July 12, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Louis Armstrong was the founding father of jazz and one of this century's towering cultural figures who forever changed the face of American music. Here to tell the story is Laurence Bergreen, who wrote the definitive biography on the man known as Pops: Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app, to Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts. Louis Armstrong was the founding father of jazz
in one of last century's towering cultural figures who forever
(00:33):
changed the face of American music. You're to tell the
story is Lawrence Bergreen, who wrote the definitive biography on
the man known as Pops, Louis Armstrong and extravagant life.
Let's take a listen, look at your bye.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Let me tell you what they You're the most no
Buddhist cut.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
I bet my life you've been eating them all of
our red beats and Rice John to bid it back
from my wife the old dog. I'll read with as here.
Speaker 4 (01:13):
I'm going to talk about somebody who really occupies a
special place in my heart. And you know, I'm a biographer.
I've written a number of biographies of iconic figures, everybody
from Herving Berlin to Magellan to Casanova. But there's something
special about Louis Armstrong, and people who know was just
you know, a huge amount of people know what's really
(01:35):
special about him. And it's hard to be a biographer
of Louis because he is beyond category. And usually you
can sit in judgment and comment and criticize and organize.
Louis beyond category, I feel, and his emotional effect is
so overwhelming and it's so inspiring that you know, I
(01:58):
think he's in the category by himself. As I was
researching Berlin, I realized that a lot of the background
of popular music had to do with jazz, with crime figures,
and especially New Orleans. So I decided I would dare
(02:19):
to do Louis Armstrong. I really didn't think I could
get into that idiom for a while, but then I did.
And there's something about Louis which is so open ended
that almost anyone can participate it. Some people think of
him as a you know, laughing, smiling, grinning person with
a white handkerchief, and he loves everybody. And that growling
(02:42):
voice that was true. That was not an act, That
was a genuine part of him.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
You travel a bit, dear, Where do you find your
best audiences?
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Which come every way?
Speaker 5 (02:50):
I hit that note?
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Where do you hit it in any language? Where do
you hit it every time a bit of dawn. What
do you like least least? I don't think by the
least was a time of Logarana.
Speaker 5 (03:03):
Got down in front of me public and jammin.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
With the cats that I know, and I don't expect
too much, you know.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
I don't have time.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
Underlying that was an extraordinary life of hardship that he
overcame to get it again, coming from the very bottom
of the social ladder in New Orleans, which was highly stratified,
and conquering it in two ways with his immense talent,
which was he never took a music lesson in his life.
(03:32):
He just picked this up literally on the street. I'll
get there in a second. And partly because of his
extraordinary spirit, his a very American optimism, his resilience. That
didn't mean that he was a happy clown by any means.
His music, to some extent he invented what we call jazz,
reflected that, but it really came out of a specific lifestyle.
(03:56):
But the way he overcame it, it's really extraordinary. But
he started out to use a contemporary word, disadvantage to
put it mildly. He was the son of a war
He was married to war. He was surrounded by wars
much of his early life, and he said they were
some of the best people he ever met. When I
say war. He lived near Storyville, which was the legendary
(04:19):
red light district of New Orleans.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Well, there's all nice people, that's all I can say.
I mean going up as a kid, I mean, they
didn't do anything that would hurt us and tell us
something wrong. And quite naturally, when they'd having a good
times at night round hunky dunks and things like that,
most of the kids was in bed. And the way
they didn't paint attend But I'm in up all right,
(04:43):
I mean I didn't overdo it.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
One of this early formative experiences when he was a
kid ten or twelve years old, was he was sent
to reform school. He was arrested for petty crime. And
this reform school was a dreadful place. However, his paradoxical
reaction to it was he felt it was one of
the best things that ever happened to him. He admired
(05:09):
the discipline that the people who ran it were trying
to instill in him, and occasionally, if you could imagine,
this is true. When he got to New Orleans, as
an adult. He would go back to visit and remind
them of who he was. And you know we knew
his acquaintance.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Well when I went to the Sunset, which was owned
by mister Joe Grazer, my manager. After that, I you
see a lot of the boys sitting around in al
Capone and his brigade would come in. Yeah, many times
we had some bad boys New Orleans. He didn't. We
had some boys just as tough as al Capones boys
(05:48):
right there New Orleans when I was coming up selling newspapers,
and they followed my life up, you know, from the
time I left the Hunky Dunks to come up gnot
and blow and I went down there and not in
thirty one to play at the Suburban Garden. But this
night they don't prop this man up to it's a
(06:08):
big deal. Now you you bring on little some stories
New Orleans boy and blah blah blah. But a second
before this cat had to go to that mic and
bring me on, he walked away say, I just can't
introduce that nigga can't do it. So the the talten
boys want to wash him wain, you know.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
What I mean.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
But anyway they come to me and say tell me
what he says. I say, well, don't worry about it.
You know, I said, give me a card. Boys. And
I walked at that mic and you dinner shimb and
I walked at that bike before I opened my mouth.
There's all the white boys that I was raised with,
you know, sitting up their shop and they are a
(06:54):
different blah blah blah blah. Man dot the walls was.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Coming in and you've been listening to Lawrence Berggreen tell
the story of Louis Armstrong. And you heard from Louis
Armstrong himself. What a voice, what a life, What a
remarkable thing to understand that one of the worst experiences
of his life, being sent to reform school, also had
an upside when we come back. More of the remarkable
(07:23):
life story of Louis Armstrong here on our American Stories.
This is Lee Habib, host of our American Stories. Every
day we set out to tell the stories of Americans
past and present, from small towns to big cities, and
from all walks of life doing extraordinary things. But we
truly can't do this show without you. Our shows are
(07:45):
free to listen to, but they're not free to make.
If you love what you hear, go to our Americanstories
dot com and make a donation to keep the stories coming.
That's our American Stories dot com. And we continue with
(08:10):
our American Stories and with Lawrence Bergreen, who wrote the
definitive biography of the man known as Pops. Let's continue
where we left off, picking up with Armstrong himself.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
And before I opened my mouth, there's all the white
boys that I was raised with, you know, sitting up
their shop done got rich their fathers and left from
the produced places and different things. That was a kids
who'd hang around and after school we'd go out in
the lots and play cowboys and Indians with the broken
(08:42):
slates and things like that. You know what I mean.
We was the Indians. I've stood there twenty minutes, and
they are a different blah blah man. You thought the
walls was coming in and it's a noncustandard age. Well
(09:03):
I didn't know. This is what happened in the South
of New Orleans and of Appenberg book. So they fired
him and everything, and I took over myself.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
I can't imagine, but this was Louis, you know, really extraordinary.
