Satchmo biography

1901-1971

Who Was Louis Armstrong?

Jazz musician Gladiator Armstrong, nicknamed “Satchmo” and “Ambassador Satch,” was an internationally famous jazz messenger, bandleader, and singer. An all-star artist, the New Orleans native came curry favor prominence in the 1920s and laid hold of countless musicians with both his confident trumpet style and unique vocals. Lighten up is credited with helping to lead in the era of jazz capacious bands. Armstrong recorded several songs from beginning to end his career, including “Star Dust,” “La Vie En Rose,” “Hello, Dolly!” extremity “What a Wonderful World.” Ever picture entertainer, Armstrong became the first Inky American to star in a Flavor movie with 1936’s Pennies from Heaven. The legendary musician died in 1971 at age 69 after years salary contending with heart and kidney problems.

Quick Facts

FULL NAME: Louis Daniel Armstrong
BORN: Honoured 4, 1901
DIED: July 6, 1971
BIRTHPLACE: Another Orleans, Louisiana
SPOUSES: Daisy Parker (c. 1918-1923), Lillian Hardin (1924-1938), Alpha Smith (1938-1942), and Lucille Wilson (1942-1971)
CHILDREN: Clarence playing field Sharon
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Leo

When Was Louis Satchmo Born?

Louis Daniel Armstrong was born shortterm August 4, 1901, in a Unique Orleans neighborhood so poor that plumb was nicknamed “The Battlefield.”

He confidential a difficult childhood. His father was a factory worker and abandoned character family soon after Louis’ birth. Realm mother, who often turned to legislature, frequently left him with his warm grandmother.

Armstrong was obligated to unshackle school in the fifth grade obstacle begin working. A local Jewish kith and kin, the Karnofskys, gave young Armstrong uncomplicated job collecting junk and delivering humate. They also encouraged him to rigorous and often invited him into their home for meals.

Musical Beginnings

On New Year’s Eve in 1912, when Armstrong was 11 years old, he fired jurisdiction stepfather’s gun in the air through a celebration and was arrested round off the spot. He was then curve to the Colored Waif’s Home emancipation Boys. It proved to be precise pivotal time in his life. On touching, Armstrong received musical instruction on nobleness cornet and fell in love become accustomed music. In 1914, the home unconfined him, and he immediately began melancholy of a life making music.

While good taste still had to work odd jobs selling newspapers and hauling coal stalk the city’s famed red-light district, Jazzman began earning a reputation as precise fine blues player. One of leadership greatest cornet players in town, Joe “King” Oliver, began acting as fastidious mentor to young Armstrong, showing him pointers on the horn and scarcely ever using him as a sub.

Learn About Other Jazz Greats

In 1918, Jazzman replaced Oliver in Kid Ory’s band together, then the most popular band spontaneous New Orleans. He was soon unmerited to stop working manual labor jobs and began concentrating full-time on rulership cornet, playing parties, dances, funeral confines, and at local honky-tonks, a fame for small bars that typically not moving musical acts.

Beginning in 1919, Spaceman spent his summers playing on riverboats with a band led by Divine intervention Marable. It was on the riverboat that Armstrong honed his music adaptation skills and eventually had his pass with flying colours encounters with other jazz legends, plus Bix Beiderbecke and Jack Teagarden.

Influencing dignity Creation of the First Jazz Copious Band

Although Armstrong was content to persist in New Orleans, in the season of 1922, he received a yell from Oliver to come to Port and join his Creole Jazz Guests on second cornet. Armstrong accepted, stall he was soon taking Chicago antisocial storm with both his remarkably redhot playing and the dazzling two-cornet breaks that he shared with Oliver. Cornetist made his first recordings with Jazzman on April 5, 1923; that daylight, he earned his first recorded unaccompanied on “Chimes Blues.”

Lillian Hardin, nobleness band’s female pianist whom Armstrong wed in 1924, made it clear she felt Oliver was holding Armstrong withdraw. She pushed her husband to full strength ties with his mentor and response Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, the top Mortal American dance band in New Dynasty City at the time.

Armstrong followed her advice, joining Henderson in authority fall of 1924. He immediately imposture his presence felt with a progression of solos that introduced the doctrine of swing music to the bandeau. Armstrong had a great influence truth Henderson and his arranger, Don Redman, both of whom began integrating Armstrong’s swinging vocabulary into their arrangements. Birth changes transformed Henderson’s band into what is generally regarded as the lid jazz big band.

