This week in US Pop History class, we are talking about early jazz, and that means talking about Louis Armstrong. If you are not deep into 1920s music, your relationship with him almost certainly begins and ends with this:
Bob Thiele and George David Weiss wrote the tune specifically with Armstrong in mind. He recorded it in 1967, four years before his death, and many decades after his period of peak cultural relevance. It wasn’t a big hit in the US, though it did top the UK singles chart. The tune worked its way into the fabric of American culture gradually, especially once it started appearing in movies and TV shows.
For my age cohort, the most iconic usage is an ironic one.
I grew up thinking of Louis Armstrong as a kind of benevolent grandpa figure with a muppet-y voice. I had always assumed that Frank Oz based Cookie Monster’s voice on Armstrong, though I can’t find any evidence of that. Kevin Clash did explicitly model Hoot The Owl on Armstrong, though; you can compare and contrast that character with Cookie Monster here.
Anyway, I was probably aware that Armstrong played the trumpet, but more from seeing pictures of him playing than from ever hearing it. My parents’ generation knew this side of him better, because he was a regular presence on TV, performing Dixieland, pop songs, and the occasional duet with Duke Ellington.
Armstrong’s trumpet playing at this stage of his life did not have much power to it; he had problems with his teeth and lip. He did still have his inimitable stage presence and that voice, but you would never guess that you were seeing someone who, at one time, had been one of the major creative drivers of jazz, and of 20th century music generally.
Louis Armstrong’s records with the Hot Five and Hot Seven in the late 1920s were startlingly fresh, audacious and modern-sounding at the time, and they still sound great now.
The other musicians on these records sound okay, but Armstrong is an another level both technically and creatively. His rhythmic sense in particular is far ahead of anyone else’s at the time, and he has effortlessly precise control over his tone.
To really get the feeling for how Armstrong must have sounded to people in his prime, let’s make an apples-to-apples comparison. First, listen to Hoagy Carmichael’s 1930 recording of his song “(Up A) Lazy River”.
Hoagy Carmichael is a better songwriter than singer, but he gets the tune across. There are some great musicians playing behind him: the Dorsey brothers, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang.
Now listen to the recording that Louis Armstrong made of the tune a year later:
This band doesn’t have the polish or the panache that Hoagy Carmichael’s does, but Armstrong himself is extraordinarily creative.
- At 0:13 during his trumpet intro, he breaks into a cool doubletime riff that previews what’s coming.
- At 0:40, when he starts singing, he isn’t constrained by the written the melody at all. He sings most of the A section on a single note with hip percussive rhythms.
- At 1:24, he starts scatting, once again going into doubletime. His riff at 1:38 is breathtakingly funky. You can lay it over a hip-hop beat and it fits right in.
- At 2:31 during his trumpet solo, he hits an incredible note, smearing from G up to B, back down to G, and then up to A.
Throughout the track, whether he’s singing, talking or playing trumpet, Armstrong has palpable swagger. He sounds more at home in front of the microphone than I do lying in my own bed.
Louis Armstrong became a star in the 1930s, and his virtuosity, charm and personal style made him an inspirational figure for Black Americans. However, by the 1950s, Black musicians and fans found him embarrassing. Two quotes from Miles Davis sum their feelings up. On the one hand, Miles said, “you can’t play anything on a horn that Louis hasn’t played – I mean even modern.” On the other hand, Miles also said, “I loved Satchmo, but I couldn’t stand all that grinning he did.”
Miles isn’t just talking about Armstrong’s later crowd-pleasing TV performances and pop records. Even at his artistic peak, Armstrong participated in a lot of regrettable minstrelry. A low point is his appearance in the film A Rhapsody in Black and Blue (1932), which I don’t recommend watching. Most of us would prefer to ignore this side of Armstrong and focus on things like his exquisite records with Ella Fitzgerald instead.
But in a pop music history class, we need to look at the man in his complex entirety. Charles Hiroshi Garrett’s 2008 book, Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century, devotes a chapter to Armstrong, with the Great Migration as its framing device. Armstrong was one of six million Black Americans who left the Jim Crow South for better economic opportunities and (potentially) more rights and dignity in Northern cities. Armstrong had grown up in horrific poverty in New Orleans, and he found fame and success in Chicago. But that success came with feelings of dislocation. In that way, his personal experience mirrored those of many new Black arrivals from the deep South.
Garrett sees symbolic importance in the fact that Armstrong got famous not just for performances, but for his records. The phonograph had existed for decades by that point, but in the late 1920s, records had become a mass medium, one of the few that featured professional Black artists making work aimed at Black audiences. Garrett points out:
Although top-of-the-line phonograph players required considerable sums, Armstrong’s recollections indicate the symbolic significance of owning one as a point of pride for families able to make such a substantial financial commitment. He remembered playing jazz and operatic recordings in his New Orleans home on “an upright Victrola we were very proud of.”
Armstrong’s music was fresh and innovative, but it also featured a constant undercurrent of nostalgia. He recorded “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” for the first time in 1931, and then adopted it as his signature song; he would use it to open his shows for the rest of his life.
