Around the time Louis Armstrong moved from a big band to a small-group setting in 1947, grumblings were being heard. At first, it came from the Black community, especially from fellow musicians. Dizzy Gillespie termed him a “plantation character” in a DownBeat article, and would later amplify that sentiment. Miles Davis went after both Armstrong and Gillespie, writing “I hated the way they used to laugh and grin for audiences.” The general argument was that Armstrong’s onstage antics were too reminiscent of minstrelsy, an era laden with racist baggage. And this attitude was writ in stone by white critic Gunther Schuller in his 1967 book Early Jazz, wherein he praised Armstrong’s innovative genius, “at least until the early 1930s, when he did succumb to the sheer weight of his success and its attendant commercial pressures.”
This chorus of misguided criticism would crescendo throughout the 1950s and ’60s as the critics parroted one another, not unlike the classical-world phenomenon of ritually calling Jascha Heifetz’s performances and recordings “cold,” a judgment only attainable without listening to the artist. But critics tend to be reliably sheeplike.
This is why it’s a good thing that Armstrong authority Ricky Riccardi began his three-volume biography of the jazz genius with the third book in the series, What a Wonderful World, published in 2011. It picks up Armstrong’s story from 1947, when he made the important transition to the small-group setting that he’d use for public performances for the rest of his life. The most important task for anyone wishing to paint a balanced portrait of the man’s life is to objectively present those criticisms, then counter them with thoughtful analysis.
This is what Riccardi smoothly accomplishes here, always emphasizing the fact that Armstrong’s concerts remained wildly popular and that even while he was carrying on some mild minstrelsy traditions, he was a committed advocate of civil rights—at first through his insistence on performing with a mixed-race ensemble, thus cutting off concerts in his native New Orleans for many decades, and then with a public statement in 1957 expressing his horror at Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus’s use of the National Guard to keep nine Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School for the first time. Not surprisingly, television viewers at the time saw mobs of angry whites screaming imprecations at the students.
(photos courtesy of Ricky Riccardi via Facebook)
Nearly two weeks later, at a stop to perform in North Dakota, Armstrong sat down with a 21-year-old reporter for the Grand Forks Herald named Larry Lubenow and vented publicly as he’d never done before, with remarks so inflammatory (even in their edited form; they were too colorful for print at the time) that the Associated Press insisted that Lubenow get Armstrong’s approval. He got it. “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” Armstrong said, calling Faubus a term that he agreed to change to “uneducated plow boy” and President Eisenhower “two faced” with “no guts.” The wire services picked it up and it made national headlines.
Yet it hardly changed the negative tenor of those reviews. To understand why Armstrong performed in a style that brought charges of “Uncle Tomming,” with the eye-rolling and laughing and face-mopping, you have to understand the artist’s boyhood in New Orleans. And that’s where the newest volume in the trilogy, Stomp Off, Let’s Go, comes in. As a boy, Armstrong was a street performer, singing harmony with friends, doing Bert Williams impressions when he wasn’t driving a coal cart, and generally developing a repertory of antics that won him laughs.
His behavior was rooted in the expectations and environment of his time. He grew up with a firm awareness of racial prejudice, something that characterized a seemingly enlightened New Orleans as much as it did everywhere else in the south—and, indeed, throughout the country—but he couched a rebellious style of behavior within that context. And there was plenty of precedent.
In his study of African-American humor titled On the Real Side, Mel Watkins notes that with the growth of slavery in the US, “a remarkably resilient and inventive manner of behaving and observing both themselves and the external world began to emerge. It would be nurtured and shaped by their interaction with America’s social customs and the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery…and eventually become a key factor in African America’s rich and expansive under- or subculture.”
The exaggerated mannerisms and stylized speech born in the 19th-century minstrel shows were in fact developed as a parody of white behavior, and was then enjoyed by whites too self-involved to realize that they themselves were being lampooned. “Obviously,” writes Watkins, “the pragmatically adopted policy of ‘puttin’ on massa’ and thereby making deceit part of their lifestyle had negative long-term consequences for slaves and their descendants. But it did solve some immediate problems presented by bondage.” Thus, Armstrong was following a far more complicated tradition than the pearl-clutching critics could understand.
Stomp Off, Let’s Go begins with a richly detailed look at Louis Armstrong’s birth and family, giving more information than has been unearthed by previous biographies. Which is not to short-change the good ones, written by Gary Giddens, Terry Teachout, and (in two volumes) Thomas Brothers. And there’s a volume by James Lincoln Collier that’s worth ignoring, as Collier is of the Schuller school of ill-informed know-it-all-ness.
