Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  117A more direct antecedent for Carmichael was a story, one version of which was printed (originally in the New Orleans Times-Democrat) in the Washington Post, Feb. 19, 1893 (p. 12), as “When Aunt Harriet Died: A Silhouette of Slavery Drawn Thirty Years After.” Harriet, the article reveals, “had known slavery and freedom, and through all changes she had stood by ‘Mistiss’ [i.e., her mistress] and the old plantation.” In the story, the mistress arrives while Aunt Harriet is on her deathbed and sympathetically attempts to administer medicine to her devoted slave. This reference should be added to the discussion of Rockin’ Chair and Carmichael’s songs by Roger Hewitt (1985). See also Moton 1929, 190. Hewitt’s excellent article is the important rejoinder to the untenable claim by Richard Sudhalter (2002, 155) that “race, in this context, is less a political statement than a simple identification, not meant to carry social baggage.”

  118Here is a partial itinerary for early 1930, derived from newspaper notices and the scrapbooks at LAHM: Philadelphia, Jan. 2–4, Louis Armstrong and His Columbia Recording Orchestra, Shadowland, 20th Street and Montgomery Avenue; Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Jan. 11–17, including the Standard, and Louis Armstrong and His Hot Chocolates Band, Howard Theater; New Albert Auditorium, Jan. 12; New York, Jan. 25–31, Loew’s State Theater, Broadway at 45th; Chicago, Feb. 8–17, Regal Theater, Savoy Ballroom (this visit also included, on Feb. 9, a banquet held in honor of “three of the most distinguished colored artists in the world,” Armstrong, George Dewey Washington, and Johnny Hudgins, with Armstrong playing a duet with Louis Panico); St. Louis, Feb. 22–23; New York, Feb. 26–March 26 (Feb. 26, Loew’s State Theater; Feb. 26–March 14, Cocoanut Grove, 225 West 125th Street; March 23, Savoy Ballroom; March 26, Rose Danceland, 125th Street and Seventh Avenue); Detroit, April 7–13, Graystone Ballroom and Michigan Theater; Philadelphia, April 24, Pearl Theater and Strand Ballroom; Baltimore, April 28, New Albert Auditorium; Chicago, May 9–26, Tivoli, Cottage Grove at 63rd Street, Savoy Ballroom, Paradise Theater, the Extra Uptown.

  119It is worth pointing out that Armstrong was not universally admired, even in 1930, in the African-American community. Frank Byrd in his column “Harlem Nite Life,” (Interstate Tattler, Sept. 5, 1930, p. 10): “Some may like them, but this dept. finds no enthusiasm to spare for Louis Armstrong’s new OKeh records… . ‘Exactly Like You’ and ‘Indian Cradle Song’ … not so hot.”

  120Armstrong had the good fortune to grow up in the heyday of vernacular-based dance music in New Orleans, and the coincidence of his musical maturity with the height of the race record phenomenon—and at one of the locations where the industry was well organized—was just as lucky. The flow of his life thus benefited, in a maximal way, from the cultural-social-economic dynamics of the Great Migration. In New Orleans, he was immersed in a sophisticated urban scene that nevertheless was also preindustrial; in his community, at least, the communal practices of the plantations, with emphasis on direct social interaction, still held strong. He then stepped into more competitive and commercially organized entertainment circles of the North, to which he responded with greater and greater control as a soloist; the industrial social organization of the North was ready to reward this achievement, and so was the commercial organization of the recording industry. It was not simply a matter of historical poetry that New Orleans jazz did not get recorded until it moved North, that it only gained documentation through commercial recordings at the very moment that it left the city and experienced a new set of pressures, causing it to change at the very moment of its documentation. Less adaptable musicians like Fred Keppard initially refused to record. Armstrong, the most adaptable of them all, embraced the new environment.

