The Story of Louis Armstrong

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American People. To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app, to Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Louis Armstrong was the founding father of jazz and one of last century’s towering cultural figures who forever changed the face of American music. Here to tell the story is Lawrence Bergreen, who wrote the definitive biography on the man known as Pops: Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life. Let’s take a listen, look at your bye.

Let me tell you what they… You’re the most no Buddhist cut.

I bet my life you’ve been eating them all of our red beats and rice! John, to bid it back from my wife, the old dog. I’ll read with as here.

I’m going to talk about somebody who really occupies a special place in my heart. And you know, I’m a biographer. I’ve written a number of biographies of iconic figures, everybody from Irving Berlin to Magellan to Casanova. But there’s something special about Louis Armstrong. And people who know… was just, you know, a huge amount of people know what’s really special about him. And it’s hard to be a biographer of Louis because he is beyond category. And usually you can sit in judgment and comment and criticize and organize. Louis is beyond category, I feel, and his emotional effect is so overwhelming and it’s so inspiring that, you know, I think he’s in the category by himself. As I was researching Berlin, I realized that a lot of the background of popular music had to do with jazz, with crime figures, and especially New Orleans. So I decided I would dare to do Louis Armstrong. I really didn’t think I could get into that idiom for a while, but then I did. And there’s something about Louis which is so open-ended that almost anyone can participate it. Some people think of him as a, you know, laughing, smiling, grinning person with a white handkerchief, and he loves everybody. And that growling voice? That was true. That was not an act. That was a genuine part of him.

You travel a bit, dear. Where do you find your best audiences?

Which come every way.

I hit that note!

Where do you hit it? In any language? Where do you hit it every time? A bit of dawn. What do you like least, least? I don’t think by the least was a time of Logarana.

Got down in front of me public and jamming.

With the cats that I know, and I don’t expect too much, you know.

I don’t have time.

Underlying that was an extraordinary life of hardship that he overcame, to get it again, coming from the very bottom of the social ladder in New Orleans, which was highly stratified, and conquering it in two ways: with his immense talent — which was, he never took a music lesson in his life; he just picked this up literally on the street, I’ll get there in a second — and partly because of his extraordinary spirit, his a very American optimism, his resilience. That didn’t mean that he was a happy clown by any means. His music, to some extent — he invented what we call jazz — reflected that, but it really came out of a specific lifestyle. But the way he overcame it, it’s really extraordinary. But he started out, to use a contemporary word, disadvantaged, to put it mildly. He was the son of a war. He was married to war. He was surrounded by wars much of his early life, and he said they were some of the best people he ever met. When I say “war,” he lived near Storyville, which was the legendary red-light district of New Orleans.

Well, there’s all nice people, that’s all I can say. I mean, going up as a kid, I mean, they didn’t do anything that would hurt us and tell us something wrong. And quite naturally, when they’d having a good times at night round hunky-dunks and things like that, most of the kids was in bed. And the way they didn’t paint attend. But I’m in up all right, I mean, I didn’t overdo it.

One of this early formative experiences, when he was a kid, ten or twelve years old, was he was sent to reform school. He was arrested for petty crime. And this reform school was a dreadful place. However, his paradoxical reaction to it was he felt it was one of the best things that ever happened to him. He admired the discipline that the people who ran it were trying to instill in him, and occasionally, if you could imagine — this is true — when he got to New Orleans as an adult, he would go back to visit and remind them of who he was. And, you know, we knew his acquaintance.

Well, when I went to The Sunset, which was owned by Mister Joe Grazer, my manager. After that, I you see a lot of the boys sitting around. And Al Capone and his brigade would come in. Yeah, many times. We had some bad boys New Orleans. He didn’t. We had some boys just as tough as Al Capone’s boys right there New Orleans when I was coming up selling newspapers, and they followed my life up, you know, from the time I left the hunky-dunks to come up, gnot and blow. And I went down there, and not in ’31, to play at the Suburban Garden. But this night they don’t prop this man up to “It’s a big deal.” Now, you… you bring on little some stories, New Orleans boy, and blah, blah, blah. But a second before this cat had to go to that mic and bring me on, he walked away, say, “I just can’t introduce that nigga. Can’t do it.” So the… the Talten boys want to wash him wain, you know.

What I mean.

But anyway, they come to me and say, “Tell me what he says.” I say, “Well, don’t worry about it.” You know, I said, “Give me a card, boys.” And I walked at that mic and you dinner shimb, and I walked at that bike before I opened my mouth. There’s all the white boys that I was raised with, you know, sitting up their shop, and they are a different blah, blah, blah, blah. Man, dot the walls was.

coming in! And you’ve been listening to Lawrence Bergreen tell the story of Louis Armstrong. And you heard from Louis Armstrong himself. What a voice, what a life! What a remarkable thing to understand that one of the worst experiences of his life, being sent to reform school, also had an upside. When we come back, more of the remarkable life story of Louis Armstrong here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day we set out to tell the stories of Americans past and present, from small towns to big cities, and from all walks of life, doing extraordinary things. But we truly can’t do this show without you. Our shows are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and make a donation to keep the stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and with Lawrence Bergreen, who wrote but I believe the definitive biography on the man known as Pops, and the book is called Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life. Pick it up at Amazon or wherever you get your books. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

You know, they were racial codes and segregation with the order of the day.

I was determined I had a chance to play with the best seven musicians coming through, because that’s pretty good myself. They wouldn’t tolerate with, you know, you got to be good. “How bad is the devil?” You can’t tell you for granted, even if we have two or three days off, I still had to blow that home. Was to keep up the chaps. I mean, I’ve been playing fifty years, and that’s what I’ve been doing in order to keep in that groove there. I let the warm up every day at least a hour.

You know, either evid of it, you don’t, you play your han just like you sing a song or him. If it’s in your heart, to you express yourself in the tune.

Usually, when musicians or celebrities have an autobiography — quote autobiography — it’s ghostwritten or they have a collaborator. Louis Armstrong tried that once, but he also wrote his own, called My Life in New Orleans. I should explain that his second favorite instrument, after the trumpet or cornett, was the typewriter. He spent a great deal of time writing and typing with his own hot and beck method after shows in the middle of the night. He wanted to write about the people, in which he did in a very unvarnished way, and also had a pet interest in life, which was gauge, as he called it, marijuana. Many people attribute the popularity of marijuana that started around that time in the jazz world to Louis Armstrong because people wanted to emulate him. Well, that might be true, and he certainly was a popularizer of it. People certainly wanted to be like Louis in that respect. He felt it was essential both for his music and for his life. Now, it probably wasn’t great because when he smoked what he called a spliff that was like almost a cigar, it was fat, it was very strong. It was not good for your lungs, to put it mildly, and it could get him in trouble with the law when he was traveling abroad because it was illegal in some places. It also accounted partly for his growley voice when he was younger. He didn’t really have a growley voice, but he felt it was essential for relaxing the way somebody else might say, “Well, Scotch or beer or alcohol or something else.” He was not that much of a drinker, partly because so much of the booze that was around in those days was rotgut. You know, it was just banned for you. So his drug of choice, if you will, was marijuana. He was certainly aware of people around him who were unsavory, but as he said, he tried to see the good in everybody. Well, that sounds like, you know, something that say… oh, right, okay, it soun-