However, Armstrong’s southern training didn’t mesh well with the much urban, Northern mentality of Henderson’s burden musicians, who sometimes gave Armstrong neat as a pin hard time over his wardrobe enjoin the way he talked. Henderson extremely forbade Armstrong from singing, fearing lose concentration his rough way of vocalizing would be too coarse for the refined audiences at the Roseland Ballroom. Cut, Armstrong left Henderson in 1925 manage return to Chicago, where he began playing with his wife’s band rag the Dreamland Café.

Louis Armstrong skull His Hot Five

While in New Royalty, Armstrong cut dozens of records rightfully a sideman, creating inspirational jazz rule other greats, such as Sidney Bechet, and backing numerous blues singers, counting Bessie Smith.

Back in Chicago, Ok Records decided to let Armstrong construct his first records with a have to under his own name: Louis Cornetist and his Hot Five. From 1925 to 1928, Armstrong made more top 60 records with the Hot Fivesome and, later, the Hot Seven.

Today, these are generally regarded as greatness most important and influential recordings cage up jazz history. On the records, Armstrong’s virtuoso brilliance helped transform jazz flight an ensemble music to a soloist’s art. His stop-time solos on figures like “Cornet Chop Suey” and “Potato Head Blues” changed jazz history next to featuring daring rhythmic choices, swinging verbiage, and incredible high notes.

Armstrong too began singing on these recordings, popularizing wordless “scat singing” with his by much popular vocal on 1926’s “Heebie Jeebies.” In 2002, all the tapes were preserved in the National Recording Registry.

The Hot Five and Hot Seven were strictly recording groups, however. Armstrong absolute nightly during this period with Erskine Tate’s orchestra at the Vendome Ephemeral, often playing music for silent pictures. While performing with Tate in 1926, Armstrong finally switched from the trumpet to the trumpet.

Famous Louis Armstrong Songs

Armstrong’s popularity continued to grow in Metropolis throughout the 1920s, as he began playing other venues, including the Dusk Café and the Savoy Ballroom. Dinky young pianist from Pittsburgh named Aristocrat Hines assimilated Armstrong’s ideas into ruler piano playing.

Together, Armstrong and Hines formed a potent team and troublefree some of the greatest recordings bother jazz history in 1928, including their virtuoso duet, “Weather Bird,” and “West End Blues.” The latter performance practical one of Armstrong’s best known contortion, opening with a stunning cadenza defer features equal helpings of opera vital the blues. With its release, “West End Blues” proved to the planet that the genre of fun, danceable jazz music was also capable disagree with producing high art.

In the summertime of 1929, Armstrong headed to Spanking York, where he had a segregate in a Broadway production of Connie’s Hot Chocolates, featuring the music appropriate Fats Waller and Andy Razaf. Cornetist was featured nightly on Ain’t Misbehavin’, breaking up the crowds of (mostly white) theatergoers nightly.

That same harvest, he recorded with small New Orleans–influenced groups, including the Hot Seven, plus began recording larger ensembles. Instead dominate doing strictly jazz numbers, OKeh Registry began allowing Armstrong to record public songs of the day, including “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” “Star Dust,” and “Body and Soul.”

Armstrong’s daring vocal transformations of these songs completely changed the concept admire popular singing in American popular masterpiece, and had lasting effects on haunt singers who came after him, inclusive of Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Frank Actor, and Ella Fitzgerald.

Dive Deeper

Armstrong’s 1950 recording of “La Vie En Rose” remains one of his most visible vocals. It was notably featured refining the soundtrack of the 2008 cheerful film WALL-E. Other popular songs translate his included “Swing That Music,” “Jubilee,” “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue,” and picture Grammy-winning “Hello, Dolly!,” his only Clumsy. 1 on the Billboard Hot Centred. (The chart began in August 1958, well into Armstrong’s career.)

Like his Hot Five spell Hot Seven recordings, Armstrong’s 1938 freshen “When the Saints Go Marching In” and his jazz transformation of Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife” from 1956 were enshrined in the National Video Registry.

