, When It's Sleepy Time Down South, included a racist word common in pop songs of the early thirties, and fans in a Harlem bar were photographed smashing copies. Decca called its release an accident, and Louis recorded the line again with the word people instead, though he complained bitterly about the affair in private. There was friction inside the band too. Earl Hines resented being treated as a sideman to his old friend, and quit the All Stars in 1951.[1] [2] [3]

Ambassador Satch and Little Rock

The mid fifties brought some of his finest records. At Columbia, the producer George Avakian recorded Louis Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy in 1954 and Satch Plays Fats the following year. Avakian also talked him into Mack the Knife, from The Threepenny Opera, in September 1955, with the song's original star Lotte Lenya in the studio. Louis called out her name in the song as a tribute. Some radio stations banned the record for glorifying a criminal, but it still reached the top twenty. In August 1956 he recorded Ella and Louis with Ella Fitzgerald for Verve, backed by Oscar Peterson's group, and it was Louis who got the final say on the songs and keys.[1] [2] [3] [4]

He was a movie star as well. In the 1956 film High Society he played himself, narrating the story and trading lines with Bing Crosby on Now You Has Jazz while Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra took the leads. His 1955 international tour was chronicled by Edward R. Murrow and became the documentary Satchmo the Great. In 1956 he visited Ghana as the guest of Kwame Nkrumah, and he sang Black and Blue before the independence leader in a performance captured on film. The press called him Ambassador Satch, and State Department officials regarded him as perhaps America's most effective goodwill ambassador.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

At home, the South could still be dangerous. On the twentieth of February 1957, the All Stars played to a segregated audience at Chilhowee Park in Knoxville, Tennessee, where about a thousand black fans had come to see an integrated band. Segregationists objected, and someone threw a stick of dynamite from a passing car. The blast was deafening, and Louis calmed the crowd with a joke that it was just the phone before playing on. Afterwards he was quoted saying the horn knew nothing about it and that he would play anywhere people would listen. Parts of the black press were furious, and that May Dizzy Gillespie publicly labeled him an Uncle Tom.[1] [2]

Then came Little Rock. In September 1957 the Arkansas governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to keep nine black students out of Central High School. Louis had already vented about it in radio interviews in Spokane and Edmonton, but on the seventeenth of September, in Grand Forks, North Dakota, a young journalism student named Larry Lubenow heard the full blast. Louis said that because of the way his people were being treated in the South, the government could go to hell. He called President Eisenhower two faced and gutless, and cancelled a planned State Department tour of the Soviet Union. Lubenow toned down his harshest words about Faubus for print. Days later Eisenhower sent paratroopers to escort the students into school.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The backlash was fierce. A Mississippi radio station banned his records, white columnists attacked him, and the FBI kept a file on him. Jackie Robinson, Lena Horne and Eartha Kitt spoke up for him. When his road manager Pierre Tallerie, acting on Glaser's orders, told reporters that Louis was sorry and loved Eisenhower, Louis picked up the phone and doubled down, nearly fired Tallerie, and insisted on speaking for himself. The episode fed into The Real Ambassadors, a jazz musical by Dave and Iola Brubeck that cast Louis as a version of himself. Recording it in 1961, he sang its song about race straight rather than for laughs, and by the end, those present said, everyone was in tears.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Illness, Africa and Hello, Dolly!

In June 1959, on tour in Italy, Louis fell ill in Spoleto and was taken to hospital with pneumonia, while doctors worried about his heart and lungs. Many reports called it a heart attack. Louis flatly denied it, blaming chest pains on too much spaghetti, and within weeks he was back on stage. That same year the trombonist Marshall Brown urged him to see a doctor about his battered lips instead of relying on home remedies. Louis put it off for years, and by the time he did, surgeons considered an operation too risky. In the sixties he kept up a schedule of about three hundred nights a year.[1] [2]

