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High-five casino! And one of last century's towering cultural figures, who forever changed the face of American music. Here to tell the story is Lawrence Burgreen, who wrote the definitive biography on the man known as Pops.
Louis Armstrong, An Extravagant Life. Let's take a listen. Look here boy, let me tell you what that is. You're the most no-goodest guy I've met in my life. You've been eating up all of our red beans and rice, trying to bite me in the back of my wifey old dog. You wait a minute, I'll come back, I'll show you something.
I'll be glad when you dance, you rascal hero. I'm going to talk about somebody who really occupies a special place in my heart. 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, which is 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. But Louis is beyond category, I feel, and his emotional affect is so overwhelming and is so inspiring that 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. 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 great deal. Where do you find your best audiences? Everywhere I hit that note.
Notes and notes in any language. Where do you hit it best? Every time I pick up the horn. What do you like least? Least. I don't have time to think about the least, but every time I look around, I've got the horn in front of me, in public, and jamming with the cats that I know. And I don't expect too much.
I don't have time. Underlying that was an extraordinary life of hardship that he overcame again and 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 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 whore. He was married to a whore. He was surrounded by whores much of his early life. And he said they were some of the best people he ever met.
When I say whore, he lived near Storyville, which was the legendary red light district of New Orleans. Well, it's all nice people, that's all I can say. I mean, growing up as a kid, I mean, they didn't do anything that would hurt us, and they didn't tell us anything wrong. And quite naturally, when they'd have the good times at night around the hunky-tonks and things like that, most of the kids was in bed anyway. They didn't pay no attention. But I made up alright.
I mean, I didn't overdo it. One of his early formative experiences when he was a kid, 10 or 12 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 renew his acquaintance. Well, when I went to the Sunset, which was owned by Mr. Joe Glaser, my manager, after that, I used to see a lot of the boys sitting around, and Al Capone and his brigade would come in. You saw Al Capone?
Yeah, many times. We had some bad boys in New Orleans. We had some boys just as tough as Al Capone's boys right there in New Orleans. When I was coming up selling newspapers, and they followed my life up, you know, from the time I left the Hunky Tunks to come up north and blow.
And I went down there in 1931 to play at the suburban garden. But this night, they done propped this man up to just a big deal. Now you bring on Louis Armstrong, he's a New Orleans boy, and blah, blah, blah. But a second before this kid had to go to that mic and bring me on, he walked away and say, I just can't introduce that nigga.
Can't do it. So the Dalton boys wanted to wash him way then, you know what I mean? And they come to me and say, tell me what he says, I say, well, don't worry about it, you know? I say, give me a card, boys, and I walk to that mic, and they're, da-da, shim, when I walk to that mic. And before I opened my mouth, there was all the white boys that I was raised with, you know, sitting up there, sharp. And they had a differ, satchel, and blah, blah, blah, blah.
Man, you thought the walls was coming in. And you've been listening to Lawrence Burgreen 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.
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All of that available at MeaningfulBeauty.com. And we continue with our American stories and with Lawrence Burgreen, who wrote the definitive biography of the man known as Pops. Let's continue where we left off, picking up with Armstrong himself. Before I opened my mouth, there was all the white boys that I was raised with, you know, sitting up there, sharp, and got rich with their fathers and left them to produce places and different things. There were those kids who'd hang around. And after school, we'd go out in the lots and play cowboys and Indians with those broken slates and things like that.
You know what I mean? We was the Indians. And I stood there 20 minutes, and they had a differ, sat, and then blah, blah, blah, blah. Man, you thought the walls was coming in. And this announcer standing there, you say, well, I didn't know this would happen in the South, in New Orleans.
It never happened. So they fired him and everything, and I took over myself. I can't imagine, but this was Louis, you know, really extraordinary. So that was actually a positive experience and may have been his making in a way, because it gave him a sense of self-discipline, which he lacked as a small person, young person, until that point. The New Orleans sound was already in existence before Louis came along, and he got to it the most unlikely way. He was on his own at a very early age, living on the street, hustling for nickels and dimes, playing and singing and trying to attract attention, and just trying to survive as a street kid, as a street musician. And he was always looking for, especially as a young person, for sponsors, people who could help him in some way. One of them was the by now legendary Family Karnovsky. The Karnofskys had come to New Orleans from Russia. They were Jewish.
