Play, Louis, Play!*

by Muriel Harris Weinstein

  Mayann made Louis’ favorite dish, jambalaya, and Louis took me, his horn, off the shelf, dusted me off, and told the family how much he missed me. Then he played and played far into the night. And what do you think he played first? “Home, Sweet Home.”

  C H A P T E R 9

  Razzle-Dazzle, He’s Home.

  But How Does He Make a Buck?

  Was it good to have Louis home again! He blew notes so sweet, the other horns turned green. And after Louis played “Home, Sweet Home,” he told me he could make me shine like a new horn.

  “You’ll look as golden as homemade butter,” Louis said. His hands cleaned and rubbed, polishing till his fingers hurt. I was so bright he didn’t need a light in the room.

  Next thing you know, Louis got a job playing cornet in Pete Lala’s band at Henry Ponce’s place, one of the bigger honky-tonks. He played cornet all night. At four, he’d drag himself home and grab some sleep, about two or three hours’ worth. Then he’d shovel coal from seven in the morning till five in the afternoon. Then he’d hightail it to his quartet to sing.

  He brought home a big seventy-five cents a day for shoveling coal. He was thankful for that money. Louis’ quartet was the best, but by the time they divvied up their earnings there wasn’t much left, and each singer filled his pockets with pennies. And I do mean pennies. But Louis loved singing so much that he didn’t give a darn. He was just glad music was in his life again.

  At the Home they had played only marches. Louis loved the marches, but there was more to music than marches. So coming home was like feeding his starving soul.

  But life was not all honey ’n’ flapjacks. At the end of each day Louis’ back would kill him. It was crying out for some rest. He knew the pain was from shoveling coal. He purposely didn’t tell Mayann about it, because then she’d make him quit one of the jobs. How could he quit Pete Lala’s band? Playing his horn at Henry Ponce’s was being in heaven. He was playing his music—the blues, jazz, ragtime—and playing it with musicians he admired. He felt alive playing.

  And how could he quit the coal job? That gave him dough, money, greenbacks … for real food. And quit the quartet? Never! Out of the question. So he ignored the pain. Louis struggled on with little money and a bad back—but, oh, what a joyful spirit!

  The summer that Louis turned eighteen, he thought he’d try playing his horn on one of the riverboats paddling up and down the Mississippi. They welcomed Louis with open arms. Fate Marable, the leader of the band, was sure their customers would double once the people heard Louis play. Fate was right. Louis was so good, folks stood on the docks waiting for his boat to pass. They wanted to hear the haunting sound of his cornet cut through the moonlit night as his music floated between the clouds and the rippling river.

  Of all the music he played, Louis loved the blues and swing best. Together those two forms became the jazz he developed. When Louis heard the blues, the music crawled into his heart and slept inside his soul. He felt the sorrow, the heartbreak of the guy who wrote it. And swing fit his personality, always “up,” always ready to see the sunny side of life, always ready to help someone who couldn’t see it. Louis liked making people feel better. He was one mellow cat.

  C H A P T E R 10

  Where I Go, You Go

  One day Joe Oliver, the Joe Oliver, Louis’ hero, asked Louis to stop by the club and play a few bars of music. The best part was that Louis brought me along—me, his hock-shop horn. I wanted to impress Joe Oliver too.

  Joe thought Louis was a natural. He took a real interest in him. Not like the other musicians who were too busy rushing around or had no time to bother with a kid. Joe gave him tips on playing. He even let Louis carry his cornet. In the world of honky-tonk musicians, that was one cool honor. You see, Joe Oliver was the main man in New Orleans jazz.

  Then Joe Oliver asked Louis to sit in with his combo one night. Louis was as nervous as a fly in a spider’s web. He thought every musician in Joe’s band was better than he was.

