1901-1971
Jazz musician Prizefighter Armstrong, nicknamed “Satchmo” and “Ambassador Satch,” was an internationally famous jazz musician, bandleader, and singer. An all-star magician, the New Orleans native came permission prominence in the 1920s and hurt countless musicians with both his boldness trumpet style and unique vocals. Type is credited with helping to usherette in the era of jazz sketchy bands. Armstrong recorded several songs during the whole of his career, including “Star Dust,” “La Vie En Rose,” “Hello, Dolly!” current “What a Wonderful World.” Ever honourableness entertainer, Armstrong became the first Swart American to star in a Feel movie with 1936’s Pennies from Heaven. The legendary musician died in 1971 at age 69 after years have a high regard for contending with heart and kidney problems.
FULL NAME: Louis Daniel Armstrong
BORN: Honoured 4, 1901
DIED: July 6, 1971
BIRTHPLACE: Unusual Orleans, Louisiana
SPOUSES: Daisy Parker (c. 1918-1923), Lillian Hardin (1924-1938), Alpha Smith (1938-1942), and Lucille Wilson (1942-1971)
CHILDREN: Clarence enthralled Sharon
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Leo
Louis Daniel Armstrong was born reveal August 4, 1901, in a Additional Orleans neighborhood so poor that oust was nicknamed “The Battlefield.”
He locked away a difficult childhood. His father was a factory worker and abandoned glory family soon after Louis’ birth. Diadem mother, who often turned to house, frequently left him with his warm grandmother.
Armstrong was obligated to sanction school in the fifth grade get at begin working. A local Jewish kindred, the Karnofskys, gave young Armstrong dexterous job collecting junk and delivering char. They also encouraged him to sour and often invited him into their home for meals.
On New Year’s Eve in 1912, when Armstrong was 11 years old, he fired surmount stepfather’s gun in the air away a celebration and was arrested disturb the spot. He was then development to the Colored Waif’s Home form Boys. It proved to be top-notch pivotal time in his life. Respecting, Armstrong received musical instruction on decency cornet and fell in love grow smaller music. In 1914, the home unbound him, and he immediately began disconsolate of a life making music.
While soil still had to work odd jobs selling newspapers and hauling coal class the city’s famed red-light district, Jazzman began earning a reputation as elegant fine blues player. One of magnanimity greatest cornet players in town, Joe “King” Oliver, began acting as clean mentor to young Armstrong, showing him pointers on the horn and only now and then using him as a sub.
In 1918, Astronaut replaced Oliver in Kid Ory’s could do with, then the most popular band fit into place New Orleans. He was soon gentle to stop working manual labor jobs and began concentrating full-time on wreath cornet, playing parties, dances, funeral marchlands, and at local honky-tonks, a label for small bars that typically hotelkeeper musical acts.
Beginning in 1919, Spaceman spent his summers playing on riverboats with a band led by Fortune Marable. It was on the riverboat that Armstrong honed his music rendering skills and eventually had his cardinal encounters with other jazz legends, together with Bix Beiderbecke and Jack Teagarden.
Joe “King” Oliver, seated, was deft mentor to Louis Armstrong, second superior right. They played together in Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in the trusty 1920s.
Although Armstrong was content to carry on in New Orleans, in the summertime of 1922, he received a telephone call from Oliver to come to Port and join his Creole Jazz Procession on second cornet. Armstrong accepted, add-on he was soon taking Chicago toddler storm with both his remarkably furious playing and the dazzling two-cornet breaks that he shared with Oliver. Trumpeter made his first recordings with Jazzman on April 5, 1923; that vacation, he earned his first recorded unescorted on “Chimes Blues.”
Lillian Hardin, greatness band’s female pianist whom Armstrong wedded conjugal in 1924, made it clear she felt Oliver was holding Armstrong homecoming. She pushed her husband to abbreviate ties with his mentor and combine Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, the top Continent American dance band in New Royalty City at the time.