They were, to a certain extent, outcasts as well. He helped them with their rag-picking trade, and through his efforts with them as a young child, he came across a tin bugle that he found in the street. It was dirty. It was corroded. They picked it up.
They cleaned it off so it was usable. And he started to play, to blow, as he would say. He kept on blowing for the rest of his life, on that cornet and on other instruments.
But at that point, he was simply using it to attract attention for their business, as he was going down the street with them. As a youngster in the little orphanage home in New Orleans, I was the bugler of the institution. When I got to be around 13 or 14 years old, they took me off the bugle and put me in the little brass band.
Finally, they made me the leader of the little band on the cornet. So we got so good that we could play the saints of the march and then for the boys, they marched to church every Sunday. And so those were his beginnings. It was not Juilliard. It was, you know, he never had a musical lesson in his life.
I think he would have been stymied if he had. So anything he picked up in jazz was from other musicians or was intuitive. And then there was also his great enthusiasm and zest for life as he got older. You know, that's what was so captivating.
I'd just like to read you a paragraph, if I could, from the book, my description of what it was like to encounter Louis. In the beginning, he was a sound and only a sound, a strange blend of happy cacophony and tormented catawalling. Nothing like it had been heard before, not in New Orleans, where he was born in 1901, or Chicago, or St. Louis, where he played as an emerging virtuoso cornetist. And certainly not in New York, where Duke Ellington said of his first exposure to that sound, nobody had ever heard anything like it. And his impact could not be put into words, nor had it ever been heard in Europe or in South America or Africa.
But everywhere it would be known as the sound of America. Now, how that happened is an extraordinary alchemy, because when you think of some of the most famous Americans or Americans who are examples of American music, culture or something, Louis Armstrong comes to mind. Unlike almost anybody else, he came from, you know, the most unlikely background and he established more popular songs than any other musician. And, you know, he really played two instruments. There was the cornet and then, of course, his voice, the growling voice, and then the interplay of the two.
You know, it was unmistakable. You know, it's not a sweet voice, not for fun that you would want to lull you to sleep, but there was something so reassuring and authentic about it that it was part of what made Louis Louis. He also was in general, but there are some exceptions, an innocent. He was often people took more advantage of him than he did of them. He did occasionally get into fights, fifth fights. Life in New Orleans could be very brutal, but the more he embraced music and performing as his avenue to communicating with other people, the more extraordinarily secure and popular he became. There were ups and downs along the way. Becoming a jazz musician at that time was not an easy route. He was often broke, cheated on by the people he worked with or promoters. He developed, you know, his own language, his own lingo, which persists. He was really resilient.
Something would come along and, you know, he would pick up another gig. Eventually, he, in his search for someone who could be his protector and source of financial stability, he came across Joe Glaser. Joe Glaser was disreputable, to put it mildly. He was a fight promoter who later became Louis' manager and other managers, but he was also a gangster. And that was part of the way he was effective. You didn't really want to cross Joe Glaser. Did he treat Louis well?
Well, yes and no. Since he said Joe Glaser was his boss, his protector, his manager, he got a measure of security because you didn't want to mess with Joe Glaser, who was a tough guy from the mob. On the other hand, he always shortchanged Louis Armstrong. Playing jazz in general was not a good way to become rich at that time, and nobody really knows how much of Louis' earnings Joe Glaser helped himself to, but it was more than, you know, would be considered fair or acceptable.
Louis didn't care. He needed the security and the legitimacy, and Joe Glaser gave it to him. He managed to get Louis into various venues and neighborhoods that would otherwise have been closed to him, even in New Orleans.