So that was actually a positive experience and may have
been his making in a way, because he gave him
a sense of self discipline which he lacked as a
small person and young person until that point. The New
Orleans sound was already in existence before Louis came along,
(09:37):
and he got to it the most unlikely way. He
was on his own at a very early age, living
on the street, hustling for nichols and dimes, playing and
singing and trying to attract attention and just trying to survive,
you know, as a street kit, as a street musician.
And he was always looking for, especially as a younger person,
(09:58):
for sponsors, people who could help him in some way.
One of them was the bi legendary family Karnofsky. The
Karnowskis had come to New Orleans from Russia. They were Jewish,
they were to a certain extent outcasts as well. He
helped them with their rag picking trade, and through his
(10:19):
efforts with them, as a young child, he came across
a tin bugle that he found in the street. It
was dirty, it was corroded. They picked it up, they
cleaned it off so it was usable, and he started
to play to blow. As he was saying, he kept
on blowing for the rest of his life on that
(10:40):
cornet and on other instruments. But at that point he
was simply using it to attract attention for their business
as he was going down the street with them.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
As a youngster in the little orphanage home in New Orleans,
I was the bugle of the institution, and I got
to be around eighteen or fourteen years old. Took me
off the view and put them in the little breast van.
Finally they made the leader of the little band on
the corner. So we got so good that we could
(11:09):
play the Saint sig Martian in for the boys the
Muster Church every Sunday.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
And so those were his beginnings. It was not Juilliard,
it was you know, he never had a musical lesson
in his life. I think he would have been steinied
if he had. So anything he picked up in jazz
was from other musicians or was intuitive. And then there
was also his great enthusiasm and zest for life as
(11:40):
he got older. You know, that's what was so captivating.
I'd just like to read you a paragraph if I could,
from the book, my description of what it was like
to encounter Louis in the beginning. He was a sound,
and only a sound, a strange blend of happy cacaphany
and torment to cattawauling. Nothing like it had been heard before,
(12:03):
not in New Orleans, where he was born in nineteen
oh one, or Chicago, or Saint Louis, where he played
as an emerging virtuoso cornetis, and certainly not in New York,
where Duke Ellington said of his first exposure to that sound,
nobody had ever heard anything like it, and his impact
cannot be put into words. Nor had it ever been
(12:25):
heard in Europe, or in South America or Africa, but
everywhere it would be known as the sound of America. Now,
how that happened as an extraordinary alchemy, because when you
think of some of the most famous Americans or Americans
who are examples of American music culture or something, Louis
(12:46):
Armstrong comes to mind. Unlike almost anybody else, he came from,
you know, the most unlikely background, and he established more
popular songs than any other musician. You know, he really
played two instruments. There was the cornette, and then of
course his voice, the growling voice, and then the interplay
(13:07):
of the two. You know, it was unmistakable, and it
er instead of calina.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
Is that no shore men digging? Bless?
Speaker 1 (13:21):
You never been a gas to every one.
Speaker 5 (13:27):
Check you know.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
It's not a sweet voice, not for fun that you
would want to lull you to sleep. But there was
something so reassuring and authentic about it that it was
part of what made Louis Louis. He also was in general,
but there are some exceptions, and innocent he was. Often
(13:53):
people took more advantage of him than he did of them.
He did occasionally get into fights fifth fight. Life in
New Orleans could be very brutal, but and more he
embraced music and performing as his avenue to communicating with
other people. The more extraordinarily secure and popular he became,
(14:15):
they were ups and downs along the way. Becoming a
jazz musician at that time was not an easy route.
He was often broke, cheated on by the people he
worked with or promoters. He developed, you know, his own language,
his own lingo, which persists.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
Writing my mamism.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Bad badis that?
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Do that?
Speaker 6 (14:46):
Do that?
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Dozo verout dot dozo.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Reviny.
Speaker 4 (15:05):
He was really resilient. Something would come along and you know,
he would pick up another gig. Eventually, he in his
search for someone who could be his protector and a
source of financial stability. He came across Joe Glazer. Hey,
Joe Glazer was disreputable. To put it mildly. He was
(15:26):
a fight promoter who later became Louis manager and other managers.
But he was also a gangster, and that was part
of the way he was effective. You didn't really want
to cross Joe Glazer. Did he treat Louis well? Well,
yes and no. Just since he said Joe Glazer was
his boss, his protector, his manager, he got a measure
(15:49):
of security because you didn't want to mess with Joe Glazer,
who was a tough guy from the mob. On the
other hand, he always short changed Louis Armstrong. Playing jazz
and general was not a good way to become rich
at that time, and nobody really knows how much of
Louie's earnings Joe Glazer helped himself to but it was
more than you know, would be considered fair or acceptable.
(16:14):
Louis didn't care. He needed the security and the legitimacy,
and Joe Glazer gave it to him. He managed to
get Louis into various venues and neighborhoods that would otherwise
have been closed to him, even in New Orleans. So
this was a very important connection. Eventually it led to
(16:35):
recording contracts and his incredibly productive output. It was night gloves,
gambling establishments, sometimes a riverboat, sometimes something that was high society.
But it was a long time until he got there.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
And you've been listening to Lawrence Bergreen tell the story
of Louis Armstrong, and my goodness, he just hustled on
the sh streets. He was a street kid, looking for
an advantage, looking for an opportunity. I worked for a
Jewish man who ultimately just bought and sold things off
the street, and in the end found a bugle and
started to play, And pretty soon he was in a
(17:15):
corner band as a young man, and pretty soon was
a leader of that band. He learned music from other musicians,
picked stuff up by intuition. It wasn't exactly Juilliard, Lawrence
Bergreen said, but he had a sound and nothing had
ever sounded like what Louis sounded like before, as Duke
(17:35):
Ellington said, nobody ever heard anything like it. My goodness,
if Duke Ellington is going to say that about you,
well that's true. When we come back more of this
remarkable American story, Louis Armstrong's story here on our American stories,
(18:08):
and we continue with our American stories and with Lawrence
berg Green who wrote but I believe the definitive biography
on the man known as Pops, and the book is
called Louis Armstrong An Extravagant Life. Pick it up at
Amazon or wherever you get your books. Let's pick up
where we last left off.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
You know, they were racial codes and segregation with the
order of the day.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
I was determined I had a chance to play with
the best seven musicians coming through, because that's pretty good myself.
They wouldn't tolerate with you know, you got to be good.