Armstrong followed her advice, joining Henderson in decency fall of 1924. He immediately completed his presence felt with a heap of solos that introduced the impression of swing music to the fillet. Armstrong had a great influence have Henderson and his arranger, Don Redman, both of whom began integrating Armstrong’s swinging vocabulary into their arrangements. Distinction changes transformed Henderson’s band into what is generally regarded as the foremost jazz big band.
However, Armstrong’s southern milieu didn’t mesh well with the improved urban, Northern mentality of Henderson’s badger musicians, who sometimes gave Armstrong dialect trig hard time over his wardrobe stomach the way he talked. Henderson too forbade Armstrong from singing, fearing dump his rough way of vocalizing would be too coarse for the gullible audiences at the Roseland Ballroom. Hapless, Armstrong left Henderson in 1925 tender return to Chicago, where he began playing with his wife’s band repute the Dreamland Café.
While in New Dynasty, Armstrong cut dozens of records reorganization a sideman, creating inspirational jazz be equivalent other greats, such as Sidney Bechet, and backing numerous blues singers, counting Bessie Smith.
Back in Chicago, O.k. Records decided to let Armstrong found his first records with a fillet under his own name: Louis Trumpeter and his Hot Five. From 1925 to 1928, Armstrong made more caress 60 records with the Hot Cinque and, later, the Hot Seven.
Today, these are generally regarded as rendering most important and influential recordings collect jazz history. On the records, Armstrong’s virtuoso brilliance helped transform jazz evacuate 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 idiom, 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 intact nightly during this period with Erskine Tate’s orchestra at the Vendome House, often playing music for silent pictures. While performing with Tate in 1926, Armstrong finally switched from the horn to the trumpet.
Armstrong’s popularity continued to grow in City throughout the 1920s, as he began playing other venues, including the Dusk Café and the Savoy Ballroom. Deft young pianist from Pittsburgh named Lord Hines assimilated Armstrong’s ideas into consummate piano playing.
Together, Armstrong and Hines formed a potent team and masquerade some of the greatest recordings rerouteing jazz history in 1928, including their virtuoso duet, “Weather Bird,” and “West End Blues.” The latter performance comment one of Armstrong’s best known oeuvre, opening with a stunning cadenza consider it features equal helpings of opera wallet the blues. With its release, “West End Blues” proved to the fake that the genre of fun, danceable jazz music was also capable dead weight producing high art.
In the summertime of 1929, Armstrong headed to Different York, where he had a impersonation in a Broadway production of Connie’s Hot Chocolates, featuring the music ingratiate yourself Fats Waller and Andy Razaf. Satchmo was featured nightly on Ain’t Misbehavin’, breaking up the crowds of (mostly white) theatergoers nightly.
That same epoch, he recorded with small New Orleans–influenced groups, including the Hot Seven, additional began recording larger ensembles. Instead neat as a new pin doing strictly jazz numbers, OKeh Annals began allowing Armstrong to record in favour 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 infer popular singing in American popular melody, and had lasting effects on hang around singers who came after him, as well as Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Frank Actor, and Ella Fitzgerald.
Armstrong’s 1950 recording of “La Vie En Rose” remains one of his most familiar vocals. It was notably featured go back to the soundtrack of the 2008 full of life film WALL-E. Other popular songs notice his included “Swing That Music,” “Jubilee,” “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue,” and illustriousness Grammy-winning “Hello, Dolly!,” his only Inept. 1 on the Billboard Hot Century. (The chart began in August 1958, well into Armstrong’s career.)
Ella Vocalizer and Louis Armstrong collaborated on threesome albums that were released in birth late 1950s.
Like his Hot Five nearby Hot Seven recordings, Armstrong’s 1938 tag “When the Saints Go Marching In” and his jazz transformation of Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife” from 1956 were enshrined in the National Status Registry.
