“Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.”
Louis Armstrong
Introduction
He had a voice that surpassed deepness. One that epitomised the Deep South, was the struggle for black people to gain rights and equality in an America where being black was a life of segregation and for many the ultimate struggle. Louis Armstrong knew that life too well. A child who spent his youth singing on the streets for spare change and didn’t receive any formal musical training until he was 11 when he was arrested for firing a pistol in the street during a New Year’s Eve celebration. This gravel-voice singer and trumpeter was seen by many as the archetype of jazz music but by others as a sellout Uncle Tom who failed his own talent. A man who swapped his early success of Dixieland Jazz in the 1920s for the music of the populist. A music that is littered with commercialism and controlled for most of his career by his white manager, Joe Kapp.
In a career that spanned more than four decades, Armstrong turned from being the full force in jazz to someone who played for the box office. A virtual slave to the white-controlled music industry. A man who lived in the shadow of greats like Charlie Parker. A damning review but accurate of his actions. Someone who chose to ride the wave of convention and not to stand up to an American society that was deeply racist. Louis was blind to his own actions and the penny didn’t drop until he was in advanced years.
The Ultimate Struggle
Louis Armstrong was not also always the rich and famous musician who became a household name. In the 1930s, he was kicked out of California for smoking cannabis and later chased out of Chicago by gun-wielding gangsters. He had to resort to having an armed escort when he toured. A musician who was turned away from lodgings for the colour of his skin struggled to get gigs due to racist promoters, harassed by the police and slung in jail just for wearing a fancy suit and smoking a cigarette. A bleak picture that was completely the opposite when he toured in Europe.
Yet he tried to turn the tide in his suspicious home town of New Orleans, handing out cash in the street, buying a local orphanage a radio set and becoming the first African American to do his own announcing on city radio. Yet he still left a swathe of black Americans feeling uncomfortable. A life that was totally the opposite of the speeches of Martin Luther King. A modernist who chose big money over tradition but was ripped off by the music industry, shortchanging him for his work and cashing in on his success. His influence in music is monumental, a jazz giant who literally poured sweat from his brow to get his musical message across. With classics like What a Wonderful World and Mac the Knife, this man didn’t want to retire and fade away. The thought of his feet up wasn’t something he contemplated. A heavy eater in his youth, Louis learnt to lose the taste and shed the pounds by the late 1960s. Someone who loved to be alone but was not lonely. He loved to write letters, play baseball and swim. If he could go to a desert island, he would take his Blueberry Hill record, the Bible and his own book Sachmo to learn about himself and contemplate on what he could have done differently. A musician who died in New York at the age of 69 in 1971.