How bad is the devil? You can't tell you for granted,
even if we have two or three days off, I
(18:57):
still had to blow that home. Was to keep up
the chaps. I mean, I've been playing fifty years and
that's what I've been doing in order to keep in
that groove there. I let the warm up every day
at least a hour.
Speaker 5 (19:15):
You know, either evid of it, you don't you play
your han just like you sing a song or him
if it's in your heart to you express yourself in
the tune.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
Usually, when musicians or celebrities have an autobiography quote autobiography,
it's ghost written or they have a collaborator. Louis Armstrong
tried that once, but he also wrote his own called
My Life in New Orleans. I should explain that his
second favorite instrument, after the trumpet or cornett, was the typewriter.
(19:58):
He spent a great deal of time writing and typing
with his own hot and beck method after shows in
the middle of the night. He wanted to write about
the people, in which he did in a very unvarnished way,
and also had a pet interest in life which was gauge,
(20:18):
as he called it, marijuana. Many people attribute the popularity
of marijuana that started around that time in the jazz
world to Louis Armstrong because people wanted to emulate him. Well,
that might be true, and he certainly was a popularizer
of it. People certainly wanted to be like Louis in
that respect. He felt it was essential both for his
(20:41):
music and for his life. Now, it probably wasn't great
because when he smoked what he called a spliff that
was like almost a cigar, it was fat, it was
very strong. It was not good for your lungs, to
put it mildly, and it could get him in trouble
with the law when he was traveling abroad because it
was illegal in some places. It also accounted partly for
(21:04):
his growley voice when he was younger. He didn't really
have a growley voice, but he felt it was essential
for relaxing the way somebody else might say, well, scotch
or beer or alcohol or something else. He was not
that much of a drinker, partly because so much of
the booze that was around in those days was rotgut.
(21:25):
You know, it was just banned for you. So his
drug of choice, if you will, was marijuana. He was
certainly aware of people around him who were unsavory, but
as he said, he tried to see the good in everybody. Well,
that sounds like you know something that say, oh right, okay,
it sounds sort of saccharin. But that was really true
(21:45):
in Louis, and I think he earned it through painful
experience in life, which he authentically recorded. So his life
as well as his music, is the document about the
American spirit. I think both the difficult side, the hard side,
the unfairness and the cruelty, and the optimism and the striving.
(22:08):
I think this reached its culmination in his later life
when he sang It's a wonderful world, which has now
become you know, sort of a Sacharine song, but he
really meant it. It was a huge hit.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
The colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky,
all as along the faces of people going by.
Speaker 6 (22:35):
I see friends shaking and saying how very sad, and
I hears crowd.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
I watched them grow.
Speaker 6 (22:56):
Yeah, I'm much more.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Had I victor myself.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
What I want.
Speaker 4 (23:12):
To be able to say after all he had been through,
That It's a wonderful world was really an extraordinary affirmation.
You know, as I encountered Louie or talked to people
about Louie, he didn't get a range of opinions. You
got one. Louis was just a fantastic character. I was
(23:36):
skeptical to begin with, but he realized that he had
this spirit that I'm talking about, which was really contagious.
I don't know if anybody who doesn't love Louie, I'm
sure they're out there somewhere. They might not have fully
appreciated him, or they might have thought he was a
simple person, which he wasn't He was not educated in
(23:58):
a formal way, but it was highly preceptive about people
and very analytical. Now, one of the things I liked
about him, besides his sense of humor and his virtuosity
and resilience, the name of the songs that he performed
had played were just so beguiling, bass street Blues, King
(24:21):
of the Zulus, strutting with some barbecue, sugar Foot Stomp,
Chicago Breakdown, You Rascal you you know, which was instead
of I'll be glad when your dad you rascal you
weather Bird, Muskrat Ramble, Big Butter and Eggman. I remember
when I was a kid, I was that kind of
(24:43):
very simple summer camp and whenever it was a rainy day,
they would play Muskrat Ramble on the PA system. That
was my first exposure to Louis Arstrong. It's a buliant,
it's joyful, it's crazy, what's the bus Grant Ramble. That
(25:24):
kind of benign anarchy, you know, was part of his popularity,
and he was also in terms of his temperament different
from other jazz musicians you could say of his era,
Duke Ellington had a very upbeat, abiliant temperament, not as
a billion as Louis. I don't think anybody could be
as a billion as Louis, But if you go to
(25:45):
Miles Davis and be bup completely different, introverted, sullen, hard drugs,
also a genius, self destructive, et cetera. Louie early on
discovered that he had a fondness or an instinct for
being a father. Perhaps the worst tragedy that occurred to
(26:08):
him he was with his wife's dance girlfriend, Daisy, in
New Orleans and he adopted her son, who was named Clarence.
They had a house with a porch, as houses in
New Orleans often do, and Clarence was out there playing
one day and he slipped and he fell on his
head on the ground. He didn't die, but he was
(26:32):
never the same after that. He got appropriate medical treatment,
but he always was not right in the head. To
use a packnet expression, the rest of his life, Louis
felt incredibly guilty that this had happened, that he hadn't
been actually on the porch to watch carefully what could
(26:53):
happen to Clarence. And he adopted Clarence and took care
of Clarence for the rest of the Armstrong's life.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
You've been listening to Lawrence berg Green, author of Louis
Armstrong An Extravagant Life. You can buy it wherever you
buy your books and pick it up. It's a terrific read.
When we come back, more of the remarkable wife of
Louis Armstrong, a quintessential American story of optimism and resilience,
grit and talent. More of his story here are on
(27:25):
our American stories, and we continue with our American stories
and with Lawrence Bergreen, the author of Louis Armstrong and
Extravagant Life. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 4 (27:47):
Throughout his life, Louis never really became wealthy. You know,
Joe Blazer, he earned a fair amount of money. Joe
Blazer took a lot, he gave away a lot. Many
jazz musicians died broker nearbro Louis was certainly not broke.
He died a celebrity. He was living in New York
at that point. Nevertheless, he needed the money to survive,
(28:10):
but he wasn't particularly competitive about it. What he really
needed to do to survive was play music or encounter
all sorts of people.
Speaker 3 (28:19):
I'm just so glad to sit in the vand with
a guy like King Oliver and Downy Dots, Sydney Vision
and the greats. That was my happiness. See Davis guy
when it comes to be a star to public wish
that on him and things like that, because that was
a decisify sitting in a tailgate there in the wagons
(28:40):
and another wagon would put up, pull up on the
corner and then would shade the wheels, and that was
my kicks, you know, trying to blow that cat out
of the wagon.
