Around three in the afternoon somewhere deep in the Crescent City the club orchestras gather, five or six of them. Someone sets a slow beat, and they start to play, "Just a Little While to Stay Here," mournfully, poignantly. They begin a slow march to the funeral music. The air in New Orleans is thick, combining scents from the gulf, plant life, products from the open-air markets, and people, many people. The bands march behind a smaller group carrying a casket, all moving solemnly toward a nearby church. A host of surviving members, all dressed in black, follow the procession. They arrive at the house of worship. There's a pause. The bands wait while a service takes place inside and the club members pay their last respects. Many friends and musicians remain outside. After a good hour the grand marshal signals with a whistle. The procession starts up again, solemnly. The casket is lifted onto a hearse. The snares punctuate the rhythm, and they all march north, toward the cemetery. Now the band plays the hymn, "Flee as a Bird," still in slow time. At the gravesite everyone gathers in silence. A few sobs can be heard. The bands pause, and then start to play, in unison, still in dirge-like time, "What a Friend We Have in Jesus." They sway gently from side to side, watching the hearse arrive at the grave. Everyone is choked up. The body is laid to rest.
And then! And then, the drums roll and set a lively pace, and the bands start playing, "O Didn't He Ramble":
His feet was in the market place . . his head was in the street
Lady pass him by, said . . look at the market meat
He grabbed her pocket book . . and said I wish you well
She pulled out a forty-five . . said I'm head of personnel.
Didn't he ramble … I said he rambled
Rambled all around … in and out of town
Didn't he ramble … oh didn't he ramble
He rambled till the butcher shot him down.
Not exactly words you would expect at a respectable society funeral. But then jazz was born a mongrel. The music was played in brothels and barrelhouses, but also in street parades as well as in churches. It spread from New Orleans, north and west and then abroad. Naturally it had its vehement detractors. Its critics, not only whites, believed it was too sensuous, primitive, arousing passions that ought to be kept at bay. It also had its huge fans. Jean Cocteau said jazz was the savior of French music. He believed the French obsession with Wagner and Debussy was holding back the advance of their civilization. Jazz could serve as an antidote against "a useless beauty that encourages superfluousness." Yet no one, even Cocteau, could have predicted its eventual worldwide popularity in the decades to come.
Earlier, this music from New Orleans was called ragtime. And then, sometime in the 1900s, it became jazz. The great pianist and jazz pioneer, Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton, once remarked that black people cry at the birth and rejoice at the death. Exactly what we learn from New Orleans funerals. Jazz music is about moving from misery to joy. Louis Armstrong, reflecting on the origins of this unique music, declared to Pops Foster, an early biographer, "Yeah, Pops—jazz actually rose from the dead … the real music came from the grave. That was how jazz began. That's why it brings people to life."
He knew what he was talking about. In many ways, Louis Armstrong not only witnessed the birth and growth of jazz but was its defining musician. While his story has often been told, not least by himself, we may be grateful that an increasing number of studies are being published showing the relation between musicians like Armstrong and their context. Books are good, but they cannot render the full picture. We are blessed in the history of jazz because diligent efforts were made all along to record the music. Here, happily, technology and history meet, to give the world an incomparable legacy: the chronology of jazz in sound.
As all of his good biographers point out, there was the surface Armstrong and the veiled Armstrong.
In particular, we should be very thankful for the lavish set of ten CDs issued in 2011, with representative recordings from each of the major periods in Armstrong's life, as well as a handsome book and various reproductions of memorabilia from his heyday. The collection is quite comprehensive, beginning with the classic King Oliver Creole Jazz Band recordings from 1923, where Armstrong plays second cornet, and moving up to the many recordings with the All Stars. It contains a few unfamiliar recordings, such as a 1949 session with Bille Holiday, "You Can't Lose A Broken Heart," and a long performance of the "St Louis Blues" recorded with the New York Philharmonic in 1949. The remastering by Russ Titelman preserves the original sounds while diminishing the noise of the old 78s. Those unfamiliar with the breadth of Armstrong's work will be surprised by both its diversity and its sheer musicality. His great Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings (between 1925 and 1929) reveal a collective individuality among the musicians and a polyphony that some have likened to baroque music with swing. "What a Wonderful World" was a late career hit meant to encourage community and racial reconciliation.