In 1960 he toured Africa again. When he arrived in the Congo, drummers and dancers carried him through the streets on a throne. The tour ended in grief. In January 1961, in Sierra Leone, his singer Velma Middleton, who had been part of his show since 1942 and often provided the comedy in their duets, suffered a stroke. She died in a hospital in Freetown on the tenth of February 1961. The clarinetist Barney Bigard later criticized Louis and Joe Glaser for refusing to arrange her transfer to a country with better medical care. In his final weeks, Louis decorated a tape box with photos of Velma, and the museum counts her among his three closest musician friends.[1] [2] [3]

Back home, 1961 brought a meeting of giants. Louis and Duke Ellington made their only studio recordings together, an all Ellington program with Duke sitting in on piano with the All Stars. The sessions came out as Together for the First Time and The Great Reunion. That year he also recorded The Real Ambassadors with the Brubecks, and he performed it with them at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1962, though nobody filmed it. In January 1964 his old friend Jack Teagarden died. Louis later remembered, lovingly, how the two of them had broken down barriers together on their trips through the South. That same month his trombonist Trummy Young, a fixture since 1952, left the band.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In December 1963, at his manager's urging, Louis cut a demo of a show tune called Hello, Dolly! so the publisher could promote a new Broadway musical. He had not been in a recording studio for more than two years. Kapp Records released it as a single in January 1964, the month the show opened, and the producer David Merrick settled on the show's title after hearing Louis's version. The record climbed steadily through the height of Beatlemania, and in May 1964 it knocked the Beatles off the top of the Billboard Hot 100 after fourteen straight weeks. At sixty two, Louis became the oldest artist ever to reach number one on that chart.[1] [2] [3] [4]

An album built around the hit replaced the Broadway cast album at the top of the album chart in June 1964 and became the most successful LP of his career. At the Grammys he won Best Male Vocal Performance, and the song was named Song of the Year. Asked about it, he said it felt good to be up there with those Beatles. Ambassador Satch kept travelling. In 1965 he played behind the Iron Curtain, including concerts in East Germany and at the Lucerna Hall in Prague, and on the thirty first of October 1965 he played New Orleans for the first time in a decade, with his old teacher Peter Davis in the audience.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

What a Wonderful World and the final years

In 1967 the producer Bob Thiele and the songwriter George David Weiss wrote What a Wonderful World especially for Louis, hoping a warm voice singing about goodwill could ease the racial strife tearing at America. Thiele used a pen name, George Douglas, built from the names of his uncles. They recorded it in Las Vegas in August 1967, after Louis's midnight show at the Tropicana. The session started around two in the morning, was interrupted twice by the horns of passing freight trains, and ran until about six. Louis laughed off the delays. He took only the basic union rate of two hundred and fifty dollars so that the orchestra could be paid its overtime. He sang, but did not play trumpet, on the record.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The president of ABC Records, Larry Newton, wanted another bouncy hit like Hello, Dolly! and hated the slow ballad. According to Thiele, Newton tried to stop the session and had to be locked out of the studio, and afterwards he refused to promote the record. In America it sold fewer than a thousand copies at first and stalled at number one hundred and sixteen. In Britain it reached number one in April 1968, stayed there for a month and was the country's best selling single of the year, making Louis, at sixty six, the oldest man to top the UK chart. When young fans asked how he could call the world wonderful amid so many wars, he answered that the trouble was not the world but what people were doing to it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By 1968 his heart and kidneys were failing. He was in and out of Beth Israel Hospital in New York and did not perform in public for most of 1969, and while recovering at Beth Israel he wrote a memoir about the Karnoffsky family. On the sixth of June 1969, Joe Glaser died after a stroke, aged seventy two. That October, after more than a year out of the studio, Louis recorded We Have All the Time in the World for the James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The composer John Barry chose him because he felt Louis could deliver the title with irony. That year he also appeared in the film of Hello, Dolly! singing the title song with Barbra Streisand.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

By the summer of 1970 his doctors said he was fit to work again. He appeared on television talk shows, made a new album, and played with the All Stars in Las Vegas and New York. On the twenty eighth of October 1970 he guested on The Johnny Cash Show, where he sang Ramblin' Rose and joined Cash to recreate Blue Yodel Number Nine, the Jimmie Rodgers song on which he had played trumpet, unbilled, forty years earlier. He set out on another world tour, but a heart attack forced him to stop for two months. He stayed determined, later telling an interviewer he was just one old cat you can't kill and would be back on stage as soon as his legs got stronger.[1] [2] [3]