Speaker 4 (28:51):
You know, many entertainers have a crowd of people, you know,
groupies around them. Louis's idea of a great bunch of
groupies were people from New Orleans, old friends, jazz musicians,
working girls, he prostitutes, rabbis, a few priests, and other
assorted people. The more varied, the better, you know, a
(29:11):
totally American Louis Armstrong combination. He just loved these people.
A sense of saneness was not his style. He really
liked the variety, and he made an effort, if they
were all with him in the same place, to introduce
everybody to everybody else. Rabbi meet the prostitute and nuns
(29:32):
as well. He wanted everybody to get along because he
said that he saw a sense of divinity in all people,
didn't matter what kind of a rich, poor, black and white, etc.
He said he could see it. And again just to
make a comparison to Irving Berlin, where everything was so
(29:52):
tightly controlled that it had to be note for note,
you know, just the way he intended, and that it
was part of Berlin's excellence. With Louis it was different.
He would play notes, but what mattered to him were
these tiny micro pauses and irregularities in the rhythm between
(30:15):
the notes, and he felt this is where jazz could
be found in things that you don't necessarily hear. Well,
how do you respond to them? Your mind gets stimulated
and replaces it or invents something to put in these
little gaps, and he describes it in rather clinical detail.
(30:38):
For him, this was the secret of syncopation and the
secret of jazz. So as he became more and more
aware of it, he tended to emphasize that. So he felt,
part of jazz is what you were hearing. You know,
the notes as written, but part of it is things
that you didn't hear, that the mind was being tricked
(30:59):
or stimulated into creating as you listen to it. Because
the ear anticipates sounds before you actually hear them, so
you become engaged unconsciously without realizing it. And I think
in some ways it's the key to what jazz is
and the improvsatory nature of it. But this was so
(31:23):
to speak, the gospel, so to speak of what he
was promoting, and you know it was based on good vibes,
on spirit, on feeling. If not for Louis Armstrong, I
don't know what the jazz world would be like. I
would be there. But he became an exponent of New
Orleans jazz in a way that was really extraordinary. And
(31:46):
then later on when he got into the show business
mainstream with Hello Dolly and other things, he managed to
remain himself almost the entire time. And you know, the
term selling out things that we think of as being
uh standard terms, they don't apply to him.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
Well, people love me and my music. You know, I
loved him. I have no problems at all, but people
and then I walk on the band stand. They know
they're gonna get something good and no jive, and they
know what they're there for, and that's why they come
and they leave very satisfied. I see that that cause
(32:25):
I don't believe it getting up there, and uh, well
a lot of hope 'em. I made a statement of
the day. While you don't hear of a lot of
musicians that got famous and didn't stay that way because
they they had the wrong idea. They figured out they
got famous and they're playing to a crowd of people.
They playing for them there from the heart, which gave
(32:49):
them the the reputation they got so big. Now they
watching the box office, say they blonde. They up there
to watching the box office and forget about them people.
And when you look around, you don't hear them no more.
So you don't play your public cheap at no time.
I'm the audience myself. I'm my own audience, and I
(33:10):
don't like to hear myself play bad or sing bad.
Say I know I ain't gonna do it for you.
Speaker 4 (33:19):
In nineteen sixty nine, the Beatles dominated popular music and
so therefore many quote old fashioned types of American music.
The day was over. So it was really a shock
when Hello Dolly shot to the top of the charts
and became a number one hit.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
Hello Dollar It Lewis Dollar, It's so time to help
you back where.
Speaker 4 (33:48):
You belong and What was so extraordinary was that it
overtook the Beatles in popularity, and that was for a
while number one. It wasn't so much the song, which
if you've ever seen the musical, you know on Brod
said it's okay, yes, of his time. It was his interpretation.
(34:09):
He made it personal when he said this is Lewis Dolly,
because he went by all sorts of nicknames, and nobody
ever really knew for sure how to pronounce his name.
Was it Lewis, was it Louis? His name Satchmo, which
was a New Orleans abbreviation for satchel mouth, because his
mouth was so big.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
You know, all the musicians in my days they had nicknames.
My name was sachel Mouth, like a doctor's satchel. When
I went to England, this fellow is strictly English and
he was the editor of the newspaper there. It shook
my hand and they got off the train and he said,
close Satchmo. So right away with my trauma, Blas said, hmm,
(34:52):
the mad think you have more mouth than sachol mouth.
Salas stuck with and then it's turned out all right.
Speaker 4 (34:58):
So he was introduced himself as if he needed to
you know in later life as Lewis so it was
a neat bit of self promotion and also I guess
honesty on his part, and eventually he became instead of
somebody from the margins of society, somebody who was espousing
(35:21):
central or important values that people could instantly recognize and
ascribe to, relating to people of freedom and of joy.
Everybody around the world knows Louis Armstrong the music, but
he did become almost without meaning to a goodwill ambassador
(35:42):
for the upbeat American spirit. When GI's overseas wanted to
think about or wanted to hear something American, they often
thought of Louis Armstrong's jazz. You know, it was just
a quintessential American sound and it was something new. It
didn't exist the high years before, you know, and it
was a composite of musical styles that came together in
(36:05):
New Orleans, often in disreputable circumstances like brothels, and which
he promoted and refined and popularized. That is jazz. I mean,
how do you define jazz. It's well, you could there
are so many definitions of the word jazz, and you
know what that actually means. But I think Louis probably
(36:28):
came closer to it than others. Now, there are bebop
musicians and many other geniuses in the field who would
have different variations, some of them white, some of them black,
some of them Creole, some of them a mixture. But
still Louis was the personification of it.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Had a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to
Lawrence Bergreen who wrote what I believe is the Defense
in a biography on the man known as Pops, and
we're talking about Louis Armstrong, and the book has called
Lewis Armstrong an extravagant life. Go to Amazon, go to
your local bookstores wherever you get your books. Pick this up.
(37:13):
You will smile ear to ear throughout it and even
through the suffering. Louis's response is just remarkable every time.
So much to learn from this man and how he
lived his life all of us. He wasn't in it
for the money. I mean, he knew that his manager
was probably taking more than his fair share. But what
he really wanted to do more than anything was play
(37:34):
music with great people and meet new people. He saw divinity,
the divinity and the divine in all people. He delighted
in having a pastor and a prostitute, a rabbi and
a barkeep in the same place, introducing them, and the
delight of his life must have been the topping of
the Beatles on the charts in the late nineteen sixties
(37:55):
a near impossibility, and of course how Lawrence berg green
Is ended things was just a perfect way to do it.