One of the many virtues of this set is simply the fact that we can listen and discuss … the music. Ted Gioia, an excellent jazz musician and historian, has recently—and justifiably—complained that music criticism has degenerated into scandal-mongering, where critics care far more about what the musicians wear, whom they are dating, and so on than the music itself.[1] No risk of that when all you have are the sound-tracks, packaged in what is meant to look like Armstrong's personal travel bag. The accompanying booklet tells us a bit about Armstrong's story, but not much more. But the music is rich and varied, all within the New Orleans style. We hear superb blues, such as the "West End Blues," or the "Back O' Town Blues," spirituals such as "Nobody Knows" and "Motherless Child," a couple of French classics, standards from the American song book, humorous songs, and more, all with inventiveness and what Leonard Bernstein used to call the growing of a melodic seed into a big symphonic tree.
America's signature music, jazz, originated in the era of slavery. Though combining many genres, like tributaries running into a great river, perhaps its most important source is African American religious music. "There's two kinds of music," soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet once quipped. "There's classic and there's ragtime. When I tell you ragtime, you can feel it, there's a spirit right in the word. It comes out of Negro spirituals."
It is important to get the balance right. All kinds of musical genres converged in New Orleans. There were sea chanteys and work songs, blues and African shouts. But the church did hold a central place. Church was much more than an institution that nurtured doctrine and morals. Church was a place of fellowship, and of survival. Armstrong learned about both music and survival in the church. This may surprise some believers, since Armstrong could speak with a foul mouth, and he held to the use of marijuana for health purposes. Yet the characteristics coexisted in the one man. As Thomas Brothers points out in his excellent study, Louis Armstrong's New Orleans, Armstrong's mother, May Ann, brought him to church as a boy. Although a Baptist, she liked attending the Sanctified church, partly because it had more community and less racial prejudice. Class prejudice was strong not only against blacks in New Orleans but among them as well, as distinctions were often made based on the lightness or darkness of skin color, as well as on education or economics. The Sanctified church provided a measure of protection against some of this prejudice, and made up for fragmentation and isolation by stressing community. Appropriately, the music was participatory. The sounds were animated, full of rhythm and life.
Brothers takes us deep into the city, its musical culture, its racial mix, its churches, its virtues and vices. Early on, Armstrong learned the blues. Originally the blues were played by uptown Negroes, not the downtown Creoles. The blues had more of a folk origin. Among other things, when played well, the blues blurred the line between song and speech. Full of passion, the notes were bent, as with stretching the string on a guitar. The songs were about lost love, unfair patrons, hard work on the levees. Creole music was more sophisticated, as many of the musicians were professionally trained. As it happened, the two musical cultures, folk and classical, would meet throughout the history of jazz, often producing a creative third way. Armstrong embodied both.
W. C. Handy, who composed the "St Louis Blues," was tutored in classical music. He could sing arias from Wagner and Verdi. When he first heard the blues, he was rather bewildered. But then he fell in love with the music, and wrote scores of memorable blues, all with a classical feel. Of course once written, his pieces could be performed in any style. The Duke Ellington band of the 1920s had the same classical or ragtime feel, until trumpeter Bubber Miley came along and introduced the uptown New Orleans ethos to the music. This creative blending continued right down to bebop and modern jazz. Charlie "Yardbird" Parker was an uptown musician, Dizzy Gillespie more Creole. What a revolution was created by the encounter of the two.
Louis Armstrong roamed around New Orleans' uptown and heard the wonderful sounds of the blues. The greatest blues and jazz master at the time was his mentor, cornet player Joe "King" Oliver. He had a gorgeous tone. He could also lag behind the rhythm, and then get caught up, much the way singers would do it in the church or onstage. As musicians would say, he was bad, man, he was bad. Armstrong practically worshiped King Oliver. He went to work for him in Chicago, during the great migration, and they produced some of the greatest jazz ever heard. Eventually Armstrong went independent, but he never forgot his debt to Oliver.
Early this year, Thomas Brothers produced a sequel to Louis Armstrong's New Orleans. The new volume, Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism, begins with Armstrong's train-ride from New Orleans to Chicago. It focuses more intently on the details of Armstrong's creative process. The text is replete with musical examples and somewhat technical analyses of the melodies and harmonies of Armstrong's jazz. Brothers looks carefully into the places where the music was performed, and finds a connection between the venue and the music. To cite one of many examples, he devotes several pages to the trumpet parts on Armstrong's great hit "Big Butter and Egg Man from the West," written for Armstrong by Percy Venable. (A "big butter and egg man" was a traveling business man who would spend large amounts of money at a nightclub.) Venable was a record producer at the Sunset Café, noted for its cabaret acts. It was the seat of many of Armstrong's most memorable performances, and the place he truly became "modern." The husband-and-wife dance team Herbert Brown and Naomi McGraw came to perform at the Sunset. They were known as the fastest and most eccentric dancers in the world. They inspired Armstrong to play music in a way that would blend with their movements and rhythms. "Every step they played I put the notes to it," Armstrong once explained, although contemporary musicians would say their dance act was nothing without his notes. Brothers argues that Armstrong was truly a composer, not an improviser in the strictest sense. He would plan his solos according to the requirements of the music within various kinds of settings. Although a good many recordings of this early jazz survive, relatively little video footage exists, which makes the task of trying to reconstruct these scenes more challenging, though not impossible. Armstrong's strong musical logic, Brothers argues, was worthy of Mozart or Schubert. What made him distinctively modern was his ability to combine elements from various traditions, in a particular performance venue, and then transcend them all.