  121Band leadership changed during Armstrong’s stay there, with Vernon Elkins named as leader in newspaper reports from July, August, and October. Royal Marshal (1996, 37, and Bryant 1998, 40) said that Leon Herriford was leader “at the time he [Armstrong] was busted for having one measly marijuana cigarette” and that Herriford was replaced by Les Hite. Buck Clayton (IJS and Clayton 1987, 46) said that Armstrong’s first recordings in Los Angeles were made under Herriford, who “was in the Cotton Club before Hite.” The Los Angeles Times of Nov. 19, 1930 (p. A12) lists Armstrong as playing in Les Heydt’s Orchestra [sic]. A report in the Eagle, Oct. 10 (p. 10; reference courtesy Steven Lasker), mentions Vernon Elkins’s band closing at the Cotton Club. Thus, Elkins was leader until Oct. 10, Hite by Nov. 19, and Herriford sometime in between. See also Hampton 1993, 34; Zwicky 1970.

  122There are many references to Armstrong having originated scat in reviews from England, summer 1932 (Scrapbook 6, LAHM). For example: “Louis told me he was the originator of the ‘scat’ or ‘Yo-do-deo-do’ style of singing.”

  123Zilner Randolph (IJS 1977) reported this story and said that Armstrong regretted holding Hampton back. Randolph also described a recording session when the sound engineer was motioning to him to play louder while Armstrong, simultaneously and in deliberate contradiction, motioned him to play softer, to stay in the background.

  124Honey, Rudy Vallée’s big hit of 1929, clocking in at 120 beats per minute, may reflect the slow fox trot tempo (Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 6, 1929, p. J3; see also Washington Post, March 29, 1930, p. 3, and April 4, 1930, p. 3). Armstrong recorded seven numbers close to this tempo in 1929, two in 1930, and eight in 1931; these counts expand with five more numbers if we include a tempo around 138. On the slow fox trot, see McCracken 2000, 202; also Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 21, 1932, p. 4, and Aug. 14, 1934, p. 15. Most of the uptempo numbers recorded by the Sebastian New Cotton Club Orchestra (I’m in the Market for You, You’re Lucky to Me, You’re Driving Me Crazy!) clock in around 180 beats per minute. (The exceptions are the multitempo Just a Gigolo and Shine, which would have been designed for the revue rather than for social dancing.)

  125There exist four documents, all dating from near the end of his life, that automatically give a strong and candid sense of Armstrong’s personality, instantly cutting through the showman’s persona that tends to dominate his public statements. Two were published immediately—Richard Meryman’s 1966 interview for Life (Armstrong 1966; though this comes with a caveat, since Meryman removed his own side of the conversations, making the text read misleadingly like a monologue) and Larry L. King’s 1967 profile for Harper’s. “Louis Armstrong and the Jewish Family in New Orleans, La., the Year of 1907,” which Armstrong began writing in March 1969 and thought of as a book, was published in 1999 (Armstrong 1999). The fourth document is a tape he made in the privacy of his living room (Armstrong 2008). He speaks for an hour, directly into the microphone, for his “posterity,” as he liked to say, and he goes on at length and in great detail about the glories and comforts of marijuana. The beginnings of the autobiographical sequel have been published as “The Satchmo Story,” in Louis Armstrong in His Own Words.

  126Armstrong 1999, 207. Also on file in the Library of Congress is a letter Armstrong wrote from Europe to Mezz Mezzrow, dated Sept. 18, 1932. Though marijuana is not explicitly mentioned, it is clear from statements like the following that this is what Armstrong is requesting Mezzrow to send: “see to your Boy being well fixed, because I wouldn’t want to Run Short, because it might Bring me Down. No might in it, it would. Ha Ha.” Stuff Crouch was also a steady supplier in a later period (Bigard IJS 1976), delivering bricks from Mexico.

  127In a column entitled “Paris and People,” ca. 1954, Art Buchwald wrote (Louis Armstrong HJA vertical file) of meeting Armstrong: “‘Let’s go up stairs, man, I’m beat,’ he said. “But I’ll get two or three Benzedrine pills under my belt and I’ll feel all right.”

  128Gushee 1988, 292. This is reflected in historical study of Armstrong, for with 1929 and the move to New York City, close study of his music drops off dramatically. For the Chicago period, almost every trumpet solo and a number of vocal solos have been transcribed, which encourages analytical reflection and comparison; for the period beginning in 1929 there is far less work like this. Of course,
as Gushee and others have observed, the falling off in analytical work also reflects bias against the supposed “commercial” orientation of this later period, with the “chamber jazz” of the Hot Five period valued over the big bands.