Louis Armstrong was the goodwill ambassador to the upbeat American spirit.
The story of Louis Armstrong here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app, to Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts. Louis Armstrong was the founding father of jazz
in one of last century's towering cultural figures who forever
(00:33):
changed the face of American music. You're to tell the
story is Lawrence Bergreen, who wrote the definitive biography on
the man known as Pops, Louis Armstrong and extravagant life.
Let's take a listen, look at your bye.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Let me tell you what they You're the most no
Buddhist cut.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
I bet my life you've been eating them all of
our red beats and Rice John to bid it back
from my wife the old dog. I'll read with as here.
Speaker 4 (01:13):
I'm going to talk about somebody who really occupies a
special place in my heart. And you know, I'm a biographer.
I've written a number of biographies of iconic figures, everybody
from Herving Berlin to Magellan to Casanova. But there's something
special about Louis Armstrong, and people who know was just
you know, a huge amount of people know what's really
(01:35):
special about him. And it's hard to be a biographer
of Louis because he is beyond category. And usually you
can sit in judgment and comment and criticize and organize.
Louis beyond category, I feel, and his emotional effect is
so overwhelming and it's so inspiring that you know, I
(01:58):
think he's in the category by himself. As I was
researching Berlin, I realized that a lot of the background
of popular music had to do with jazz, with crime figures,
and especially New Orleans. So I decided I would dare
(02:19):
to do Louis Armstrong. I really didn't think I could
get into that idiom for a while, but then I did.
And there's something about Louis which is so open ended
that almost anyone can participate it. Some people think of
him as a you know, laughing, smiling, grinning person with
a white handkerchief, and he loves everybody. And that growling
(02:42):
voice that was true. That was not an act, That
was a genuine part of him.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
You travel a bit, dear, Where do you find your
best audiences?
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Which come every way?
Speaker 5 (02:50):
I hit that note?
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Where do you hit it in any language? Where do
you hit it every time a bit of dawn. What
do you like least least? I don't think by the
least was a time of Logarana.
Speaker 5 (03:03):
Got down in front of me public and jammin.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
With the cats that I know, and I don't expect
too much, you know.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
I don't have time.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
Underlying that was an extraordinary life of hardship that he
overcame to get it again, coming from the very bottom
of the social ladder in New Orleans, which was highly stratified,
and conquering it in two ways with his immense talent,
which was he never took a music lesson in his life.
(03:32):
He just picked this up literally on the street. I'll
get there in a second. And partly because of his
extraordinary spirit, his a very American optimism, his resilience. That
didn't mean that he was a happy clown by any means.
His music, to some extent he invented what we call jazz,
reflected that, but it really came out of a specific lifestyle.
(03:56):
But the way he overcame it, it's really extraordinary. But
he started out to use a contemporary word, disadvantage to
put it mildly. He was the son of a war
He was married to war. He was surrounded by wars
much of his early life, and he said they were
some of the best people he ever met. When I
say war. He lived near Storyville, which was the legendary
(04:19):
red light district of New Orleans.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Well, there's all nice people, that's all I can say.
I mean going up as a kid, I mean, they
didn't do anything that would hurt us and tell us
something wrong. And quite naturally, when they'd having a good
times at night round hunky dunks and things like that,
most of the kids was in bed. And the way
they didn't paint attend But I'm in up all right,
(04:43):
I mean I didn't overdo it.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
One of this early formative experiences when he was a
kid ten or twelve years old, was he was sent
to reform school. He was arrested for petty crime. And
this reform school was a dreadful place. However, his paradoxical
reaction to it was he felt it was one of
the best things that ever happened to him. He admired
(05:09):
the discipline that the people who ran it were trying
to instill in him, and occasionally, if you could imagine,
this is true. When he got to New Orleans, as
an adult. He would go back to visit and remind
them of who he was. And you know we knew
his acquaintance.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Well when I went to the Sunset, which was owned
by mister Joe Grazer, my manager. After that, I you
see a lot of the boys sitting around in al
Capone and his brigade would come in. Yeah, many times
we had some bad boys New Orleans. He didn't. We
had some boys just as tough as al Capones boys
(05:48):
right there New Orleans when I was coming up selling newspapers,
and they followed my life up, you know, from the
time I left the Hunky Dunks to come up gnot
and blow and I went down there and not in
thirty one to play at the Suburban Garden. But this
night they don't prop this man up to it's a
(06:08):
big deal. Now you you bring on little some stories
New Orleans boy and blah blah blah. But a second
before this cat had to go to that mic and
bring me on, he walked away say, I just can't
introduce that nigga can't do it. So the the talten
boys want to wash him wain, you know.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
What I mean.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
But anyway they come to me and say tell me
what he says. I say, well, don't worry about it.
You know, I said, give me a card. Boys. And
I walked at that mic and you dinner shimb and
I walked at that bike before I opened my mouth.
There's all the white boys that I was raised with,
you know, sitting up their shop and they are a
(06:54):
different blah blah blah blah. Man dot the walls was.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Coming in and you've been listening to Lawrence Berggreen tell
the story of Louis Armstrong. And you heard from Louis
Armstrong himself. What a voice, what a life, What a
remarkable thing to understand that one of the worst experiences
of his life, being sent to reform school, also had
an upside when we come back. More of the remarkable
(07:23):
life story of Louis Armstrong here on our American Stories.
This is Lee Habib, host of our American Stories. Every
day we set out to tell the stories of Americans
past and present, from small towns to big cities, and
from all walks of life doing extraordinary things. But we
truly can't do this show without you. Our shows are
(07:45):
free to listen to, but they're not free to make.
If you love what you hear, go to our Americanstories
dot com and make a donation to keep the stories coming.
That's our American Stories dot com. And we continue with
(08:10):
our American Stories and with Lawrence Bergreen, who wrote the
definitive biography of the man known as Pops. Let's continue
where we left off, picking up with Armstrong himself.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
And before I opened my mouth, there's all the white
boys that I was raised with, you know, sitting up
their shop done got rich their fathers and left from
the produced places and different things. That was a kids
who'd hang around and after school we'd go out in
the lots and play cowboys and Indians with the broken
(08:42):
slates and things like that. You know what I mean.
We was the Indians. I've stood there twenty minutes, and
they are a different blah blah man. You thought the
walls was coming in and it's a noncustandard age. Well
(09:03):
I didn't know. This is what happened in the South
of New Orleans and of Appenberg book. So they fired
him and everything, and I took over myself.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
I can't imagine, but this was Louis, you know, really extraordinary.