In March 1971, against his doctor's advice, Louis played a two week engagement in the Empire Room of the Waldorf Astoria in New York. A day after it ended he suffered a major heart attack, and he did not get home to Corona until the eighth of May. Even then he kept going, dubbing all his own records onto tape, making new collages, and practicing along with his old recordings to get his lip back. In late June he invited reporters to the house and played trumpet for them, promising to tour again. On the fifth of July he called to ask for the band to be gathered for a rehearsal. He died in his sleep early the next morning, the sixth of July 1971. He was sixty nine.[1] [2] [3] [4]

After the music stopped

His honorary pallbearers included Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Pearl Bailey and Johnny Carson. Peggy Lee sang The Lord's Prayer, and his longtime friend Fred Robbins gave the eulogy. Louis was buried in Flushing Cemetery in Queens. Lil Hardin, his second wife, rode in the family car at the funeral. Just weeks later, on the twenty seventh of August 1971, she was performing at a televised memorial concert for him in Chicago when she collapsed at the piano and died of a heart attack. After her funeral, her letters and the unfinished manuscript of her autobiography disappeared from her house. His first teacher, Peter Davis, had died that April.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lucille stayed in the Corona house until her death in 1983. The Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation then gave the house to New York City, and his tapes, scrapbooks and manuscripts went to Queens College. Declared a National Historic Landmark, it opened as the Louis Armstrong House Museum on the fifteenth of October 2003, kept almost exactly as the couple left it, with his den restored to look just as it did in his lifetime. In 2023 the Louis Armstrong Center opened across the street, holding more than sixty thousand items, the largest archive devoted to any jazz musician.[1] [2] [3]

His voice kept finding new audiences. In 1987 What a Wonderful World played over scenes of war in the film Good Morning, Vietnam, even though the film is set two years before the song was recorded. Reissued in 1988, it reached number thirty two in America, twenty years late. In Britain a 1994 Guinness advert sent We Have All the Time in the World to number three. In 1999 Kenny G added his saxophone to Louis's original vocal with the estate's permission, and the guitarist Pat Metheny condemned it as musical necrophilia. By April 2014 the original What a Wonderful World had sold more than two million downloads in the United States.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The honors kept coming. He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1972, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him as an early influence. Congo Square in New Orleans became part of Louis Armstrong Park in 1980, with a twelve foot statue of him. An asteroid was named 9179 Satchmo in 1991, and in 1995 he appeared on a postage stamp. For his centennial in 2001, New Orleans renamed its main airport Louis Armstrong New Orleans International, and Satchmo SummerFest was launched to coincide with his August birthday. A US Open tennis stadium near his home carries his name, and his Melancholy Blues travels through space on the Voyager Golden Record.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His story is still being retold. The 2022 documentary Louis Armstrong's Black and Blues, directed by Sacha Jenkins, drew heavily on his home tapes, letting him speak bluntly about racism in his own words. A stage musical, A Wonderful World, told his life through the eyes of his four wives and reached Broadway at Studio 54 in November 2024, with James Monroe Iglehart as Louis. In 2023 Rolling Stone ranked him thirty ninth among the greatest singers of all time, saying the modern era of American pop begins with him. And on the twelfth of November 2025, the Louis Armstrong House Museum marked one hundred years since the first Hot Five session.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong and King Oliver. Oliver was Louis's mentor and father figure, the man he called Papa Joe. He gave the boy lessons, handed him his chair in Kid Ory's band, and summoned him to Chicago in 1922. Lil Hardin later persuaded Louis to step out of his shadow. Oliver's fortunes collapsed in the Depression. Gum disease stopped his playing, he lost his savings, and he died in poverty in Savannah in 1938. Louis was among the loyal friends at his burial in New York.[1] [2] [3]

