Then the band settles into riffs as the solo builds higher in range and grows more majestic. It is a simple and effective formula. “He wanted simple riffs, hot but simple, behind his solos,” said George James. Another great riff-based, driving flat 4/4 performance is I Got Rhythm, also recorded in November, with more light humorous banter and with a series of solos from the band members, each of them introduced by Armstrong, recalling the format of Gut Bucket Blues from the very first Hot Five session six years before. Danny Barker explained that there was a handful of standard repertory songs in the 1930s that everyone memorized and played in simple head arrangements, such as Lady Be Good, Honeysuckle Rose, and Liza. That status turned them into basic material for jam sessions and later for bebop. I Got Rhythm had probably been established in this way by the time of this performance.
Two Chicago sessions in January 1932 produced more recordings. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea has a superb trumpet solo that constantly moves in and out of connection with the tune, while offering some phrases that are out of sync with the binary flow of measures, others in double time, gliding and sliding, all of it elegant, fluid, and impressively quick. Home and All of Me were released without delay; the Courier called them (April 9) “the greatest hits of the season.” All of Me starts with a terrific introductory solo on muted trumpet, followed by a clever and attractive vocal, then a soaring solo on open trumpet, the familiar sequence that was working so well for Armstrong during these years.
Back on the East Coast, the band scooted up to New Haven to share a bill with film actress Ruth Roland, who headlined. The headliner always came on last, which meant, in this case, that Armstrong immediately preceded her. The crowd’s response to Armstrong was so overwhelming that Roland sat crying in her dressing room when it came time for her to take the stage. The order was eventually switched, with Armstrong assuming final position. “Louis stopped the show every time,” remembered Jackson.
In Boston, at the Metropolitan Theater (still standing at 252 Tremont Street and called the Wang Theater), they battled the Casa Loma Orchestra and Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, two formidable bands, with Armstrong trotting out two of his most reliable tricks for the contest: 260 high C’s, ending on high F, along with dozens and dozens of choruses of Tiger Rag. “When he finished there wasn’t nothing for the other fellow to do,” observed Jackson. From there they moved (February 15, 1932) to Paul Revere Hall, with a reported fee of $6,000.
Nevertheless, the band dissolved that spring after problems getting paid. Jackson had to ask his mother to send some food to keep him going. There was talk of Europe, or perhaps California, or even a return to Suburban Gardens, but none of it came off. “The reason, I believe, is that Louis was an easy going fellow who left everything up to his manager, accounting and everything, and I don’t think that was right,” Jackson complained.
Part of what they were owed was a chunk of change for making two short films in Astoria, Long Island, probably in January 1932, for Paramount. I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You, a Betty Boop cartoon, and Rhapsody in Black and Blue surrounded Armstrong with truly crippling racist imagery. It must have been bracing to go from the elegant lobbies of the Palace Theaters and the status of heading up the RKO tour to imitating cannibals.
Cultural Racism
One reason Louis Armstrong was so important is the extremely high quality of his music; another is the complexity of the social environments in which his music was performed. His experiences reveal much about how African-American music functioned and evolved in the first half of the twentieth century. Put the two together—the greatness of the music and the complexity of the social context—and he becomes the ultimate representative of African-American musical history.
First came the rich array of music making in his community of origin, former slaves who had made the post-Reconstruction move to New Orleans. Sisters shouted in Sanctified churches, three-chord piano players pounded blues in honky tonks, men sat around bars and improvised “barbershop” harmonies, rags-bottles-and-bones men played blues on tin horns, dance bands inspired grinding hips at Funky Butt Hall, and ear-playing marching bands blasted back beats and obbligatos. The thrill of growing up in New Orleans was the easy accessibility and agreed-upon importance of these musical practices. We can trace that kind of experience—music by us, for us—all the way through Armstrong’s great triumphs in Chicago, from Lincoln Gardens, where he played his rendition of the blues on his first night of work; through the Hot Five series conceived for the race market; into the Vendome Theater, where he worked out his modern method of playing solos; and on to the Savoy Ballroom, where thousands cheered as he slayed the ofay demons with West End Blues.