So that was actually a positive experience and may have
been his making in a way, because he gave him
a sense of self discipline which he lacked as a
small person and young person until that point. The New
Orleans sound was already in existence before Louis came along,
(09:37):
and he got to it the most unlikely way. He
was on his own at a very early age, living
on the street, hustling for nichols and dimes, playing and
singing and trying to attract attention and just trying to survive,
you know, as a street kit, as a street musician.
And he was always looking for, especially as a younger person,
(09:58):
for sponsors, people who could help him in some way.
One of them was the bi legendary family Karnofsky. The
Karnowskis had come to New Orleans from Russia. They were Jewish,
they were to a certain extent outcasts as well. He
helped them with their rag picking trade, and through his
(10:19):
efforts with them, as a young child, he came across
a tin bugle that he found in the street. It
was dirty, it was corroded. They picked it up, they
cleaned it off so it was usable, and he started
to play to blow. As he was saying, he kept
on blowing for the rest of his life on that
(10:40):
cornet and on other instruments. But at that point he
was simply using it to attract attention for their business
as he was going down the street with them.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
As a youngster in the little orphanage home in New Orleans,
I was the bugle of the institution, and I got
to be around eighteen or fourteen years old. Took me
off the view and put them in the little breast van.
Finally they made the leader of the little band on
the corner. So we got so good that we could
(11:09):
play the Saint sig Martian in for the boys the
Muster Church every Sunday.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
And so those were his beginnings. It was not Juilliard,
it was you know, he never had a musical lesson
in his life. I think he would have been steinied
if he had. So anything he picked up in jazz
was from other musicians or was intuitive. And then there
was also his great enthusiasm and zest for life as
(11:40):
he got older. You know, that's what was so captivating.
I'd just like to read you a paragraph if I could,
from the book, my description of what it was like
to encounter Louis in the beginning. He was a sound,
and only a sound, a strange blend of happy cacaphany
and torment to cattawauling. Nothing like it had been heard before,
(12:03):
not in New Orleans, where he was born in nineteen
oh one, or Chicago, or Saint Louis, where he played
as an emerging virtuoso cornetis, and certainly not in New York,
where Duke Ellington said of his first exposure to that sound,
nobody had ever heard anything like it, and his impact
cannot be put into words. Nor had it ever been
(12:25):
heard in Europe, or in South America or Africa, but
everywhere it would be known as the sound of America. Now,
how that happened as an extraordinary alchemy, because when you
think of some of the most famous Americans or Americans
who are examples of American music culture or something, Louis
(12:46):
Armstrong comes to mind. Unlike almost anybody else, he came from,
you know, the most unlikely background, and he established more
popular songs than any other musician. You know, he really
played two instruments. There was the cornette, and then of
course his voice, the growling voice, and then the interplay
(13:07):
of the two. You know, it was unmistakable, and it
er instead of calina.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
Is that no shore men digging? Bless?
Speaker 1 (13:21):
You never been a gas to every one.
Speaker 5 (13:27):
Check you know.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
It's not a sweet voice, not for fun that you
would want to lull you to sleep. But there was
something so reassuring and authentic about it that it was
part of what made Louis Louis. He also was in general,
but there are some exceptions, and innocent he was. Often
(13:53):
people took more advantage of him than he did of them.
He did occasionally get into fights fifth fight. Life in
New Orleans could be very brutal, but and more he
embraced music and performing as his avenue to communicating with
other people. The more extraordinarily secure and popular he became,
(14:15):
they were ups and downs along the way. Becoming a
jazz musician at that time was not an easy route.
He was often broke, cheated on by the people he
worked with or promoters. He developed, you know, his own language,
his own lingo, which persists.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
Writing my mamism.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Bad badis that?
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Do that?
Speaker 6 (14:46):
Do that?
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Dozo verout dot dozo.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Reviny.
Speaker 4 (15:05):
He was really resilient. Something would come along and you know,
he would pick up another gig. Eventually, he in his
search for someone who could be his protector and a
source of financial stability. He came across Joe Glazer. Hey,
Joe Glazer was disreputable. To put it mildly. He was
(15:26):
a fight promoter who later became Louis manager and other managers.
But he was also a gangster, and that was part
of the way he was effective. You didn't really want
to cross Joe Glazer. Did he treat Louis well? Well,
yes and no. Just since he said Joe Glazer was
his boss, his protector, his manager, he got a measure
(15:49):
of security because you didn't want to mess with Joe Glazer,
who was a tough guy from the mob. On the
other hand, he always short changed Louis Armstrong. Playing jazz
and general was not a good way to become rich
at that time, and nobody really knows how much of
Louie's earnings Joe Glazer helped himself to but it was
more than you know, would be considered fair or acceptable.
(16:14):
Louis didn't care. He needed the security and the legitimacy,
and Joe Glazer gave it to him. He managed to
get Louis into various venues and neighborhoods that would otherwise
have been closed to him, even in New Orleans. So
this was a very important connection. Eventually it led to
(16:35):
recording contracts and his incredibly productive output. It was night gloves,
gambling establishments, sometimes a riverboat, sometimes something that was high society.
But it was a long time until he got there.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
And you've been listening to Lawrence Bergreen tell the story
of Louis Armstrong, and my goodness, he just hustled on
the sh streets. He was a street kid, looking for
an advantage, looking for an opportunity. I worked for a
Jewish man who ultimately just bought and sold things off
the street, and in the end found a bugle and
started to play, And pretty soon he was in a
(17:15):
corner band as a young man, and pretty soon was
a leader of that band. He learned music from other musicians,
picked stuff up by intuition. It wasn't exactly Juilliard, Lawrence
Bergreen said, but he had a sound and nothing had
ever sounded like what Louis sounded like before, as Duke
(17:35):
Ellington said, nobody ever heard anything like it. My goodness,
if Duke Ellington is going to say that about you,
well that's true. When we come back more of this
remarkable American story, Louis Armstrong's story here on our American stories,
(18:08):
and we continue with our American stories and with Lawrence
berg Green who wrote but I believe the definitive biography
on the man known as Pops, and the book is
called Louis Armstrong An Extravagant Life. Pick it up at
Amazon or wherever you get your books. Let's pick up
where we last left off.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
You know, they were racial codes and segregation with the
order of the day.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
I was determined I had a chance to play with
the best seven musicians coming through, because that's pretty good myself.
They wouldn't tolerate with you know, you got to be good.
How bad is the devil? You can't tell you for granted,
even if we have two or three days off, I
(18:57):
still had to blow that home. Was to keep up
the chaps. I mean, I've been playing fifty years and
that's what I've been doing in order to keep in
that groove there. I let the warm up every day
at least a hour.