Louis Armstrong and Lil Hardin Armstrong. His second wife and the architect of his early career. A trained pianist, she polished his image, pushed him to leave Oliver, brought him back from New York and helped create the Hot Five, writing tunes like Struttin' with Some Barbecue. They grew apart over class and money and separated in 1931 when he took up with Alpha Smith, divorcing in 1938. She stayed loyal, even making him a tuxedo, and died weeks after his funeral.[1] [2] [3]

Louis Armstrong and Lucille Wilson Armstrong. His fourth wife, a Cotton Club performer he married in October 1942. She gave him the stable home in Corona that he kept for nearly three decades, and she was at his side on tours from Africa to the pyramids. Their marriage survived his affairs, including a long one with Lucille Preston. After his death she preserved the house and arranged for it to become a museum, and she died in 1983.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Louis Armstrong and Joe Glaser. His manager from 1935 until Glaser's death in 1969. A mob connected former brothel owner and Sunset Cafe manager, convicted in 1927 of raping a fourteen year old girl before the verdict was reversed, Glaser nonetheless untangled Louis's debts and built the All Stars and the Associated Booking Corporation around him. Louis dedicated a book to him as the best friend he ever had, and wore a Star of David that Glaser gave him.[1] [2]

Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines. They met at the musicians' union in Chicago, where Louis heard Hines's trumpet style piano and said it was his own style. Together they made West End Blues and the duet Weather Bird in 1928. Their plan to stick together as the Unholy Three collapsed, and Hines felt betrayed. Reunited in the All Stars in 1948, they clashed over billing. Louis complained about Hines's ego, and Hines quit in 1951.[1] [2]

Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby. Crosby modeled his early singing on Louis and called him the beginning and the end of music in America. In 1936 he insisted Louis be cast in Pennies from Heaven and given proper billing, and Louis often thanked him for it. They sang together in High Society in 1956 and remained warm friends for decades. Crosby was among the honorary pallbearers at Louis's funeral.[1] [2] [3]

Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden. The white Texan trombonist and singer was one of Louis's closest friends. Their duets at Town Hall in 1947 helped launch the All Stars, where Teagarden played until 1951. Louis later recalled the two of them busting down barriers on tours through the South. Teagarden died in January 1964, and in his final weeks Louis put his photo on the front of a tape box collage.[1] [2] [3]

Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. The leading bebop trumpeter was one of his harshest critics. After the 1949 Mardi Gras he called Louis a plantation character, and in 1957 he publicly branded him an Uncle Tom, while Louis mocked bebop as Chinese music. Both later served as State Department jazz ambassadors, and when Gillespie ran a joke campaign for president in 1964 he named Louis his Secretary of Agriculture. Gillespie was an honorary pallbearer in 1971.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet. The two greatest early jazz soloists recorded together in 1924 and 1925 for Clarence Williams. On Cake Walkin' Babies from Home they tried to outdo each other break after break, a rivalry historians still discuss, though they also shared friendly moments on Texas Moaner Blues. Bechet's temper hurt his career in America, and he spent much of his later life in France.[1] [2]

Louis Armstrong and Velma Middleton. The singer joined his big band in 1942 and stayed with the All Stars for nearly two decades, famous for comic duets and doing the splits on stage. Critics were lukewarm about her voice, but Louis considered her essential to the show. She suffered a stroke on tour in Sierra Leone and died in Freetown in February 1961, and Barney Bigard blamed Louis and Glaser for not moving her to better care.[1] [2]

Louis Armstrong and Pierre Tallerie. The white road manager, known as Frenchy, joined as a bus driver and ran All Stars tours in the fifties and sixties, negotiating with segregated hotels and venues. He was unpopular, and the historian Ricky Riccardi calls him infamous for racial insensitivity. After Little Rock he told the press Louis regretted his words, and Louis publicly contradicted him and nearly fired him.[1] [2]

Louis Armstrong and The Karnoffsky family. This Lithuanian Jewish family employed Louis as a boy, fed him, and encouraged his music. Morris Karnoffsky helped him buy his first cornet and later opened Morris Music, the first jazz record store in New Orleans, which Louis kept visiting. Louis wore a Star of David for the rest of his life partly in their memory, and in 1969 he wrote a memoir about them.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Louis Armstrong