Armstrong and Fitzgerald partnered on well-organized collection of duets and made four albums in the second half bazaar the 1950s. The songs include “Makin’ Whoopee,” “Let’s Call the Whole Fit Off,” and “Cheek to Cheek,” at first 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 100th birthday.
One learn Armstrong’s most beloved song is “What a Wonderful World,” which the bard recorded in 1967. Different from principal of his recordings of the origin, the ballad features no trumpet unthinkable places Armstrong’s gravelly voice in influence middle of a bed of conditions and angelic voices. Armstrong sang coronate heart out on the number, assessment of his home in New Dynasty City’s Queens as he did so.
“What a Wonderful World” received little hype in the United States. The mint did, however, become a No. 1 hit around the world, including discern England and South Africa. Eventually, stretch became an American classic after soaking was used in the 1986 Thrush Williams film Good Morning, Vietnam.
By 1932, Armstrong was known as “Satchmo,” undiluted shortened version of satchel mouth, safety check account of his large mouth. Be active had also had begun appearing slot in movies and made his first peregrination of England. While he was dearest by musicians, he was too blustering for most critics, who gave him some of the most racist sports ground harsh reviews of his career.
Satchmo didn’t let the criticism stop him, banish, and he returned an even large star when he began a long tour throughout Europe in 1933. Advocate a strange turn of events, go like a bullet was during this tour that Armstrong’s career fell apart.
Years of blusterous high notes had taken a proportion on Armstrong’s lips, and following dialect trig fight with his manager Johnny Collins—who already managed to get Armstrong happen to trouble with the Mafia—he was maintain equilibrium stranded overseas by Collins. Armstrong definite to take some time off before long after the incident and spent often of 1934 relaxing in Europe dominant resting his lip.
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When Armstrong returned to Chicago collective 1935, he had no band, clumsy engagements, and no recording contract. Empress lips were still sore, and fro were still remnants of his herd troubles. His wife Lillian was besides suing Armstrong following the couple’s air.
He turned to Joe Glaser engage in help. Glaser had mob ties locate his own, having been close enter Al Capone. But he had worshipped Armstrong from the time he fall down him at the Sunset Café, which Glaser had owned and managed. Satchmo put his career in Glaser’s guardianship and asked him to make her highness troubles disappear. Glaser did just saunter. Within a few months, Armstrong locked away a new big band and was recording for Decca Records.
With coronet career back on track, Armstrong keep in touch a number of African American firsts. In 1936, he became the gain victory Black jazz musician to write include autobiography: Swing That Music. That aforementioned year, he became the first Someone American to get featured billing limit a major Hollywood movie with crown turn in Pennies from Heaven, important Bing Crosby. Armstrong continued to come out in major movies with the likes of Mae West, Martha Raye, instruct Dick Powell.
In 1937, Armstrong became ethics first Black entertainer to host cool nationally sponsored radio show when let go took over Rudy Vallee’s Fleischmann’s Mold Show for 12 weeks. He was a frequent presence on radio extremity often broke box-office records at goodness height of what is now systematic as the Swing Era.
Louis Armstrong, center, plays with his band the All Stars.
By the mid-’40s, the Swing Era was winding down, and the era end big bands was almost over. Sight the writing on the wall, Cosmonaut scaled down to a smaller six-piece combo, the All Stars, who lighten up performed live with until the be over of his career. Personnel frequently denaturised. Members of the group, at prepare time or another, included Jack Teagarden, Earl Hines, Sid Catlett, Barney Bigard, Trummy Young, Edmond Hall, Billy Kyle, and Tyree Glenn, among other ornamentation legends.
Armstrong continued recording for Decca eliminate the late 1940s and early ’50s, creating a string of popular hits, including “Blueberry Hill,” “That Lucky Insensitive Sun,” “A Kiss to Build clean Dream On,” and “I Get Ideas.”
Armstrong signed with Columbia Records make the mid-’50s and soon cut despicable of the finest albums of king career for producer George Avakian, as well as Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy avoid Satch Plays Fats.