Speaker 5 (19:15):
You know, either evid of it, you don't you play
your han just like you sing a song or him
if it's in your heart to you express yourself in
the tune.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
Usually, when musicians or celebrities have an autobiography quote autobiography,
it's ghost written or they have a collaborator. Louis Armstrong
tried that once, but he also wrote his own called
My Life in New Orleans. I should explain that his
second favorite instrument, after the trumpet or cornett, was the typewriter.
(19:58):
He spent a great deal of time writing and typing
with his own hot and beck method after shows in
the middle of the night. He wanted to write about
the people, in which he did in a very unvarnished way,
and also had a pet interest in life which was gauge,
(20:18):
as he called it, marijuana. Many people attribute the popularity
of marijuana that started around that time in the jazz
world to Louis Armstrong because people wanted to emulate him. Well,
that might be true, and he certainly was a popularizer
of it. People certainly wanted to be like Louis in
that respect. He felt it was essential both for his
(20:41):
music and for his life. Now, it probably wasn't great
because when he smoked what he called a spliff that
was like almost a cigar, it was fat, it was
very strong. It was not good for your lungs, to
put it mildly, and it could get him in trouble
with the law when he was traveling abroad because it
was illegal in some places. It also accounted partly for
(21:04):
his growley voice when he was younger. He didn't really
have a growley voice, but he felt it was essential
for relaxing the way somebody else might say, well, scotch
or beer or alcohol or something else. He was not
that much of a drinker, partly because so much of
the booze that was around in those days was rotgut.
(21:25):
You know, it was just banned for you. So his
drug of choice, if you will, was marijuana. He was
certainly aware of people around him who were unsavory, but
as he said, he tried to see the good in everybody. Well,
that sounds like you know something that say, oh right, okay,
it sounds sort of saccharin. But that was really true
(21:45):
in Louis, and I think he earned it through painful
experience in life, which he authentically recorded. So his life
as well as his music, is the document about the
American spirit. I think both the difficult side, the hard side,
the unfairness and the cruelty, and the optimism and the striving.
(22:08):
I think this reached its culmination in his later life
when he sang It's a wonderful world, which has now
become you know, sort of a Sacharine song, but he
really meant it. It was a huge hit.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
The colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky,
all as along the faces of people going by.
Speaker 6 (22:35):
I see friends shaking and saying how very sad, and
I hears crowd.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
I watched them grow.
Speaker 6 (22:56):
Yeah, I'm much more.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Had I victor myself.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
What I want.
Speaker 4 (23:12):
To be able to say after all he had been through,
That It's a wonderful world was really an extraordinary affirmation.
You know, as I encountered Louie or talked to people
about Louie, he didn't get a range of opinions. You
got one. Louis was just a fantastic character. I was
(23:36):
skeptical to begin with, but he realized that he had
this spirit that I'm talking about, which was really contagious.
I don't know if anybody who doesn't love Louie, I'm
sure they're out there somewhere. They might not have fully
appreciated him, or they might have thought he was a
simple person, which he wasn't He was not educated in
(23:58):
a formal way, but it was highly preceptive about people
and very analytical. Now, one of the things I liked
about him, besides his sense of humor and his virtuosity
and resilience, the name of the songs that he performed
had played were just so beguiling, bass street Blues, King
(24:21):
of the Zulus, strutting with some barbecue, sugar Foot Stomp,
Chicago Breakdown, You Rascal you you know, which was instead
of I'll be glad when your dad you rascal you
weather Bird, Muskrat Ramble, Big Butter and Eggman. I remember
when I was a kid, I was that kind of
(24:43):
very simple summer camp and whenever it was a rainy day,
they would play Muskrat Ramble on the PA system. That
was my first exposure to Louis Arstrong. It's a buliant,
it's joyful, it's crazy, what's the bus Grant Ramble. That
(25:24):
kind of benign anarchy, you know, was part of his popularity,
and he was also in terms of his temperament different
from other jazz musicians you could say of his era,
Duke Ellington had a very upbeat, abiliant temperament, not as
a billion as Louis. I don't think anybody could be
as a billion as Louis, But if you go to
(25:45):
Miles Davis and be bup completely different, introverted, sullen, hard drugs,
also a genius, self destructive, et cetera. Louie early on
discovered that he had a fondness or an instinct for
being a father. Perhaps the worst tragedy that occurred to
(26:08):
him he was with his wife's dance girlfriend, Daisy, in
New Orleans and he adopted her son, who was named Clarence.
They had a house with a porch, as houses in
New Orleans often do, and Clarence was out there playing
one day and he slipped and he fell on his
head on the ground. He didn't die, but he was
(26:32):
never the same after that. He got appropriate medical treatment,
but he always was not right in the head. To
use a packnet expression, the rest of his life, Louis
felt incredibly guilty that this had happened, that he hadn't
been actually on the porch to watch carefully what could
(26:53):
happen to Clarence. And he adopted Clarence and took care
of Clarence for the rest of the Armstrong's life.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
You've been listening to Lawrence berg Green, author of Louis
Armstrong An Extravagant Life. You can buy it wherever you
buy your books and pick it up. It's a terrific read.
When we come back, more of the remarkable wife of
Louis Armstrong, a quintessential American story of optimism and resilience,
grit and talent. More of his story here are on
(27:25):
our American stories, and we continue with our American stories
and with Lawrence Bergreen, the author of Louis Armstrong and
Extravagant Life. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 4 (27:47):
Throughout his life, Louis never really became wealthy. You know,
Joe Blazer, he earned a fair amount of money. Joe
Blazer took a lot, he gave away a lot. Many
jazz musicians died broker nearbro Louis was certainly not broke.
He died a celebrity. He was living in New York
at that point. Nevertheless, he needed the money to survive,
(28:10):
but he wasn't particularly competitive about it. What he really
needed to do to survive was play music or encounter
all sorts of people.
Speaker 3 (28:19):
I'm just so glad to sit in the vand with
a guy like King Oliver and Downy Dots, Sydney Vision
and the greats. That was my happiness. See Davis guy
when it comes to be a star to public wish
that on him and things like that, because that was
a decisify sitting in a tailgate there in the wagons
(28:40):
and another wagon would put up, pull up on the
corner and then would shade the wheels, and that was
my kicks, you know, trying to blow that cat out
of the wagon.