• His recording of Melancholy Blues is on the Voyager Golden Record, now travelling beyond the solar system. The Voyager Golden Record carries sights and sounds of Earth for anyone who might find it. Among its music is Louis Armstrong's recording of Melancholy Blues, chosen as a sample of the sounds of Earth.[1]
• He was the first jazz musician ever to appear on the cover of Time magazine. The cover ran on the twenty first of February 1949, tied to his reign as King of the Zulus at the New Orleans Mardi Gras. He told the magazine it was a lifelong dream.[1] [2]
• On his first records in 1923 he had to stand about fifteen feet from King Oliver because he was too loud. Acoustic recording meant everyone played into one horn wired to the cutting needle. Louis's cornet overpowered his boss, so he was moved to a far corner of the studio.[1] [2]
• He taught a young Cab Calloway to scat at the Sunset Cafe in Chicago. Calloway was working at the club when he met Louis, who showed him the scat style. Louis later recommended him as a replacement singer in the revue Hot Chocolates.[1]
• He played trumpet on a Jimmie Rodgers country blues in 1930 but was left off the credits. Louis and Lil backed Rodgers on Blue Yodel Number Nine in Los Angeles. His OKeh contract meant he could not be named on a Victor record. Forty years later he recreated it with Johnny Cash.[1] [2]
• What a Wonderful World was credited to George Douglas, a pen name made from the names of Bob Thiele's uncles. Thiele combined the names of his uncles Stanley, Clayton, George and Douglas into pseudonyms. His real name only appeared on the writing credits from 1988 onward.[1] [2]
• He was paid just two hundred and fifty dollars for What a Wonderful World. The overnight session ran long, so Louis took only the basic union scale. That way the orchestra members could be paid extra for their overtime.[1]
• The hero of Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man listens to Louis singing Black and Blue in a basement lit by 1,369 light bulbs. Ellison opens his 1952 novel with the narrator hiding underground, listening to Louis's recording and thinking about the horrors of slavery. Louis had made the first recording of the song in 1929.[1]
• In Woody Allen's film Manhattan, Potato Head Blues is named as one of the reasons life is worth living. Allen's character lists the 1927 Hot Seven recording among his reasons to live. The record's stop time solo is widely considered one of Louis's greatest.[1]
• Doctors named a lip injury in trumpet players after him, Satchmo's syndrome. It describes a rupture of the muscle around the mouth. The name comes from the symptoms Louis appears to have had in 1935 after years of punishing playing.[1]
• He became the official spokesman for a lip salve called Ansatz Creme. Years of damage led him to treat his lips with creams and even cut scar tissue away with a razor blade. By the 1950s he was promoting the salve he relied on.[1]
• He handed out packets of an herbal laxative called Swiss Kriss to almost everyone he met, including British royals. He was obsessed with his health and published a diet plan called Lose Weight the Satchmo Way. He even had joke cards printed on the subject for friends.[1]
• He signed his letters Red beans and ricely yours. Red beans and rice was his favorite dish, and the sign off kept his New Orleans roots in every letter he wrote on the road.[1] [2]
• Louis and Lil sold their first Hot Five compositions outright for a flat fifty dollars each. They skipped future royalties for quick cash. In 1952 Louis said he wished he had kept even a half cent interest, since the reissues were selling like hotcakes.[1]
• At the first Hot Five session, clarinetist Johnny Dodds had to tap his foot on a pillow. Dodds could not play without patting his foot, which the recording horn picked up. OKeh's E. A. Fearn fetched a pillow to muffle it, according to Johnny St. Cyr.[1]
• In 1933 a British newspaper reported that he had died. Follow up reports even blamed a dog bite. Louis simply sent a telegram thanking everyone for the nice free publicity.[1]
• Mezz Mezzrow drove fifty three miles just to play Heebie Jeebies for Bix Beiderbecke. Mezzrow and Frank Teschemacher were so thrilled by the record that they drove to Indiana to share it with Bix, who was also knocked out.[1] [2]