Riccardi’s study of Armstrong’s early years pays special attention to the many influences he absorbed as a boy, influences that sparked in him the desire to entertain. He did it early, and he evidently did it well—and this was before a cornet ever touched his lips. I find this depth of reporting fascinating when it’s told well, which is not a problem for Riccardi, who brings a strong storytelling talent to his writing.
This is especially helpful in volume two of the trilogy, Heart Full of Rhythm, which was published in 2020. It picks up the story in 1929, after the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings—recordings that revealed to an eager public how innovative Armstrong had become. But now he was playing in Carroll Dickerson’s band in Chicago and attendance was dwindling. So he agreed to travel to Harlem for two performances as featured soloist with Luis Russell’s band, and took New York by storm. Nobody played with a tone and skill like Armstrong’s.
He did a similar thing not long thereafter, joining the Broadway cast of Fats Waller’s “Connie’s Hot Chocolates” and bringing down the house with his solo performance of “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” When he recorded it a little later, he chose for the flip side another song by Waller and lyricist Andy Razaf: “Black and Blue,” which in Armstrong’s hands became a powerful plaint of protest.
There are a lot of facts to relate in following the performer through the ’30s and well into the ‘40s. Thanks to clever marketing by Tommy Rockwell, his manager at the time, he was becoming as much of a pop star as a jazz sensation. His records were hot items, even when he waxed a controversial number like “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” which seemed to celebrate a racist heritage and even included the word “darkies” in the lyrics. He was in constant demand as a performer, and that’s where he ran into a problem that would dog him for years.
He changed managers, going to Johnny Collins, a man with mob connections (not at all unique in that business at that time). Collins and Rockwell fell out with each other, so it probably was Rockwell who sent gangsters to Armstrong’s dressing room one night. There are many versions of this story and the nerve-wracking events that followed, but Riccardi does an admirable job of presenting the alternatives and drawing informed conclusions.
A help and probably a hindrance to Riccardi through all three of his books are the Armstrong archives. These consist of his writings—he wrote a volume of autobiography and hundreds of letters—and the tape recordings he made throughout his career, in later years while sitting in his home in Queens, either narrating his story while dubbing recordings by himself and others, or while entertaining friends and swapping anecdotes. Riccardi has listened to many, many hours of this material in order to transcribe the most helpful information. (And you can hear some of it, too, by visiting the Louis Armstrong House Museum online at louisarmstronghouse.org and making your way to the digital collections.)
Joe Glaser was a car salesman with, you guessed it, mob connections when he decided to represent Black performers in 1934. He had enough success with this new venture to catch Armstrong’s attention, and then began their long association, lasting until Glaser’s death in 1969. Initially, Armstrong sought the white manager as much for protection as for bookings, and the combination worked, as described in Volume Two. But the story continues through Volume Three, as Glaser grudgingly (at first) agrees to the small-group format, then goes on to reap more money than ever out of the Armstrong bookings.
What was the financial arrangement? Nobody knows for sure, but Riccardi has assembled enough evidence to assure us that the musician was more than happy with it—and not bashful about importuning Glaser for more money whenever he believed he deserved it.
If you’re new to Riccardi’s biography, you have the chance to read the three volumes in the order that presents Armstrong’s earliest to his latest years. If, like me, you acquired them as they were published, you can enjoy the fascinating and often harrowing childhood stories in Stomp Off, Let’s Go that culminate in Armstrong’s journey from New Orleans to Chicago and the genesis of those Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings.
In the end, he was a man who lived to entertain, a genius who was pleasantly modest, a Black man who spent his life witnessing racial inequity while using the power of music to try to fight it. If his reputation was somewhat sullied by the nonsense recounted at the top of this piece, it’s thanks to work like this by Riccardi that we can see Armstrong as the most unique and influential figure in American music—and a role model who deserves to be revered.
The three volumes of Ricky Riccardi’s Louis Armstrong biography, What a Wonderful World, Heart Full of Rhythm, and Stomp Off, Let’s Go may be purchased through most online booksellers and brick-and-mortar bookshops.
B.A. Nilsson is a freelance writer and actor who lives in rural New York. His interest in vintage jazz long predates his marriage to a Paul Whiteman relative, and greatly helped in winning her affections.