  Louis walked to the front of the stage. They had no mics then. Louis tilted his head back and blew a new kind of blues, blowing notes higher than anyone had ever heard, holding them longer than anyone else—notes that moaned, then turned sugar sweet and soared so high they touched the moon. One by one each note turned colors: first blue, then lazy purple, then spinning round like pink molasses and cotton candy, then into swirls of rainbow-colored ribbons. All floated down as soft as velvet, turning in the air, curling into your ears.

  Louis blew with such a passion, he swung with such rhythm that his music made you snap your fingers or swing your big, fat momma hips.

  More bandleaders started noticing Louis. They liked his style. They thought he was so darn good, they invited him to sit in with their bands. Sitting in was a way to try out—if the bandleader liked you, he might offer you a spot. Before you could sing “Potato Head Blues,” Louis was swinging away, trying out each night. When Louis played, he felt he was home.

  Night after night after night, he experimented with music. He tested his ideas, wanting to make music no one else tried and no one else heard, trying to find that music he heard in his head. His music flew free and his rhythm was so contagious that every musician, even the cats in Joe Oliver’s band, wanted to follow his style. It was as if I was part of Louis ’n’ he was part of me. My sound was his voice. I, me, the horn, was Louis. Sound crazy? No, that’s why we weren’t just buddies. We were brothers.

  His music set everyone in a fever. And Joe Oliver’s ears grew as large as an elephant’s as he listened to Louis play his cornet.

  It wasn’t long before Joe Oliver said, “You’re in, Louis. I’ll give you a dollar a night.”

  Louis was so excited! He didn’t sleep for the next thirty nights. Mayann still needed money, so Louis continued shoveling coal all day for the Andrews Coal Company. In spite of aching muscles, he played his music every night, all night. Nothing was going to keep him from Joe Oliver’s band.

  Louis was the best cornet player in the band. He was so good, Joe and Louis started playing duets. They’d get up to the front of the stage and take turns playing solos. It was as if the horns were talking to each other, telling secrets, laughing and teasing, chasing one another around corners. But they mostly played together. Joe Oliver would take the lead and Louis would follow with clever harmony underneath Joe’s melody. What Louis did was not an easy-breezy thing to do. He had to be good, yet he couldn’t suddenly burst out in a wild melody, strutting his stuff, because Oliver was the leader of the band and the lead horn player.

  About that time, Chicago, the jazz center of the world, offered Joe Oliver a job at the famous Lincoln Gardens. It was what Joe Oliver dreamed of. He had to go, but he was worried about leaving Louis. He knew Louis never wanted to leave New Orleans. Louis always told Joe that the New Orleans mud was in his shoes.

  One night Joe invited Louis home for supper.

  Of course they talked only about music. But Joe also tried to make Louis see that it was important to move forward, not only in music but also to other parts of the country. Joe told Louis, “You gotta grow. You can’t stay in the same place playin’ the same music. I know you love tryin’ new ideas. You belong in Chicago.”

  Louis didn’t want to lose Joe. He was family to Louis—really, more like a father than anyone else had been.

  Louis listened, but he didn’t say anything about being willing to move to Chicago or any other place.

  Then Joe did something that made Little Louis cry.

  “Louis,” he said, “your talent is so special that every musician wants to imitate your style. There’s no one like you. Your horn’s full of miracles. So, I’m givin’ you a present. It’s my cornet. It’s time I bought me a new one. Now, take my cornet, little brother.”

  Louis hugged his hero and his eyes grew watery. Then Louis did something that surprised me and Joe.

  Louis kissed me, the old hock-shop horn, and said, “No one was more reliable, more dependable than you. You h
elped me play my kind of music. You’re part of me. So I can’t leave you. When I’m out on the stage playin’ Joe’s horn, you’ll be waitin’ for me in my dressin’ room. Where I go, you go.”

  • • •

  And that’s how Louis rose to fame and I went with him. It wasn’t long before Joe Oliver, now called King Oliver, left for Chicago. And it wasn’t long after that when he called Louis from Chicago and said, “C’mon up. I need you here.”

  Louis, who had never left New Orleans, was nervous about going so far. He didn’t count the riverboats ’cause they were a short distance away. But when Joe Oliver called, Louis had to go.

