Louis Daniel Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901, in New Orleans, Louisiana, according to baptismal records discovered in the mid-1980s. (Armstrong himself maintained that he had been born on July 4, 1900.)
Growing up severely impoverished in the Battlefield section of New Orleans, Louis was taken under the wing of the Karnoffsky family at age six. According to a memoir, he tried playing a tin horn alongside Karnoffsky’s junk wagon to attract customers. After firing a borrowed gun on New Year’s Eve 1912 (as is New Orleans custom), he was sentenced to the Colored Waif’s Home where he learned to play the cornet and to read music.
In his teens, Armstrong worked on the Streckfus Mississippi steamer S. S. Sidney with Fate Marable’s Band. Louis further developed his sight-reading skills at the behest of Marable, who demanded musical literacy of his musicians. He took over Joe “King” Oliver’s spot as cornetist with Kid Ory when Oliver went to Chicago, later joining Oliver there in 1922.
In 1923, Armstrong made his first records with King Oliver the for Gennett, and Paramount labels. He traveled to New York City in 1924 to play with Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, where he switched to trumpet. His time with Henderson was to determine the course of big band jazz. Louis’ innate sense of swing communicated itself to his bandmates; Henderson recordings swung much harde