So this was a very important connection. Eventually it led to recording contracts and his incredibly productive output was nightclubs, gambling establishments, sometimes a riverboat, sometimes something that was high society, but it was a long time until he got there. And you've been listening to Lawrence Burgreen tell the story of Louis Armstrong, and my goodness, he just hustled on the streets. He was a street kid looking for an advantage, looking for an opportunity.
I worked for a Jewish man who ultimately just bought and sold things off the street, and in the end found a bugle and started to play. And pretty soon he was in a corner band as a young man, and pretty soon was a leader of that band. He learned music from other musicians, picked stuff up by intuition. It wasn't exactly Juilliard, Lawrence Burgreen said, but he had a sound and nothing had ever sounded like what Louis sounded like before. As Duke Ellington said, nobody ever heard anything like it.
My goodness, if Duke Ellington is going to say that about you, well that's true. When we come back, more of this remarkable American story, Louis Armstrong's story, here on Our American Stories. High Five Casino is a social casino with real prizes and big Vegas hits at highfivecasino.com. The hottest games right from Vegas, and all winnings go straight to your bank account.
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All that available at MeaningfulBeauty.com. And we continue with our American stories and with Lawrence Burgreen, who wrote what 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, there were racial codes and segregation was the order of the day. I was determined. I had a chance to play with the best civilizations coming through because I was pretty good myself. Well, they wouldn't have tolerated with me, you know.
You got to be good or bad is the devil. You can't take it for granted. Even if we have two or three days off, I still had to blow that horn. A few hours to keep up the chaps. I mean, I've been playing 50 years, and that's what I've been doing, you know, to keep in that groove.
I got to warm up every day, at least an hour, you know. You either have it or you don't. You play your horn just like you sing a song or a hymn. If it's in your heart, you express yourself in the tune. Usually when musicians or celebrities have an autobiography, quote, autobiography, it's ghost written 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 cornet was the typewriter. He spent a great deal of time writing and typing with his own Hunt and Beck method after shows in the middle of the night. He wanted to write about the people, 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 growly voice. When he was younger, he didn't really have a growly 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.
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 something they'd say, oh, right, OK, it sounds sort of saccharine. But that was really true with Louis. And I think he earned it through painful experience, a life which he authentically recorded. So his life, as well as his music, is a document about the American spirit, I think both the difficult side, the hard side, the unfairness and the cruelty and the optimism and the striving. I think this reached its culmination in his later life when he sang It's a Wonderful World, which has now become, you know, sort of a saccharine song.
But he really meant it. It was a huge hit. The colors of the rainbow. So pretty in the sky. Also on the faces of people going by. I see friends shaking hands, saying how dangerous. They're really saying I love you. I hear beggars cry. I watch them grow.
They'll learn much more than I'll ever know. And I think to myself. What a wonderful world. To be able to say after all he had been through that It's a Wonderful World was really an extraordinary affirmation. You know, as I encountered Louis or talked to people about Louis, he didn't get a range of opinions.
You got one. Louis was just a fantastic character. I was skeptical to begin with, but he realized that he had this spirit that I'm talking about, which was really contagious. I don't know of anybody who doesn't love Louis.
I'm sure they're out there somewhere. They might not have fully appreciated him or they might have thought he was a simple person, which he wasn't. He was not educated in a formal way, but he was highly perceptive about people and very analytical. Now, one of the things I liked about him, besides his sense of humor and his virtuosity and resilience, the name of the songs that he performed and played were just so beguiling. Jason Street Blues, King of the Zulus, Struttin' With Some Barbecue, Sugarfoot Stomp, Chicago Breakdown, You Rascal You, you know, which was a set of I'll be I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal you, Weatherbird, Muskrat Ramble, Big Butter and Eggman. I remember when I was a kid, I was that kind of very simple summer camp. And whenever it was a rainy day, they would play Muskrat Ramble on the P.A.
system. That was my first exposure to Louis Armstrong. It's ebullient. It's joyful. It's crazy.