Speaker 4 (28:51):
You know, many entertainers have a crowd of people, you know,
groupies around them. Louis's idea of a great bunch of
groupies were people from New Orleans, old friends, jazz musicians,
working girls, he prostitutes, rabbis, a few priests, and other
assorted people. The more varied, the better, you know, a
(29:11):
totally American Louis Armstrong combination. He just loved these people.
A sense of saneness was not his style. He really
liked the variety, and he made an effort, if they
were all with him in the same place, to introduce
everybody to everybody else. Rabbi meet the prostitute and nuns
(29:32):
as well. He wanted everybody to get along because he
said that he saw a sense of divinity in all people,
didn't matter what kind of a rich, poor, black and white, etc.
He said he could see it. And again just to
make a comparison to Irving Berlin, where everything was so
(29:52):
tightly controlled that it had to be note for note,
you know, just the way he intended, and that it
was part of Berlin's excellence. With Louis it was different.
He would play notes, but what mattered to him were
these tiny micro pauses and irregularities in the rhythm between
(30:15):
the notes, and he felt this is where jazz could
be found in things that you don't necessarily hear. Well,
how do you respond to them? Your mind gets stimulated
and replaces it or invents something to put in these
little gaps, and he describes it in rather clinical detail.
(30:38):
For him, this was the secret of syncopation and the
secret of jazz. So as he became more and more
aware of it, he tended to emphasize that. So he felt,
part of jazz is what you were hearing. You know,
the notes as written, but part of it is things
that you didn't hear, that the mind was being tricked
(30:59):
or stimulated into creating as you listen to it. Because
the ear anticipates sounds before you actually hear them, so
you become engaged unconsciously without realizing it. And I think
in some ways it's the key to what jazz is
and the improvsatory nature of it. But this was so
(31:23):
to speak, the gospel, so to speak of what he
was promoting, and you know it was based on good vibes,
on spirit, on feeling. If not for Louis Armstrong, I
don't know what the jazz world would be like. I
would be there. But he became an exponent of New
Orleans jazz in a way that was really extraordinary. And
(31:46):
then later on when he got into the show business
mainstream with Hello Dolly and other things, he managed to
remain himself almost the entire time. And you know, the
term selling out things that we think of as being
uh standard terms, they don't apply to him.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
Well, people love me and my music. You know, I
loved him. I have no problems at all, but people
and then I walk on the band stand. They know
they're gonna get something good and no jive, and they
know what they're there for, and that's why they come
and they leave very satisfied. I see that that cause
(32:25):
I don't believe it getting up there, and uh, well
a lot of hope 'em. I made a statement of
the day. While you don't hear of a lot of
musicians that got famous and didn't stay that way because
they they had the wrong idea. They figured out they
got famous and they're playing to a crowd of people.
They playing for them there from the heart, which gave
(32:49):
them the the reputation they got so big. Now they
watching the box office, say they blonde. They up there
to watching the box office and forget about them people.
And when you look around, you don't hear them no more.
So you don't play your public cheap at no time.
I'm the audience myself. I'm my own audience, and I
(33:10):
don't like to hear myself play bad or sing bad.
Say I know I ain't gonna do it for you.
Speaker 4 (33:19):
In nineteen sixty nine, the Beatles dominated popular music and
so therefore many quote old fashioned types of American music.
The day was over. So it was really a shock
when Hello Dolly shot to the top of the charts
and became a number one hit.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
Hello Dollar It Lewis Dollar, It's so time to help
you back where.
Speaker 4 (33:48):
You belong and What was so extraordinary was that it
overtook the Beatles in popularity, and that was for a
while number one. It wasn't so much the song, which
if you've ever seen the musical, you know on Brod
said it's okay, yes, of his time. It was his interpretation.
(34:09):
He made it personal when he said this is Lewis Dolly,
because he went by all sorts of nicknames, and nobody
ever really knew for sure how to pronounce his name.
Was it Lewis, was it Louis? His name Satchmo, which
was a New Orleans abbreviation for satchel mouth, because his
mouth was so big.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
You know, all the musicians in my days they had nicknames.
My name was sachel Mouth, like a doctor's satchel. When
I went to England, this fellow is strictly English and
he was the editor of the newspaper there. It shook
my hand and they got off the train and he said,
close Satchmo. So right away with my trauma, Blas said, hmm,
(34:52):
the mad think you have more mouth than sachol mouth.
Salas stuck with and then it's turned out all right.
Speaker 4 (34:58):
So he was introduced himself as if he needed to
you know in later life as Lewis so it was
a neat bit of self promotion and also I guess
honesty on his part, and eventually he became instead of
somebody from the margins of society, somebody who was espousing
(35:21):
central or important values that people could instantly recognize and
ascribe to, relating to people of freedom and of joy.
Everybody around the world knows Louis Armstrong the music, but
he did become almost without meaning to a goodwill ambassador
(35:42):
for the upbeat American spirit. When GI's overseas wanted to
think about or wanted to hear something American, they often
thought of Louis Armstrong's jazz. You know, it was just
a quintessential American sound and it was something new. It
didn't exist the high years before, you know, and it
was a composite of musical styles that came together in
(36:05):
New Orleans, often in disreputable circumstances like brothels, and which
he promoted and refined and popularized. That is jazz. I mean,
how do you define jazz. It's well, you could there
are so many definitions of the word jazz, and you
know what that actually means. But I think Louis probably
(36:28):
came closer to it than others. Now, there are bebop
musicians and many other geniuses in the field who would
have different variations, some of them white, some of them black,
some of them Creole, some of them a mixture. But
still Louis was the personification of it.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Had a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to
Lawrence Bergreen who wrote what I believe is the Defense
in a biography on the man known as Pops, and
we're talking about Louis Armstrong, and the book has called
Lewis Armstrong an extravagant life. Go to Amazon, go to
your local bookstores wherever you get your books. Pick this up.
(37:13):
You will smile ear to ear throughout it and even
through the suffering. Louis's response is just remarkable every time.
So much to learn from this man and how he
lived his life all of us. He wasn't in it
for the money. I mean, he knew that his manager
was probably taking more than his fair share. But what
he really wanted to do more than anything was play
(37:34):
music with great people and meet new people. He saw divinity,
the divinity and the divine in all people. He delighted
in having a pastor and a prostitute, a rabbi and
a barkeep in the same place, introducing them, and the
delight of his life must have been the topping of
the Beatles on the charts in the late nineteen sixties
(37:55):
a near impossibility, and of course how Lawrence berg green
Is ended things was just a perfect way to do it.
Louis Armstrong was the goodwill ambassador to the upbeat American spirit.
The story of Louis Armstrong here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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