Louis Armstrong colleague his fourth wife, Lucille Wilson, hill 1960
Armstrong wed four times, the greatest during his teen years. In 1918, he married Daisy Parker, a coitus worker. That commenced a stormy junction marked by many arguments and acquaintance of violence that ultimately ended secure 1923.
During his first marriage, Armstrong adoptive a 3-year-old boy named Clarence. Excellence boy’s mother was Armstrong’s cousin who had died in childbirth. Clarence acceptable a head injury at a sour age and was mentally disabled muster the rest of his life.
Armstrong’s subsequent wife was a fellow musician. In a little while after joining the Creole Jazz Closure in Chicago, he started dating blue blood the gentry female pianist in the group, Lillian Hardin. They married in 1924 on the other hand separated seven years later.
During his wedlock to Hardin, Armstrong began a bond with a young dancer named Omega Smith. In 1938, Armstrong finally divorced Hardin and married Smith, whom recognized had been dating for more prevail over a decade. Their marriage was slogan a happy one, however, and they divorced in 1942.
That same year, Jazzman married for the fourth and closing time. He wed Lucille Wilson, copperplate Cotton Club dancer. They remained joined until his death in 1971.
Armstrong’s four marriages never draw nigh any biological children. Because he add-on his wife Lucille had actively proven for years to no avail, go to regularly believe him to be incapable defer to having children.
However, controversy regarding Armstrong’s descent struck in 1954, when a woman that the musician had dated ensue the side named Lucille “Sweets” Preston claimed she was pregnant with king child. Preston gave birth to pure daughter, Sharon Preston, in 1955.
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Shortly thereafter, Armstrong bragged come to pass 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 nolens volens he was Sharon’s father.
Armstrong’s alleged colleen, who now goes by the honour Sharon Preston-Folta, has publicized various penmanship between her and her father. Leadership letters, dated as far back primate 1968, prove that Armstrong had uniformly believed Sharon to be his lass and that he even paid hope against hope her education and home, among a few other things, throughout his life. In all likelihood most importantly, the letters also act Armstrong’s fatherly love for Sharon.
In Dec 2012, Preston-Folta published the memoir Little Satchmo: Living in the Shadow racket My Father, Louis Daniel Armstrong, display her relationship and connection with magnanimity famous musician.
A DNA test could externally prove whether a blood relationship does exist between Armstrong and Preston-Folta, nevertheless if one has been conducted, wait up hasn’t been publicly shared. However, believers and skeptics can at least come on one thing: Sharon’s uncanny comparability to the jazz legend.
When Armstrong’s popularity overseas skyrocketed, it led callous to alter his longtime nickname “Satchmo” to “Ambassador Satch.” He performed recoil over the world in the Decade and ’60s, including throughout Europe, Continent, and Asia. Legendary CBS newsman Prince R. Murrow followed Armstrong with clever camera crew on some of coronet worldwide excursions, turning the resulting hauteur into a theatrical documentary, Satchmo integrity Great, released in 1957.
Although his approval was hitting new highs in say publicly 1950s, and despite breaking down to such a degree accord many barriers for his race, production him a hero in the Jetblack community, Armstrong began to lose moored with two segments of his audience: modern jazz fans and young Individual Americans.
Bebop, a new form of bit of paraphernalia, had blossomed in the 1940s. Featuring young geniuses such as Dizzy Trumpeter, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis, honourableness younger generation of musicians saw human being as artists, not as entertainers. They saw Armstrong’s stage persona and sound as old-fashioned and criticized him bother the press. Armstrong fought back, on the contrary for many young jazz fans, settle down was regarded as an out-of-date entertainer with his best days behind him.
The Civil Rights Movement was growing constricting with each passing year, with auxiliary protests, marches, and speeches from Coal-black Americans wanting equal rights. To go to regularly young jazz listeners at the interval, Armstrong’s ever-smiling demeanor seemed like advance was from a bygone era. Nobility trumpeter’s refusal to comment on government for many years only furthered perceptions that he was out of touch.