Simultaneously, their music—his music—entered the white world according to very different terms of reception. African-American jazz was cloaked in minstrelsy as soon as it left New Orleans: the Creole Jazz Band posed as “authentic plantation darkies” on their tours, Jelly Roll Morton put on blackface makeup, and King Oliver’s band wore plantation clothes in San Francisco. Armstrong admired Bill “Bojangles” Robinson because of his sophistication and because he did not wear blackface. His own career in the 1920s largely kept him safe from such compromises. At Lincoln Gardens he patched his tuxedo, at the Roseland he got new clothes and looked sharp, at the Vendome he was coaxed to stand up and play tunes from Cavalleria rusticana from the stage, and at the Savoy Ballroom he emerged as the musical King Menelik. Minstrelsy was the last thing on anyone’s mind in these celebratory settings. Trappings of minstrelsy were undoubtedly mixed into skits at the Sunset Café, subtly or not. Stereotypes of black sexuality were also in play, and he sang comic numbers like Irish Black Bottom and Big Butter and Egg Man, which relied on the play of opposites, a black man posing as an Irishman or as a rich white man.
Minstrel-derived humor surfaced more powerfully when Armstrong stepped into all-colored musicals on Broadway, with songs like (What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue. He sang several comic tunes like this in the early 1930s. In California these included Little Joe (recorded on his return to Chicago, with an arrangement that he brought from California). “Though your color isn’t white, you’re more than mighty like a rose to me,” he sings to his “kinky-headed baby,” and then personalizes the song: “Little Satchelmouth Joe … though your eyes are black as coal, your little soul is white as snow to me.” He obviously knew the tune and the arrangement, and delivered beautifully and inventively.
Sometimes he adds his own dash of racial comedy. The most famous example is Just a Gigolo, also from the California days, into which he drops a slight, punning transformation, changing the lines “When the end comes I know they’ll say, ‘Just a gigolo,’ as life goes on without me” to “When the end comes I know they’ll say ‘Just a jig, I know’…” Buck Clayton remembered how “it kind of stirred up some people, especially the NAACP,” but the crowd at Sebastian’s Cotton Club surely loved it.
Even more upsetting to the NAACP would have been his Shine. He recorded this older song at the same Los Angeles session and performed it often on his 1931 tours. It was issued on the flip side of Gigolo, as if to deliberately construct a package of regressive minstrelsy. He was closely associated with Shine during this period, as it became one of the numbers that other musicians used to imitate him.
We have lost the offensive connotations of the word “shine,” but they were very active in 1931. Robert Moten explained in 1929 that “shine” and “darky” were “only slightly less offensive” than “nigger”; the Defender modified his analysis and put all three words in the same class.137 Originally published in 1910 as That’s Why They Call Me Shine, the song as Armstrong performed it was simply called Shine. The original lists offensive names the speaker has been called, but now he is known simply as “Shine” because he “takes troubles smiling.”
Armstrong’s Shine opens with a rhythmic outburst—“Chocolate Drop, that’s me!”—that would have been hard to recover from, no matter what
the motive. The trend in recent writings has been to try and rescue him from the racist material of these years; Alfred Appel, for example, hears in this performance a “scat attack” on the offensive lyrics, a “deconstruction and destruction” of them. It is safe to assume that white critics who admired the “heat” Armstrong put in his performance of Shine (and also admired the flip side, Gigolo, which shows “what he can do when it comes to sweet stuff”) did not hear that—and there is no evidence that anyone else in the 1930s did, either. Anyone who regarded scat as an attack probably did so in the context of African cannibalism, which is not quite the same.
