Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, Joseph Epstein wrote about Sandy Koufax, the star pitcher whose athletic prowess was as rare as his modesty. Today, Joe Nocera remembers Louis Armstrong, the father of that most American of art forms: jazz. —The Editors
It would be hard to come up with a more quintessentially American figure than Louis Armstrong. Growing up dirt-poor in a section of New Orleans—Storyville—largely populated by prostitutes, he became the first black entertainer to be truly embraced by Americans, whether white or black. Indeed, at the height of his fame, he was the most beloved entertainer in the world. A self-taught trumpet player, he practically single-handedly transformed jazz, as the critic Gary Giddins once wrote, into a music whose “undeniable splendor projects an equally undeniable spirit of freedom.” His voice—”a bruising, teasing, gravel-throated everyman” (Giddins again)—could not have been more different from contemporaries like Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald. Yet in 1964, his recording of “Hello, Dolly” knocked the Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love” from the top of the charts.
Satchmo, as everybody called him, was a complete original. He believed in “the curative power of pot,” as one writer put it, which he smoked daily. He was never not himself, always ready with a joke or funny remark—some blue, some not—with a casual, unfiltered style that people couldn’t help but warm to. Once, during a concert in England, he dedicated a song to King George V with the words, “This one’s for you, Rex.”
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He loved America—why else would he claim to have been born on July 4th? (he wasn’t)—but he didn’t shy from criticizing it when he felt it was important to do so. In 1957, for instance, when Arkansas governor Orval Faubus had the National Guard block nine black students from entering a white high school, Armstrong spurned a planned State Department–sponsored tour of the Soviet Union to protest the federal government’s laggard response. “The way they are treating my people in the South,” he said, “the government can go to hell.”