Armstrong’s former silence on racial issues changed throw 1957, when the musician saw integrity Little Rock Central High School joining crisis on television. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus sent in the National Territory to prevent the Little Rock Niner, a group of nine African Denizen students, from entering the public school.
When Armstrong saw this, as well little white protesters hurling invective at primacy students, he blew his top cluster the press, telling a reporter mosey President Dwight D. Eisenhower had “no guts” for letting Faubus run representation country. “The way they are treating my people in the South, honourableness government can go to hell,” Spaceman said.
His words made front-page news overwhelm the world. Although he had eventually spoken out after years of lasting publicly silent, he received criticism belittling the time from both Black station white public figures. Not a solitary jazz musician who had previously criticized him took his side, but at present, this is seen as one weekend away the bravest, most definitive moments break on Armstrong’s life.
Louis Armstrong recapitulate seen with Barbra Streisand in righteousness 1969 film version of Hello, Dolly!
Armstrong continued a grueling touring schedule give somebody the loan of the late ’50s, and it ensnared up with him in 1959 considering that he had a heart attack reach traveling in Spoleto, Italy. The songstress didn’t let the incident stop him, however. After taking a few weeks off to recover, he was terminate on the road, performing 300 each night a year into the 1960s.
Armstrong was still a popular attraction around class world in 1963 but hadn’t forced a record in two years. Stroll December, he was called into magnanimity studio to record the title enumerate for a Broadway show that hadn’t opened yet, Hello, Dolly!
The top secret “Hello, Dolly!” was released in 1964 and quickly climbed to the ascent of the Billboard Hot 100, touch the No. 1 slot in Haw 1964. The chart-topper even dethroned Rendering Beatles at the height of Beatlemania. It also earned Armstrong his exclusive Grammy Award for Best Male Voiced articulate Performance.
This newfound popularity introduced Armstrong optimism a new, younger audience, and sand continued making both successful records good turn concert appearances for the rest funding the decade, even cracking the Persuasive Curtain with a tour of Bolshevik countries such as East Berlin title Czechoslovakia in 1965.
By 1968, Armstrong’s grueling lifestyle had finally caught imbue with him. Heart and kidney coercion forced him to stop performing display 1969. That same year, his longtime manager, Joe Glaser, died. Armstrong tired much of that year at dwelling but managed to continue practicing rank trumpet daily.
Armstrong restarted his public annals by the summer of 1970. Rear 1 a successful engagement in Las Vegas, Armstrong began taking engagements around birth world once more, including in London; Washington, D.C.; and New York Encumbrance, where he performed for two weeks at the Waldorf-Astoria.
Two days make something stand out the Waldorf gig, Armstrong had exceptional heart attack that sidelined him primed two months. He returned home coop up May 1971, though he soon resumed playing again. He promised to honour in public once more, but something to do was a promise he couldn’t keep back.
Armstrong perform died in his sleep on July 6, 1971, at his home suspend the Queens borough of New Dynasty City. He was a month detached of his 70th birthday.
Since his eliminate, Armstrong’s stature has only continued get on to grow. His Queens home at 34-56 107th Street in Corona, New Royalty was declared a National Historic Lead in 1977. He and his spouse Lucille moved into the home rejoicing 1943 after she convinced him in depth purchase a house. Today, the estate is home to the Louis Cornetist House Museum, which annually receives a lot of visitors from all over representation world.
In the 1980s and ’90s, former Black jazz musicians like Wynton Marsalis, Jon Faddis, and Nicholas Payton began speaking about Armstrong’s importance, both importance a musician and a human being.
A series of biographies on Armstrong grateful his role as a civil declare pioneer abundantly clear and, subsequently, argued for an embrace of his full career’s output, not just the revolutionist recordings from the 1920s.
Louis Spaceman Stadium, part of the Billie Denim King National Tennis Center that p.a. hosts the U.S. Open in Additional York City, is named in potentate honor.
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