In his first-rate book Louis Armstrong: The Soundtrack of the American Experience, David Stricklin further relates jazz to its context. Like Brothers, he connects jazz to New Orleans, then Chicago and New York. As the title suggests, he goes into considerable depth in matching the music with the social history of these places. Moving to Chicago was a golden opportunity for Armstrong to get out of the South. Many blacks expected that populating the urban areas would bring greater freedom from racism. That ended up being only partly true. Race prejudice was not absent from the North. But Chicago was a new city, and its people thought of themselves as masters of the American future. All of this is wonderfully illustrated in the series by Harlem Renaissance painter Jacob Lawrence, The Great Migration: An American Story, owned by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. He manages to capture both the hopes and the disappointments of African Americans who moved north.
In Chicago the mob dominated much of the commerce and entertainment. Perhaps surprisingly, for music that meant there was a highly professional business aspect to performances. Armstrong respected this and learned to handle the financial aspect of his trade. He did eventually engage a competent manager, Joe Glaser, who found him the best opportunities. The trick was for these New Orleans musicians now in the North to keep alive what Stricklin happily calls the "spirit of rebellious joy" that had so characterized early jazz.
The recording industry was nascent, and early jazz recordings took place in primitive conditions, often in warehouses. Louder instruments had to be kept in the background, and drummers had to muffle their kits. Solos had to be shortened since the maximum time for a side of the record was three minutes. This had the effect of cramping Armstrong's style, as he was used to much more freedom. Yet recordings made this extraordinary music available to the world—and, of course, to other musicians.
Armstrong went to New York in 1924, to work with the famed Fletcher Henderson band. He electrified the city. As Gary Giddens puts it, "He taught New York to swing." Sometimes his playing was so miraculous the other musicians in the band stopped playing and just listened. Not that everything was easy in New York. Chicago had a large number of Southern black musicians, who were good old boys without pretentions. In New York, blacks were far more polished, and readily teased Armstrong for his rough speaking manner and lack of education. But soon his blues style and his ebullient personality overcame the snobbish surroundings.
As all of his good biographers point out, there was the surface Armstrong and the veiled Armstrong. We learn a great deal from these books about the complexity of the man. Terry Teachout's truly definitive biography, Pops, portrays a joyful and humorous Armstrong on-stage and a pensive, moody Armstrong at home or in the hotel room. He always carried a typewriter around and wrote reams of memories, notes, reviews.
One of the major enigmas in assessing Armstrong's life, one which is finally coming in for some appropriate appraisal, is his attitude toward race. His critics, including fellow blacks, at times cast him as an Uncle Tom. Dizzy Gillespie once called him a "plantation character." One of Armstrong's lifelong ambitions was to become the "King of the Zulus," the head of a legendary social club which led a parade in New Orleans' Mardi Gras. The King dressed up in an outrageous costume and painted his face black. This honor fell to Louis in 1949. The appointment won him the scorn of younger blacks who saw nothing in it but accommodation to white supremacy. For Armstrong, something quite different was at work. He saw the opportunity as a way to endorse the good work of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club. He also fully capitalized on the double entendre in the blackface parody of white dominance. He could parody a parody. Further, this appearance in New Orleans was the only one he allowed himself, at least until the Civil Rights Act of 1965, as he had resolved to stay away from the city of his origins until its racial barriers were dropped.
The Uncle Tom interpretation of Armstrong could not be further from the truth. Armstrong was in fact deeply sensitive about race, and had suffered greatly from the cruel effects of segregation. What some of his critics missed was the difference between attitude and strategy. Unfashionable as it seemed, Louis had resolved to attack race prejudice simply through the weaponry of music: "I have my own ideas about racial segregation and have spent half of my life breaking down barriers through positive action and not a lot of words."
