Louis Armstrong

You don’t see him first. None of us do. We hear him. His voice, or his skill with the trumpet, but we hear him. Shockingly, he only ever won one Grammy, and his lifetime achievement award was posthumous. But he’s in the Grammy Hall of Fame twelve times. He’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, his “West End Blues” listed as one of the five hundred songs that influenced rock and roll. He’s in seven other halls of fame at least and on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He has recordings in the National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress. An airport, an asteroid, a park, and a tennis stadium are named after him, and a house he used to live in is a museum. And his music was sent into space on the Voyager probes.

Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans, you know, at some point. He grew up in an area known as The Battlefield, which is never a good sign. His mother, Mary Albert, was probably about sixteen. For some of his childhood, he and his mother lived with and worked for a Lithuanian Jewish family, the Karnoffskys, who treated the boy with kindness. He learned about anti-Semitism and how Jews were also poorly treated by the local whites, but the Karnoffskys always treated him well, though his family life was never stable and meant he eventually moved away. His first cornet was paid for at least in part with an advance on his wages from Morris Karnoffsky.

Reading between the lines, you can see that music is what took Armstrong away from a short, violent life on the streets of New Orleans. He actually seems to have briefly acted as a pimp, and only when she stabbed him in the shoulder did he quit that line of work. His first formal musical education—possibly his only formal musical education—was while he was in the Negro Waif’s Home for having fired a revolver loaded with blanks into the air. Given the uncertainty as to his date of birth, we don’t know how old he was, but it was eleven or twelve.

What also seems true is that, even in those early days, everyone who listened to him play recognized his talent. In his teens, he was playing on riverboats; by his early twenties, he left for Chicago. He performed in New York and in Hollywood. He toured Europe, Africa, and Asia. He averaged three hundred performances a year for decades and managed to knock the Beatles out of the number one slot with “Hello, Dolly,” making him the oldest person ever to top the charts, and then topped the British charts several years later with “What a Wonderful World.”

Actually, no one knows how much of what he said about his childhood was true, though it’s clear that it definitely wasn’t an easy one. And it’s true that he wore a Star of David for much of his life. And, most important of all, he was a magnificent musician. The trumpet is a rough instrument to play and took its toll—for which he apparently self-medicated quite heavily with marijuana. Well, after all, he was a jazz musician, wasn’t he?