  129Sometime during the summer of 1930, composer Eubie Blake sent Armstrong a copy of Memories of You, his new tune for Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1930. Back in December 1929, we noticed Armstrong doing a favor for his friend Hoagy Carmichael and recording Rockin’ Chair. Examples like this appear not to have been very common in Armstrong’s recorded oeuvre after he left Chicago, but here is another one, recorded by the Sebastian band in October.

  130Wilbur 1948, p. 27: “As a listener Sidney [Bechet] has the intuitive ability to sense the value of any music he hears. I’ve never heard him say ‘That’s an awful tune.’ He loves all music because he sees the way to play it.” Albert Nicholas (Nicholas HJA 1972) remembered touring during the 1930s with a book of 40 arrangements. “In the band people wouldn’t like one tune or the other but Louis Armstrong said all the tunes were good.”

  131Toni Morrison (quoted in Gilory 1993, 78) has said that “the major things black art has to have are these: it must have the ability to use found objects, the appearance of using found things, and it must look effortless.” Armstrong certainly embraced the first two, though not the third, at least not completely.

  132There are various signs of Armstrong’s increasing reach. A search of six leading newspapers reveals no mention of his name at all until 1929, when an isolated OKeh ad for St. James Infirmary appeared in a March issue of the Atlanta Constitution; this was followed by three ads in April issues of the Chicago Tribune for appearances at the Regal Theater. As Bud Freeman (1974, 16) put it, “he had not become famous yet [in 1929], but of course every musician in the world had heard his recordings.” The six major newspapers, searchable through ProQuest, are the Atlanta Constitution, New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal. In 1930 the total number of mentions rises very slightly to six; that is where it stays in 1931 before dropping to three in 1932 and one in 1933. These statistics are dwarfed by the attention he was getting in the African-American press during the same period: there are 29 mentions in 1929, 99 in 1930, 164 in 1931, 203 in 1932, and 155 in 1933. The searchable African-American newspapers are the Chicago Defender, Philadelphia Tribune, Pittsburgh Courier, Baltimore Afro-American, New York Amsterdam News, and Norfolk New Journal and Guide. White audiences were beginning to know who Armstrong was, but among black audiences he had become famous.

  133Gunther Schuller, whose commentaries on jazz history have justifiably loomed very large, sums up the tragic view near the beginning of his chapter on Armstrong in The Swing Era. Schuller writes (p. 160) that “in early 1929 Armstrong began performing and recording exclusively with big-band backing—a state of affairs that, much to the dismay of his small-group fans, lasted unbroken until 1940.” For the period covered in the present book, this collection of disappointed small-group fans is a complete fiction. As I have explained, Armstrong started playing arrangements in “big bands” in 1924 and never stopped; the Hot Five and Hot Seven recording series was an artificial enterprise designed on the cheap solely for the race record market. Likewise, there is no basis for thinking of Schuller’s “second problem” (p. 161)—the change in repertory from ad hoc compositions created by him and members of his circle for the recording studio to mainstream popular hits—as a problem in any artistic sense. See also Gushee 1988, 303.

  134The Atlanta World (Jan. 8, 1931) identifies John Collins as former general manager of the Keith Vaudeville Circuit.

  135Chicago Tribune, Nov. 2, 1931, p. 25. It seems clear from dates and recollections that there was movement back and forth between these cities, so the sequence presented here is probably not complete. On Armstrong’s performance at the Palace Theater in Chicago, see also Defender, Nov. 14, 1931, p. 5.