  He heard Chicago was c-c-cold, with a big wind blowing in from the huge lake and the wide sky over Lake Michigan, so Louis bought the longest, warmest underwear he could find. Then, with a trout sandwich wrapped in a brown paper bag, his underwear folded in another one, and Joe Oliver’s cornet under his arm, he boarded the train for Chicago, the Windy City. Of course, I was there too.

  Wow! Was he a success. He performed for overflowing crowds, playing his heart out. Every city, every country, every continent wanted him. He was like an eagle soaring toward the sky, into the height of fame. He never slowed down and never stopped playing.

  That’s the story, the true story of how Louis Armstrong, the great Satchmo, became the world’s greatest horn player. Jazz poured from his soul like a river. He loved sharing the music that haunted his heart, that bounced around in his head. When he picked me up to play a solo, I was so proud I felt there wasn’t a cornet around as happy as I was. And there wasn’t a horn player as happy as Louis.

  He sure loved his music, and he loved the world. And the wonderful thing was, the world loved him back.

  A F T E R W O R D

  Louis Armstrong influenced jazz music and jazz musicians throughout the universe. He was a triple threat: he wrote music and lyrics, he was a unique vocalist, and he played the meanest horn. Music critics on every continent regarded him as the finest cornet player in the world. Later, when he switched to the trumpet, he was regarded as the greatest trumpeter. His gravelly, raspy voice was as rough as sandpaper, but still there was something wonderful about it. Everyone loved listening to him.

  His ideas changed jazz. Before Louis, no horn player took the mic and played solo for a long stretch of time. Louis encouraged musicians to stand and play for several minutes, a huge difference both to the horn player and to the listener. Louis felt that playing solo showed not only the beauty of the melody but also the skill of the musician.

  Before Louis, musicians did not improvise much. Improvisation is creating another thread of music that blends with the melody—and making it up right there, on the spot. When audiences and musicians heard how exciting and freewheeling it was to create by playing around with the notes in the melody, it encouraged musicians to experiment even more.

  Before Louis, vocalists almost never improvised either. They didn’t sing that frequently with jazz groups, and they never scatted along with the band. Louis played a big part in freeing them to sing scat, to release their voices, to sound like instruments.

  That’s not to say that Louis invented scat. It started long before, with African tribes who liked to imitate the sounds of the jungle with their drums. And Louis never planned to sing scat professionally. But one day his group, the Hot Five, were recording a song when Louis dropped the sheet of paper with lyrics on it. Since he had to sing on the very next beat, he didn’t have time to pick up the paper and read the words. So Louis scatted. That was the first time Louis recorded scat. He went home very upset. He was sure the record, Heebie Jeebies, was going to be the flop of the century. But it was a huge hit!

  Louis was not happy taking a day off. He was on the road entertaining people in different states and different countries over three hundred days a year. This was a difficult schedule to sustain, but Louis never minded the difficulties in traveling because he was doing what he loved most: sharing his music with the public. They called him “Ambassador Satch” because his music brought goodwill and helped international relations. He played for many presidents and heads of foreign state, including the king and queen of Great Britain. His records and performances sold out all over France, Germany, Scandinavia, Japan, and the United States.

  One day Louis’ wife, Lucille, decided that she and Louis had lived out of suitcases and in hotels long enough. So she decided to surprise Louis and buy a home. She found a small two-story house in a working-class neighborhood in Corona, New York. Since Louis had no children of his own, he encouraged the kids on the street to visit. Whenever he returned from a trip on the road, kids would hang out on his stoop, waiting for him to come out and talk with them.

  We know all these details about Louis because he wrote in his journal. Louis wrote of each day’s events, his feelings about his friends, even the discussions they had in the local barber shop. His journal reads as if he were talking to a best friend. For a boy who dropped out of fifth grade, Louis enjoyed writing and revealing his thoughts more than friends or family suspected. He talked to the world through his horn, and in writing two autobiographies he shared his life with the world. He lived to be sixty-nine years old.