What's the Muskrat Ramble? That kind of benign anarchy, you know, was part of his popularity. And he was also, in terms of his temperament, different from other jazz musicians. You could say of his era, Duke Ellington had a very upbeat ebullient temperament, not as ebullient as Louis. I don't think anybody could be as ebullient as Louis.
But if you go to Miles Davis and bebop, completely different, introverted, sullen, hard drugs, also a genius, self-destructive, etc. Louis early on discovered that he had a fondness or an instinct for being a father. Perhaps the worst tragedy that occurred to him, he was with his wife's last girlfriend, Daisy, in New Orleans. And he adopted her son, who was named Clarence.
They had a house with a porch, as houses in New Orleans often do. And Clarence was out there playing one day, and he slipped and he fell on his head on the ground. He didn't die, but he was never the same after that. He got appropriate medical treatment, but he always was not right in the head, to use a hackneyed expression, the rest of his life.
Louis felt incredibly guilty that this had happened, that he hadn't been actually on the porch to watch carefully what could happen to Clarence. And he adopted Clarence and took care of Clarence for the rest of Louis Armstrong's life. You've been listening to Lawrence Burgreen, author of Louis Armstrong, An Extravagant Life. You can buy it wherever you buy your books and pick it up. It's a terrific read. When we come back, more of the remarkable life of Louis Armstrong, a quintessential American story of optimism and resilience, grit and talent.
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Let's pick up where we last left off. Throughout his life, Louis never really became wealthy. He, you know, Joe Glaser, he earned a fair amount of money.
Joe Glaser took a lot. He gave away a lot. Many jazz musicians died broke or near broke. Louis was certainly not broke. He died a celebrity. He was living in New York at that point.
Nevertheless, he needed the money to survive, but he wasn't particularly competitive about it. What he really needed to do to survive was play music or encounter all sorts of people. I was just so glad to sit in a band with guys like King Hollywood and Johnny Dodd, Sidney Bashir and them greats. That was my happiness. See, they have this guy when it comes to be a star, the public wish that on them and things like that.
Because I was just satisfied sitting at tailgate there in the wagons and another wagon would pull up on the corner and then we'd chain the wheels and that was my kicks, you know, trying to blow that cat out of the wagon. You know, many entertainers have a crowd of people, you know, groupies around them. Louis's idea of a great bunch of groupies were people from New Orleans, old friends, jazz musicians, working girls, i.e. prostitutes, rabbis. A few priests and other assorted people, the more varied, the better.
You know, a totally American Louis Armstrong combination. He just loved these people. A sense of sameness was not his style. He really liked the variety and he made an effort, if they were all with him in the same place, to introduce everybody to everybody else. Rabbi, meet the prostitute. And nuns as well. He wanted everybody to get along because he said that he saw a sense of divinity in all people.
It didn't matter what kind, rich, poor, black, white, etc. He said he could see it. And again, just to make a comparison to Irving Berlin, where everything was so tightly controlled and it had to be note for note, you know, just the way he intended.
It was part of Berlin's excellence. With Louis, it was different. He would play notes, but what mattered to him were these tiny micro pauses and irregularities in the rhythm between the notes. And he felt this is where jazz could be found in things that you don't necessarily hear.
Well, how do you respond to them? Your mind gets stimulated and replaces it or invent something to put in these little gaps. And he describes it in rather clinical detail. For him, this was the secret of syncopation and the secret of jazz. So as he became more and more aware of it, he tended to emphasize that. So he felt part of jazz is what you were hearing, you know, the notes as written. But part of it was things that you didn't hear, that the mind was being tricked or stimulated into creating as you listen to it, because the ear anticipates sounds before you actually hear them.
So you become engaged unconsciously without realizing it. And I think in some ways it's the key to what jazz is and the improvisatory nature of it. But this was, so to speak, the gospel, so to speak, of what he was promoting. And, you know, it was based on good vibes, on spirit, on feeling. If not for Louis Armstrong, I don't know what the jazz world would be like.
I would be there. But he became an exponent of New Orleans jazz in a way that was really extraordinary. And then later on, when he got into the show business mainstream with Hello Dolly and other things, he managed to remain himself almost the entire time.