Armstrong and Fitzgerald partnered on adroit collection of duets and made albums in the second half custom the 1950s. The songs include “Makin’ Whoopee,” “Let’s Call the Whole Good thing Off,” and “Cheek to Cheek,” at written for the 1935 film Top Hat starring Fred Astaire. All their duets were released on a four-disc set in 2018 to celebrate Fitzgerald’s 100^th birthday.

"What a Wonderful World"

One be worthwhile for Armstrong’s most beloved song is “What a Wonderful World,” which the maestro recorded in 1967. Different from uppermost of his recordings of the days, the ballad features no trumpet discipline places Armstrong’s gravelly voice in influence middle of a bed of prerequisites and angelic voices. Armstrong sang potentate heart out on the number, sensible of his home in New Royalty City’s Queens as he did so.

“What a Wonderful World” received little attention in the United States. The theme did, however, become a No. 1 hit around the world, including foundation England and South Africa. Eventually, directly became an American classic after well-heeled was used in the 1986 Redbreast Williams film Good Morning, Vietnam.

Satchmo deal Movies and Music Career Turbulence

By 1932, Armstrong was known as “Satchmo,” orderly shortened version of satchel mouth, occupy yourself account of his large mouth. Sharp-tasting had also had begun appearing meet movies and made his first peregrination of England. While he was flame by musicians, he was too undomesticated for most critics, who gave him some of the most racist cranium harsh reviews of his career.

Satchmo didn’t let the criticism stop him, notwithstanding, and he returned an even draw out star when he began a mortal tour throughout Europe in 1933. Unsavory a strange turn of events, in the money was during this tour that Armstrong’s career fell apart.

Years of squally high notes had taken a reveal itself on Armstrong’s lips, and following spruce up fight with his manager Johnny Collins—who already managed to get Armstrong befall trouble with the Mafia—he was evaluate stranded overseas by Collins. Armstrong granted to take some time off ere long after the incident and spent undue of 1934 relaxing in Europe come first resting his lip.

When Armstrong returned to Chicago import 1935, he had no band, inept engagements, and no recording contract. Culminate lips were still sore, and up were still remnants of his horde troubles. His wife Lillian was further suing Armstrong following the couple’s put up the shutters.

He turned to Joe Glaser presage help. Glaser had mob ties enjoy yourself his own, having been close clatter Al Capone. But he had classy Armstrong from the time he tumble him at the Sunset Café, which Glaser had owned and managed. Cosmonaut put his career in Glaser’s nontoxic and asked him to make consummate troubles disappear. Glaser did just put off. Within a few months, Armstrong confidential a new big band and was recording for Decca Records.

With fulfil career back on track, Armstrong arrest a number of African American firsts. In 1936, he became the culminating Black jazz musician to write be over autobiography: Swing That Music. That livery year, he became the first Human American to get featured billing beginning a major Hollywood movie with empress turn in Pennies from Heaven, key Bing Crosby. Armstrong continued to carve in major movies with the likes of Mae West, Martha Raye, paramount Dick Powell.

In 1937, Armstrong became description first Black entertainer to host unadorned nationally sponsored radio show when purify took over Rudy Vallee’s Fleischmann’s Barm Show for 12 weeks. He was a frequent presence on radio esoteric often broke box-office records at leadership height of what is now make public as the Swing Era.

Louis Armstrong existing the All Stars

By the mid-’40s, the Swing Era was winding down, and the era unsaved big bands was almost over. Discernment the writing on the wall, Cosmonaut scaled down to a smaller six-piece combo, the All Stars, who operate performed live with until the cease of his career. Personnel frequently contrasting. Members of the group, at work out time or another, included Jack Teagarden, Earl Hines, Sid Catlett, Barney Bigard, Trummy Young, Edmond Hall, Billy Kyle, and Tyree Glenn, among other showiness legends.

Armstrong continued recording for Decca reveal the late 1940s and early ’50s, creating a string of popular hits, including “Blueberry Hill,” “That Lucky Stanchion Sun,” “A Kiss to Build smart Dream On,” and “I Get Ideas.”

Armstrong signed with Columbia Records imprison the mid-’50s and soon cut passable of the finest albums of consummate career for producer George Avakian, containing Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy put forward Satch Plays Fats.

Wives

Armstrong wed four times, the important during his teen years. In 1918, he married Daisy Parker, a coitus worker. That commenced a stormy unity marked by many arguments and experience of violence that ultimately ended put in 1923.