Having integrated his band, he felt any honest observer would have to conclude that there is no reason for segregation. He resented being so popular with whites that his own people were not as drawn to the music, and thus could not always benefit from his race strategy. Not that Armstrong was always quiet about it. When President Eisenhower was slow to enforce Brown v. Board of Education in Little Rock, Arkansas, Armstrong lashed out and publically called him unprintable names. He promptly refused to go on a government-sponsored trip to the Soviet Union, citing Eisenhower's lack of guts. When the president finally changed his mind and sent the National Guard to protect the nine black students at Central High, Armstrong wrote a congratulatory telegram, saying the president had "a good heart" after all. He and Dizzy Gillespie even made up their differences. As the younger musician would testify in his own autobiography, To Be or Not to Bop:
I began to recognize what I had considered Pops' grinning in the face of racism as his absolute refusal to let anything, even anger about racism, steal the joy from his life and erase his fantastic smile. Coming from a younger generation, I misjudged him.
Armstrong became an international star. He was loved in Great Britain, in France, and all over Europe. French jazz critic Hugues Panassié became a close friend and wrote a luminous biography of him. Just when it might appear he was losing his cutting edge, he reinvented himself. And he did so by defying fashionable options. Late in his life, when it seemed that his band and the music were becoming routine, he cut a single with Kapp Records. The song, "Hello, Dolly," seemed as far from New Orleans blues as could be. Armstrong made it his own, and then saw the record climb to astonishing heights. It became the most popular song in America, just ahead of the Beatles' "Can't Buy Me Love."
Again, there were critics. Gunther Schuller, who was a knowledgeable jazz expert, deemed this great music now to be a "wasteland," the work of a musician who had "paid his dues" and now wanted simply to "enjoy the returns." Not so. Ricky Riccardi has done us a great service by exploring Armstrong's later years, deeming them his very best. Over against the view of many who believe the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of the late 1920s were the apex of Louis' art, Riccardi argues in What a Wonderful Life that every era was good, and that the years of the All Stars, Armstrong's band from 1947 on, were in many ways the zenith. The All Stars included the legendary Jack Teagarden on trombone, Sid Catlett on drums, and Barney Bigard on clarinet. Riccardi recounts the many musical adventures of the All Stars, including their European and African trips, their numerous concerts, appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show, Louis' partnership with white crooner Bing Crosby, and his Broadway appearances. He takes on Armstrong's numerous critics, including Schuller, believing them to have greatly erred about the trumpeter's supposedly waning musical quality.
The takeaway from these studies, and especially the superb recordings assembled by Richard Havers, is the pure joy of Pops Armstrong's music. He was one of the greatest entertainers of the 20th century—and that is saying quite a lot, considering it was the age of Sammy Davis, Jr., Bob Hope, Elvis Presley, Charlie Chaplin, and so many others. His onstage antics, his quips, his broad grin, all of these contributed to an art form that made people feel that in many ways, this is a wonderful world. Most of all, though, it was the music, his gravelly voice so full of life and joy, and his incomparable trumpet—every note in place, gorgeous melodies, pearl-like tunes, the embodiment of what America could be—that made Louis Armstrong who he was.
Pops continued to play until his health gave out. He expired on July 6, 1971. The funeral, not done in typical New Orleans style, gathered a who's who of the jazz world. Billy Taylor and Fred Robbins gave the eulogies. Robbins ended his with the announcement, "Move over, Gabriel! Here comes Satchmo!" Duke Ellington's tribute was simple and pithy: "He was born poor, died rich, and never hurt anyone along the way." It was an American story. Oh, didn't he ramble!
William Edgar is professor of apologetics and John Boyer Chair of Evangelism and Culture at Westminster Theological Seminary. He plays piano in a jazz band.
1. Ted Gioia, "Music Criticism Has Degenerated into Lifestyle Reporting," The Daily Beast, March 18, 2014.
Discussed in this essay:
Richard Havers, ed., "Satchmo": Louis Armstrong, Ambassador of Jazz (Universal Music Group Inter., 2011). Box set, 10 CDs, book, brochures.
Thomas Brothers, Louis Armstrong's New Orleans (Norton, 2006).
Thomas Brothers, Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism (Norton, 2014).
David Stricklin, Louis Armstrong: The Soundtrack of the American Experience (Ivan R. Dee, 2010).
Terry Teachout, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (Houghton Mifflin ? Harcourt, 2009).
Ricky Riccardi, What a Wonderful World: the Magic of Louis Armstrong's Later Years (Pantheon, 2011).
Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