The song was written by three Black men, Clarence Muse, Leon René and Otis René. However, it uses the word “darkies” several times, and generally hits all the minstrel tropes of Mammy and banjos. Nevertheless, its romantic picture of the South spoke to Armstrong’s fellow transplants in the 1930s. In addition to being separated from friends and family back home, Black Southerners often found Chicago disappointing and difficult. Professional work was mostly closed off to them, and while factory jobs paid better than picking cotton, they were not much easier. White people in Illinois could also be just as racist as white people in Louisiana.
Having fled the South, recent migrants still found themselves excluded from certain recreational venues, amusement parks, swimming pools, and many of the celebrated theaters that featured black entertainers. It was in Chicago, after all, where Amos ’n’ Andy premiered… and this modern-day minstrel show went on to become one of the most popular radio programs in U.S. history. For newcomers who were unable to benefit from the possibilities available in the North and those who missed the southern way of life, migration could be terribly disorienting and disappointing. To deal with the bumps and bruises that took their toll on new city dwellers and to acknowledge the sorrows and struggles faced by migrants consequently required capturing a broader panorama of their experiences, including many oppositional responses.
New arrivals from the South also had a hard time with more established Black urbanites.
Though he expressed great pride about his New Orleans roots, Armstrong’s recollections of arriving in Chicago display a marked self-consciousness about his southern background. As noticeable as the trout sandwiches his mother gave him to take on the train to Chicago, “anybody watching me closely could have easily seen that I was a country boy.” Such insecurity could lead to serious distress. The blues musician Big Bill Broonzy, who arrived two years before Armstrong, could barely fathom the level of prejudice that met him in Chicago: “If you’s from a different State in the USA, if your hair is frizzy and you’s real black, all the northern Negroes who have their hair straightened and know the town, instead of trying to show me how to act and do, they’ll just laugh and call me a Mississippi Negro.”
Minstrel associations or no, you could see why both Armstrong and his Chicago audience would find meaning in a song like “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South”, as well as in “Shine”, “Dixie”, and “Old Folks at Home.”
There was nothing remarkable or unusual about a Black artist performing minstrel songs in 1930; it was just what they had to do. However, by the Civil Rights era, other jazz musicians thought Armstrong’s material and onstage persona were archaic and no longer a source of pride (though white listeners had no problem with any of it, and many unfortunately still don’t.) Regardless of the pushback, Armstrong persisted in doing his nostalgic material. When he re-recorded “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” in 1951 with the line about “darkies” intact, The Louis Armstrong Museum describes the strong negative reaction in the Black press, like printing photos of people destroying the record.
So, is that it? Armstrong was a brilliant trumpet player but a disappointing political figure who was just going along to get along? Charles Hersch argues in his 2002 article “Poisoning Their Coffee: Louis Armstrong and Civil Rights” that the story is more complicated. He sees Armstrong as a resistance figure, both directly and indirectly. Armstrong had an integrated band and refused to play segregated venues, at a time when both were brave stances, and sometimes he faced physical threats and police harassment. Starting in 1930, he refused to straighten his hair. And his personal mannerisms were defiant of white Protestant norms, especially his frankness and openness about bodily pleasures and functions, as exemplified by his outspoken love of dirty jokes, marijuana, and the herbal laxative Swiss Kriss. Hersh quotes Lester Bowie:
“The true revolutionary is one that’s not apparent. I mean the revolutionary that’s waving a gun out in the streets is never effective; the police just arrest him. But the police don’t ever know about the guy that smiles and drops a little poison in their coffee. Well, Louis, in that sense, was that sort of revolutionary, a true revolutionary.”
Hersh also points to some moments when Armstrong took outspoken activist positions:
Armstrong wrote to President Eisenhower condemning his failure to act in response to Arkansas Governor Faubus’s blocking of desegregation in Little Rock. He simultaneously canceled a tour of Russia, writing the President, “the way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell.”
However, sometimes Armstrong seemed resigned to racial injustice, and talked about subservience as a survival necessity.
Describing his work on the riverboat, he said, “We were colored, and we knew what that meant. We were not allowed to mingle with the white guests under any circumstances. We were there to play good music for them, and that was all.” Being from the South, “we understood, so we never had any hard feelings. I have always loved my white folks, and they have always proved that they loved me and my music.”
Ultimately, Hersh finds Armstrong’s truest and most radical assertions of Black pride and identity in that music.
Armstrong’s virtuosic transformations of American popular music represent public assertion of individuality, and such assertions by African Americans were not welcomed, to say the least, by most whites. Many African Americans have described how segregation forced one to be as unassuming and self-effacing as possible; anything less would draw retaliation by whites who saw it as a threat.
And younger jazz musicians later changed their minds about Armstrong.
Armstrong’s smile revealed rather than concealed, showing his joy at his self-assertion and success in a racist environment. Dizzy Gillespie, once appalled by Armstrong’s stage persona, came to look at it differently: “I began to recognize what I had considered Pops’ grinning in the face of racism as his refusal to let anything, even anger about racism, steal the joy from his life.”
Perhaps this is what Billie Holiday meant when she said that Armstrong “‘Toms’ from the heart.”
I come away from reading all this imagining Armstrong as being like your uncle who is generally progressive but gets bent out of shape about pronouns: basically a good person, but resistant to (and sometimes resentful of) change. I’m reluctant to pass moral judgment on a person as complicated as Armstrong, especially when his life experience was so different from mine. I’ll give the last word to Duke Ellington: “I loved and respected Louis Armstrong. He was born poor, died rich, and never hurt anyone along the way.”