Black critics were reluctant to condemn performers who crossed over the racial divide, no matter what they did. Salem Tutt Whitney surely spoke for most: “the jokes and the shows may disgust the manager and also the actor, but they are thinking of their meals, and not their ideals.”138 Any comments would have been along the lines of the African-American review of a performance by the Creole Band in 1917, quoted in Chapter 1: “It is an act that shows very clearly what the white theatre patrons like the colored performer to do.”Armstrong was hitting the big time on all cylinders and satisfying expectations, even if they disgusted him.
When It’s Sleepy Time Down South, also introduced in California, belongs to a massive song tradition of romanticized southern plantations, where African Americans knew their place and enjoyed it, a utopian charade that goes back a long way. The songs are happy and everything is relaxed; there are no fat-bellied, stinking white folks with shotguns, no tree stumps painted red. “When I was coming along, a black man had hell,” Armstrong once observed, but plantation songs portray only a perverse version of heaven.
In Sleepy Time the whole range of stress, insult, and attack yields to blissful images of happy darkies crooning songs, dancing, and strumming banjos, living a life of ease. The derivative lyrics are closely connected to songs like Carolina Sunshine (1919) and In the Evening by the Moonlight in Dear Old Tennessee (1914). An African-American speaker yearning for the South in 1931 could be perceived as reversing the momentum of the Great Migration. Sleepy Time was in fact written in California by two brothers from Louisiana, Leon and Otis René, with help from actor Clarence Muse. Armstrong liked the song the first time the René brothers sang it for him, at a gumbo dinner with red beans and rice in Pasadena, at the René family home. He decided to feature it at Sebastian’s.
In sunny Pasadena the composing trio captured a relaxed atmosphere in a simple, brilliant stroke, in the first phrase of the chorus. The vocalist sings, “Pale moon shining on the fields below” as a delicious major seventh sitting on top of the texture, a sonic full moon that actually does feel like it is shining down on the fields of the subdominant chord underneath—lush richness blended with timeless relaxation. The pale-moon melody note stays where it is while the chord underneath shifts mysteriously, as if to magically put into motion a fairyland of crooning darkies. A review of his recorded performance headed “Louis Armstrong Scores Again with a Sweet Southern Melody” gushed over “one of the sweetest tunes in a long time.”
With his bluesy, black authenticity, Armstrong brought tremendous authority to Sleepy Time. Witness, from box seats at the Palace Theater in Cincinnati, the most modern Negro musician of the day happily defining his place as a second-class citizen. With his dark skin and watermelon smile he creates a world of perfect social harmony on the stage. There is no playful ambiguity here: you are convinced that Armstrong, who had a gift for acting that would emerge with more and more brilliance in the 1930s, identifies with the song completely.
And not just at the Palace Theater—also on phonograph records (Jos Willems’s discography lists 161 recorded performances over 40 years), across national radio networks, and at the top of countless stage performances and dances. It is almost as if the modern master had to sing Sleepy Time, and it is easy to understand why. If he was going to advance further on the ladder of his career—and he definitely was—he had to assure white audiences on a deep level that he had no designs on social progress. In the mid-1950s he sang this song at the beginning of his program and then again at the end. But by then, politically engaged African Americans did not hesitate to condemn him. Thurgood Marshall, chief legal counsel for the NAACP, labeled him “Number 1 Uncle Tom, the worst in the U.S.,” and Dizzy Gillespie “violently disagreed” with him “because of his Uncle Tom–like subservience.” Marshall and Gillespie were not willing to accept how the song served to protect him, its function not so different from gage, laxatives, and tough gangster managers. Disgusting side effects simply had to be tolerated. Life is like that. Armstrong’s life was like that.
“With one or two remarkable exceptions the American public does not want to hear a Negro singer in anything other than plantation melodies,” lamented Robert Moten in 1929. That was the environment that conditioned Armstrong’s rise to prominence in white markets, and he accepted it; it would have been extraordinary if he had not. The hell he had to deal with when coming up included very few, if any, possibilities for constructive political engagement. “I don’t dive into politics,” he admitted in 1971. “Haven’t voted since I’ve lived in New York, ain’t no use messing with something you don’t know anything about.” The potential of refusing to sing a plantation song as an oblique political gesture would never have occurred to him.