• Producer David Merrick settled on the title Hello, Dolly! after hearing Louis's record. The musical had earlier been called Dolly, A Damned Exasperating Woman, and then Call on Dolly. Louis's version helped fix the final name.[1]
• Lil Hardin's graduation project from a tailoring course was a tuxedo for Louis. In the late 1940s, long after their divorce, Lil considered leaving music to become a tailor. Her final project was to make her former husband a tuxedo.[1]
• He once told Cab Calloway that his scat style came from Jewish chanting in prayer. Louis traced his scat to the rocking style of Orthodox Jewish prayer he heard as a boy. NPR notes he also absorbed Yiddish lullabies from the Karnoffsky family.[1] [2]
• He pronounced his own name Lewis, not Louie. His home tapes show he said Lewis, though fans and even Lucille often said Louie. Close friends and musicians mostly called him Pops.[1] [2]
• The nickname Pops began because he forgot people's names and called everyone Pops. The habit was eventually turned back on him. Pops became the title of Terry Teachout's 2009 biography.[1]
• After a battle at the Savoy he was nicknamed King Menelik, after the Emperor of Ethiopia. The name celebrated his victory in a musical competition. Earlier in life he was also known as Dipper, short for Dippermouth.[1]
• He made a live duet of Mack the Knife with Lotte Lenya that was not released until 1982. Lenya, the song's original star, came to his 1955 session. Their duet stayed in the vault until after both had died.[1]
• When dynamite exploded outside his 1957 Knoxville concert, he told the crowd it was just the phone. A segregationist threw the dynamite from a car at Chilhowee Park. Nobody was caught, and Louis carried on with the show.[1] [2]
• In 1968 he sang in Italian on Italian television, performing Grassa e Bella. He appeared with the singer Lara Saint Paul on RAI in February 1968. He had recorded the song in Italian for the Italian market.[1]
• The Argentine writer Julio Cortázar credited a 1952 Armstrong concert in Paris with inspiring his Cronopios. Cortázar was a devoted fan and called Louis the Great Cronopio. The whimsical creatures became the subject of many of his stories.[1]
• Dizzy Gillespie's joke 1964 presidential campaign named Louis Secretary of Agriculture. Gillespie's mock cabinet also included Duke Ellington as Secretary of State and Miles Davis at the CIA. Proceeds from his campaign buttons went to civil rights groups.[1]
• His scene in the 1943 film Cabin in the Sky was cut, leaving him no solo number. Louis recorded Ain't It the Truth for the film, but the number was cut from the final print. His recording survives on later soundtrack releases.[1]
• He was the first to record Mahogany Hall Stomp, named after a famous Storyville brothel. The 1929 song was dedicated to Lulu White's Mahogany Hall. Louis recorded it with the Savoy Ballroom Five that spring.[1]
• Earl Hines and Louis did not hear West End Blues until it was in the shops. Playing back a take ruined the wax master, so nobody heard the finished record. When Hines brought it over, the two listened for nearly two hours.[1]
• He travelled with a trunk of reel to reel tapes and was a serious audiophile. He kept the latest sound equipment in his den and liked to play along with his old records. He used his own recordings to study and improve his playing.[1] [2]
• He sponsored a New Orleans baseball team called Armstrong's Secret Nine, and a cigar was named after him. On his 1931 homecoming he backed the team, which grew out of a side called the Raggedy Nine. He was a lifelong baseball fan.[1]
• He was baptized Catholic, raised Baptist, wore a Star of David and met two popes. Asked about his religion, he gave all three answers. He met Pope Pius Twelve and Pope Paul Six.[1]
• Kenny G's 1999 overdub on What a Wonderful World made Pat Metheny call it musical necrophilia. Kenny G had the estate's permission, but Metheny said no one should presume to share the stage with the single most important figure in jazz.[1] [2]
• In 2005 a BBC survey found We Have All the Time in the World was the third most popular love song at weddings. The Bond ballad was not a hit in 1969. A Guinness advert in 1994 finally sent it to number three in Britain.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.