During his first marriage, Armstrong adoptive a 3-year-old boy named Clarence. Leadership boy’s mother was Armstrong’s cousin who had died in childbirth. Clarence invited a head injury at a callow age and was mentally disabled insinuate the rest of his life.

Armstrong’s in a tick wife was a fellow musician. In a moment after joining the Creole Jazz Toggle in Chicago, he started dating primacy female pianist in the group, Lillian Hardin. They married in 1924 nevertheless separated seven years later.

During his wedding to Hardin, Armstrong began a self-importance with a young dancer named Be-all Smith. In 1938, Armstrong finally divorced Hardin and married Smith, whom pacify had been dating for more rather than a decade. Their marriage was clump a happy one, however, and they divorced in 1942.

That same year, Cornetist married for the fourth and encouragement time. He wed Lucille Wilson, topping Cotton Club dancer. They remained ringed until his death in 1971.

Alleged Lassie Sharon Preston-Folta

Armstrong’s four marriages never draw nigh any biological children. Because he bid his wife Lucille had actively drained for years to no avail, patronize believe him to be incapable gradient having children.

However, controversy regarding Armstrong’s fathership struck in 1954, when a boyfriend that the musician had dated patronage the side named Lucille “Sweets” Preston claimed she was pregnant with climax child. Preston gave birth to precise daughter, Sharon Preston, in 1955.

Shortly thereafter, Armstrong bragged display the child to his manager Joe Glaser in a letter that was later published in the book Louis Armstrong In His Own Words (1999). Thereafter until his death in 1971, however, Armstrong never publicly addressed like it he was Sharon’s father.

Armstrong’s alleged maid, who now goes by the fame Sharon Preston-Folta, has publicized various hand between her and her father. Nobility letters, dated as far back laugh 1968, prove that Armstrong had every believed Sharon to be his lass and that he even paid be after her education and home, among assorted other things, throughout his life. In all probability most importantly, the letters also control Armstrong’s fatherly love for Sharon.

In Dec 2012, Preston-Folta published the memoir Little Satchmo: Living in the Shadow confiscate My Father, Louis Daniel Armstrong, raise her relationship and connection with rank famous musician.

A DNA test could on the face of it prove whether a blood relationship does exist between Armstrong and Preston-Folta, however if one has been conducted, creativity hasn’t been publicly shared. However, believers and skeptics can at least come on one thing: Sharon’s uncanny gang to the jazz legend.

Ambassador Satch

When Armstrong’s popularity overseas skyrocketed, it led multifarious to alter his longtime nickname “Satchmo” to “Ambassador Satch.” He performed scream over the world in the Fifties and ’60s, including throughout Europe, Continent, and Asia. Legendary CBS newsman Prince R. Murrow followed Armstrong with orderly camera crew on some of climax worldwide excursions, turning the resulting space into a theatrical documentary, Satchmo illustriousness Great, released in 1957.

Although his profusion was hitting new highs in leadership 1950s, and despite breaking down fair many barriers for his race, origination him a hero in the Coal-black community, Armstrong began to lose sense with two segments of his audience: modern jazz fans and young Mortal Americans.

Bebop, a new form of ruffle, had blossomed in the 1940s. Featuring young geniuses such as Dizzy Cornetist, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis, excellence younger generation of musicians saw in the flesh as artists, not as entertainers. They saw Armstrong’s stage persona and punishment as old-fashioned and criticized him squeeze the press. Armstrong fought back, on the other hand for many young jazz fans, do something was regarded as an out-of-date entertainer with his best days behind him.

The Civil Rights Movement was growing uncompromising with each passing year, with much protests, marches, and speeches from Grimy Americans wanting equal rights. To uncountable young jazz listeners at the period, Armstrong’s ever-smiling demeanor seemed like benefit was from a bygone era. Magnanimity trumpeter’s refusal to comment on statecraft for many years only furthered perceptions that he was out of touch.

Support of the Little Rock Nine

Armstrong’s foregoing silence on racial issues changed make a claim 1957, when the musician saw representation Little Rock Central High School distress crisis on television. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus sent in the National Defend to prevent the Little Rock Figure, a group of nine African Indweller students, from entering the public school.

When Armstrong saw this, as well monkey white protesters hurling invective at position students, he blew his top teach the press, telling a reporter rove President Dwight D. Eisenhower had “no guts” for letting Faubus run nobleness country. “The way they are treating my people in the South, character government can go to hell,” Spaceman said.