  Louis’ home in New York is now the Louis Armstrong House Museum and is open all year for visitors. It is furnished exactly as Lucille Armstrong decorated it, and you can see Louis’ study just as it was when he used it. The museum even celebrates his birthday on July 4 in the garden with a huge birthday cake, a jazz concert, and a Louis Armstrong story. Everyone is welcome—just as Louis would have liked it.

  GLOSSARY

  * slang or street language

  blues: music created by African Americans, sad songs about the troubles many of us go through

  *cat: a musician who plays jazz, a person who likes jazz

  combo: a small group of usually three or four musicians

  *cool: knowing a great deal about a subject like art, music, science, or sports

  cornet: a small brass horn with valves, a member of the trumpet family

  duet: a song by two vocalists or two musicians

  freewheeling: flying in many directions; in music, not following the melody

  gullet: throat

  harmonize: to blend notes in a way that sounds pleasant to the ear

  *hightail: to run quickly

  *hock shop: a pawnbroker’s shop, where you bring something you own to sell for cash or where you buy a secondhand item

  *honky-tonks: dance halls, usually small and very cheap; often called by the owner’s name, as in Henry Ponce’s place

  hustler: a hard worker, someone who is always looking for a way to make money

  improvise: to create music as you play it, usually including some notes from the melody

  instrumental: a musical number with no singer, where just the instruments are heard

  jambalaya: Southern food of rice, tomatoes, and fish

  jazz: a kind of music started by African Americans and dominated by the blues and a rhythm known as swing; jazz also includes much improvisation

  lyrics: the words to a song

  *mellow: agreeable, pleased with the world and with your work

  mentor: a wise and trusted teacher who guides and teaches you

  mournful: full of sadness, full of grieving

  outhouse: an outdoor bathroom with no running water, usually made up of four walls, a ceiling, and a door with a small window

  peddle: to sell something as you move from place to place

  perfect pitch: the ability to sing or recognize the exact note that is being played

  *pitch: the story

  *put a lid on: to stop

  *rag: to bother

  ragtime: 1900s music with an off-beat rhythm

  raspy: having a scraping sound, like a coarse file rubbing against wood

  razzmatazz: showy or flashy—in a good way

  riff: an impressive musical phrase played over and over

  ruckus: a lot of noi
se

  scat: sounds that don’t make sense; silly words that have the beat of the music

  shenanigans: trickery, pranks, mischief

  soft shoe: a light dance step

  solo: a single person performing alone

  tarnished: discolored; used to describe metal whose color has been changed by the air, as when copper turns green

  tempo: the speed of a piece of music

  trumpet: a brass horn with valves and a mouthpiece you blow into

  unique: one of a kind, different

  vocalist: a singer

  wind instrument: an instrument that produces sound because of the air you blow into it; includes cornets, trumpets, saxophones, clarinets, flutes, piccolos, trombones, tubas, and more

  REFERENCES

  Armstrong, Louis. Louis Armstrong in His Own Words. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

  Armstrong, Louis. Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans. New York: Da Capo Press, 1986.

  Bergreen, Laurence. Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life. New York: Broadway Books, 1997.

  Brower, Steven. Satchmo: The Wonderful World and Art of Louis Armstrong. New York: Abrams, 2009.

  Cogswell, Michael. Louis Armstrong: The Offstage Story of Satchmo. Portland, OR: Collectors Press, 2003.

  Collier, James Lincoln. Louis Armstrong: An American Genius. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

  Collier, James Lincoln. Louis Armstrong: An American Success Story. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1985.

  Giddins, Gary. Satchmo. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

  Jones, Max, and John Chilton. Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story 1900–1971. New York: Da Capo Press, 1988.

  Louis Armstrong: A Cultural Legacy. Marc Miller, ed. Seattle: University of Washington Press with Queens Museum of Art, 1994.

  Tanenhaus, Sam. Louis Armstrong. Black Americans of Achievement series. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.