And, you know, the term selling out, things that we think of as being standard terms, they don't apply to him. Well, people love me and my music. You know, I love them.
I have no problems at all with people. The minute I walk on the bandstand, they know they're going to get something good and no jive. And they know what they're there for and that's why they come and they leave very satisfied, I see to that, because I don't believe in getting up there and a whole lot of hokum. I made a statement the other day, why you don't hear of a lot of musicians that got famous and didn't stay that way because they had the wrong idea. They figured after they got famous and they're playing to a crowd of people, they ain't playing for them from the heart, which gave them the reputation. They got so big, now they're watching the box office.
So they're blowing, they're up there watching the box office and forget about them people. And when you look around, you don't hear them no more. So you don't play to your public sheep at no time. I'm the audience myself. I'm my own audience. And I don't like to hear myself play bad or sing bad.
So I know I ain't going to do it for you. In 1969, the Beatles dominated popular music. And so therefore, many quote old fashioned types of American music, their day was over. So it was really a shock when Hello Dolly shot to the top of the charts and became a number one hit. Hello Dolly, this is Louis Dolly.
It's so nice to have you back where you belong. And what was so extraordinary was that it overtook the Beatles in popularity. And that was for a while number one. It wasn't so much the song, which if you've ever seen the musical, you know, on Broadway say it's okay.
Yes, it's of its time. It was his interpretation. He made it personal when he said this is Louis Dolly because he went by all sorts of nicknames. And nobody ever really knew for sure how to pronounce his name. Was it Louis? Was it Louis? His name, Satchmo, which was a New Orleans abbreviation for satchelmouth because his mouth was so big. You know, all musicians in my days had nicknames. My name was Satchelmouth, like a doctor's satchel. When I went to England, this fella was strictly English. And he was the editor of the newspaper there. He shook my hand.
They got off the train. He said, hello, Satchmo. So right away, my trombone player said, the man think you have more mouth than Satchelmouth.
So I was stuck with it and it turned out all right. So he was introducing himself as if he needed to, you know, in later life as Louis. So it was a neat bit of self-promotion and also, I guess, honesty on his part. And eventually he became, instead of somebody from the margins of society, somebody who was espousing central or important values that people could instantly recognize and ascribe to, relating to people of freedom and joy. Everybody around the world knows Louis Armstrong, the music, but he did become almost without meaning to a goodwill ambassador for the upbeat American spirit. When GIs overseas wanted to think about or wanted to hear something American, they often thought of Louis Armstrong's jazz. You know, it was just a quintessential American sound.
And it was something new. It didn't exist a hundred years before, you know, and it was a composite of musical styles that came together in New Orleans, often in disreputable circumstances like brothels and which he promoted and refined and popularized. That is jazz. I mean, how do you define jazz? Well, there are so many definitions of the word jazz and, you know, what that actually means. But I think Louis probably came closer to it than others.
Now, there are bebop musicians and many other geniuses in the field who would have different variations, some of them white, some of them black, some of them Creole, some of them a mixture. But still, Louis was the personification of it. And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to Lawrence Burgreen, who wrote what I believe is the definitive biography on the man known as Pops. We're talking about Louis Armstrong and the book is called Louis Armstrong, An Extravagant Life. Go to Amazon, go to your local bookstores, wherever you get your books.
Pick this up. You will smile ear to ear throughout it and even through the suffering. Louis' response is just remarkable every time. So much to learn from this man and how he lived his life, all of us. He wasn't in it for the money.
I mean, he knew that his manager was probably taking more than his fair share. But what he really wanted to do more than anything was play music with great people and meet new people. He saw divinity, the divinity and the divine in all people. He delighted in having a pastor and a prostitute, a rabbi and a barkeep in the same place introducing them. And the delight of his life must have been the topping of the Beatles on the charts in the late 1960s, a near impossibility. And of course, how Lawrence Burgreen ended things was just a perfect way to do it. Louis Armstrong was the goodwill ambassador to the upbeat American spirit.
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