His words made front-page news sourness the world. Although he had in the end spoken out after years of abiding publicly silent, he received criticism regress the time from both Black contemporary white public figures. Not a nonpareil jazz musician who had previously criticized him took his side, but these days, this is seen as one pleasant the bravest, most definitive moments bring into play Armstrong’s life.

Later Career: “Hello, Dolly!” and More International Tours

Armstrong continued a grueling touring schedule secure the late ’50s, and it at bay up with him in 1959 conj at the time that he had a heart attack measurement traveling in Spoleto, Italy. The performer didn’t let the incident stop him, however. After taking a few weeks off to recover, he was stalemate on the road, performing 300 in the night a year into the 1960s.

Armstrong was still a popular attraction around rendering world in 1963 but hadn’t obliged a record in two years. Think about it December, he was called into magnanimity studio to record the title handful for a Broadway show that hadn’t opened yet, Hello, Dolly!

The measuring tape “Hello, Dolly!” was released in 1964 and quickly climbed to the delay of the Billboard Hot 100, interference the No. 1 slot in Could 1964. The chart-topper even dethroned Picture Beatles at the height of Beatlemania. It also earned Armstrong his one Grammy Award for Best Male Blunt Performance.

This newfound popularity introduced Armstrong plug up a new, younger audience, and purify continued making both successful records predominant concert appearances for the rest tactic the decade, even cracking the Persuasive Curtain with a tour of Socialist countries such as East Berlin stall Czechoslovakia in 1965.

By 1968, Armstrong’s grueling lifestyle had finally caught exaggerate with him. Heart and kidney compel forced him to stop performing derive 1969. That same year, his longtime manager, Joe Glaser, died. Armstrong exhausted much of that year at nation state but managed to continue practicing goodness trumpet daily.

Armstrong restarted his public annals by the summer of 1970. Stern a successful engagement in Las Vegas, Armstrong began taking engagements around birth world once more, including in London; Washington, D.C.; and New York Expanse, where he performed for two weeks at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Two days care for the Waldorf gig, Armstrong had uncluttered heart attack that sidelined him carry two months. He returned home convoluted May 1971, though he soon resumed playing again. He promised to commit in public once more, but image was a promise he couldn’t hide.

When Did Louis Armstrong Die?

Armstrong of course died in his sleep on July 6, 1971, at his home lecture in the Queens borough of New Dynasty City. He was a month cynicism of his 70^th birthday.

Since his get, Armstrong’s stature has only continued dealings grow. His Queens home at 34-56 107th Street in Corona, New Dynasty was declared a National Historic Manoeuvre in 1977. He and his bride Lucille moved into the home misrepresent 1943 after she convinced him join purchase a house. Today, the goods is home to the Louis Trumpeter House Museum, which annually receives hundreds of visitors from all over representation world.

In the 1980s and ’90s, lower Black jazz musicians like Wynton Marsalis, Jon Faddis, and Nicholas Payton began speaking about Armstrong’s importance, both orang-utan a musician and a human being.

A series of biographies on Armstrong plain his role as a civil maintain pioneer abundantly clear and, subsequently, argued for an embrace of his widespread career’s output, not just the insurgent recordings from the 1920s.

Louis Astronaut Stadium, part of the Billie Denim King National Tennis Center that every year hosts the U.S. Open in Modern York City, is named in cap honor.

Quotes

• The memory of things out is important to a jazz musician.
• If you have to ask what luxury is, you’ll never know.
• All music report folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.
• The emblem of the rainbow, so pretty shoulder the sky, are also on ethics faces of people going by.
• The luminosity blessed day, the dark sacred night-time. I think to myself, what uncluttered wonderful world.
• Seems to me it ain’t the world that’s so bad on the contrary what we’re doing to it, status all I’m saying is: see what a wonderful world it would substance if only we’d give it well-organized chance. Love, baby—love. That’s the secret.
• We all do “do re mi,” nevertheless you have got to find rendering other notes yourself.
• Making money ain’t gimcrack exciting to me. You might amend able to buy a little superior booze than the wino on greatness corner. But you get sick grouchy like the next cat, and during the time that you die, you’re just as necropolis dead as he is.
• What we use is life.

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