It’s hard to tell if there was a quantifiable uptick in songs like this in the early 1930s, but Sleepy Time belongs firmly with cultural artifacts of the Great Depression. On one level it is an assertion of idealized southern agrarianism, defiantly staring down the collapse of industrial capitalism; it was created a year after the publication of I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, a collection of essays by a group of white writers romanticizing southern culture. It would be impossible to overestimate the cultural work accomplished by songs like this in establishing the national image of the South.
But of course, the myth of crooning darkies relaxing in a mellow Dixie was not simply the product of a few essayists and songwriters. It was deeply ingrained in the entertainment industry of New York City and Hollywood. Songs like this were vigorously cultivated over and over with tremendous success in radio, sheet music, Broadway shows, and now, with the invention of the talkie, films. The Sleepy Time fantasy was not just for southerners, not even primarily so. Reconciliation of North and South was a project everyone (white) could buy into, and if the cost of reassembling a white national whole was black exclusion, it seemed a small price to pay. To buy into the fantasy of Sleepy Time was to confirm the legitimacy of white supremacy and all the attendant horrors, legalities, and daily insults that went along with it. With its luscious surface, Sleepy Time softened the harshness of the legal and social dirty work.
The fun of plantation imagery spilled out in all directions. In the second decade of the century, for example, the makers of Aunt Jemima’s pancake flour realized how much more attractive their product had become thanks to a big picture of a southern mammy on the box, as depicted by Arthur Burdette Frost, best known for illustrating Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus tales. The “appeal and glamour of the old South” conveyed by Frost’s painting was credited with considerable increase in sales. It is easy to lose sight of how close Armstrong, the great and timeless jazz innovator, was to this set of icons in the white mind. Ed Sullivan usually concluded his columns for the Washington Post with a little gossip, but on September 13, 1935, he cracked a joke, writing, “Louis Armstrong and Aunt Jemima go into the Park Avenue Hotel… .” He didn’t have to say anything more.
Armstrong’s ascent to the top of the white market inevitably surrounded him with specialty numbers like Sleepy Time, and that must have been a cause for regret for African Americans who regarded him as the ultimate musical hero. What really did him in, however, were the movies. We have no idea what his role was in the lost movie Ex-Flame from 1930. But in two short films made by Paramount in early 1932, soft racism is thrown to the winds while Armstrong is
assigned crippling roles in stories of explicit barbarism.
Plantation songs flourished as a kind of soft racism, perfuming the argument for African-American inferiority in a haze of happy images, verbal and musical. Movies could do that, too, of course, but many movies welcomed the chance to represent racist ideology much more explicitly. We need only think of D. W. Griffith’s infamous and immensely popular Birth of a Nation (1915), with its presentation of the Ku Klux Klan as the necessary force fending off African-American savagery. Less virulent pictures highlighted African Americans’ second-class status. Racism in the movies sold well, and it was waiting for Armstrong in January 1932 in Astoria, New York.
He was thrilled, no doubt, that these two brief films would be featuring him. Rhapsody in Black and Blue belonged to a series of ten-minute “shorts” launched by Paramount in 1929. Shorts were warm-ups for the regular feature; this one was the first in the Paramount series to feature an African-American performer. The breakthrough came at a price: Armstrong would perform two of his hits, the risqué I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You (“you gave my wife a coca cola so you could play on her victrola”) and the regressive Shine, dressed as an African savage in a sparsely cut leopard skin, his bandmates dressed similarly.
Armstrong sings the songs with his standard mix of full articulation, half articulation, blurred speech, and scat, the “blubbering, cannibalistic sounds” that delighted Hoagy Carmichael and so many others now finding their visual complement in the leopard skin and African headdress. Watching him sing Sleepy Time Down South from box seats at the Palace Theater in Cincinnati would have been a categorically different experience from watching this barbaric framing on the movie screen. Needless to say, far more people witnessed the latter than the former.
Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism Page 50