  136Scrapbook 5, LAHM. More extensive description of his visual style comes from England, in reviews of his first tour there in summer 1932. For example (all from Scrapbook 6, LAHM): “Armstrong … is said to talk to the microphone when he broadcasts as if it were a human being. He grunts and spits at it. He wheedles, bullies, humours it until you positively expect it to ‘up and biff him back’” (clipping identified as Sunday Dispatch, July 24). “Yet while he makes animal noises into the microphone which sends the sound to a loud speaker at the side, he makes love to the instrument as though it were a dusky belle! … Now and then he charges his all black orchestra like a drunken bull. Yet he caresses his trumpet like a lover—and then making it do things I never heard a trumpet do before, emits from it a rapid succession of notes which have nothing to do with the melody” (clipping identified as Daily Herald, July 25, 1932). “He perspires and his neck swells until you imagine that human endurance can go no further.” “His energy is amazing. When not jazzing in front of Billy Mason’s ‘hot rhythm’ recording band he is entertaining the audience with weird facial contortions.” “At the outset he charges head down in the middle of the stage and addressing himself to a microphone, invites the audience to ‘get a load of this song.’ Then trumpet in hand, turning to his band, he gets right down to his job, rushing from one side of the stage to the other to call in trombone or saxophone player, dashing to the microphone to vociferate snatches of song, into which he puts expression that ranges from pleas to threats, then breaking away to whoop what sounds like a war cry as he draws his attention of his audience to his trumpet playing.” “Personally, I prefer to hear him on a gramophone recording, for on the stage he mixes ‘showmanship’ with his playing. A more restrained show would appeal better to his audiences who are apt to judge his playing by his fantastic gestures and vocal effects.” “When introducing a new number, or expressing his thanks for the reception of one that he has just given, he grins, gesticulates wildly, and barks. The barking at times resolves itself into the phrase ‘yes sir!’ When starting a new number, Mr. Armstrong shouts into the microphone: ‘I’ll be glad when you’re dead,’ retires to a corner of the stage, gets ‘set,’ then with trumpet upraised hurls himself on the trombonist.”

  137Moton 1929, 187; Defender, Jan. 7, 1933, p. 22, and Jan. 21, 1933, p. 14. Musicologist Joshua Berrett (2004, 189) insists that “darky” was “perfectly acceptable during the 1920s and early 1930s.” But the question, of course, is—acceptable to whom? Moton addressed the matter directly in What the Negro Thinks (187): “Only slightly less offensive [than ‘nigger’] are the terms ‘darky,’ ‘coon,’ and ‘shine,’ all of them expressions of contempt for the personality of those to whom they are applied… . The Jews, the Irish, and other races have successfully banned such allusions to their own race from the press and from the stage. Negroes have the same feelings about the matter, though as yet they are powerless to do more in this direction than to appeal to the best instincts and the more delicate sensibilities of such of their white friends as indulge in the practice… . In all such practices Negroes discern a continuous propaganda for maintaining the superiority complex of the white man which in some quarters is deemed so essential for the maintenance of American civilization, and the inferiority complex in the Negro, without which he is regarded as a menace to the ascendency of the white man and the permanence of his institutions.” See also Defender, Jan. 7, 1933, p. 22, which responds to Grafton S. Wilcox, managing editor of the New York Herald Tribune, who “didn’t know that the word ‘darky’ was objectionable to members of the Race.”

  138African-American attitudes during this period toward racist lyrics occasionally poke through in letters to newspapers. In December 1931 (published Dec. 19, p. 15), one Velma Tacnean wrote to the Defender from 3746 Indiana Avenue in Chicago to protest a radio broadcast of the song I Can’t Get Mississippi off My Mind. She had tuned to her favorite Sunday show, sponsored by a black-owned syndicate of funeral parlors, “expecting to hear something from our people to make me feel proud” and got this instead. Mississippi offers
nothing to be proud of, she insisted. Several follow-up letters were published: “when you hear the strains of that song again, shed a tear, murmur a prayer, and don’t forget us when you vote up there,” wrote Nona Storye from Goodman, Mississippi (Jan. 2, 1932, p. 15). Another writer (Jan. 23, 1932, p. 15) complained that progress had been made and people should not be ashamed of their states of origin. Another (March 6, 1932, p. 14) suggested Tacnean should shift her energy to banning whites from singing Mighty Lak’ a Rose and When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.

  139Film scholar Donald Bogle (1994, 167) makes this general observation about Armstrong’s movie performances: “Part of his effect, perhaps part of his charm, is the way in which he seems to operate in a sphere of his own. Like so many other black performers of the period, he has a persona strong enough to suggest for us another life apart from the seemingly benign yet racist world of the film… . There remains an irreducible part of Armstrong the actor, as there is of Hattie McDaniel and Eddie Anderson, that cannot be touched: there is a part of himself that he keeps unto himself.” In that light, consider these words from Armstrong himself (quoted in Gitler 1985, 33): “When I go on the bandstand I don’t know nobody’s out there. I don’t even know you’re playing with me. Play good and it will help me. I don’t know you’re there. I’m just playing.”