Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Robert G. O’Meally, preface to The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), xi. 2. “[T]he problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903, in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 100. 3. See Alfred Appel Jr., Jazz Modernism from Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce (New York: Knopf, 2002), 206. 4. Louis Armstrong: Good Evening Ev’rybody, dir. Sidney J. Stiber, prod. George Wein and Greg Lewerke (Ambassador, 2009); Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 6. 5. Masters of American Music: Satchmo, dir. Gary Giddins and Kendrick Simmons (Sony, 1989); Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns, dir. Ken Burns (PBS Home Video, 2001). For a recording of “Portrait of Louis Armstrong,” see Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Portraits by Ellington (Sony/Columbia, 1992). 6. Lester Bowie in Giddins and Simmons, Masters of American Music: Satchmo. 7. Armstrong’s in›uence on American jazz singing is explored in Leslie Gourse, Louis’ Children: American Jazz Singers (1984; updated ed., New York: Cooper Square, 2001). 8. See Billie Holiday with William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956), 16. 9. The Edsel Show Starring Bing Crosby, with Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, and Louis Armstrong (Quantum Leap, 2005); Bing Crosby qtd. in Ken Murray, “Louis, Bix Had Most In›uence on Der Bingle,” Down Beat, July 14, 1950. Reverend Satchelmouth was one of Armstrong’s comedic stage roles and nicknames. 10. Louis Armstrong, Swing That Music (New York: Longmans, 1936; New York: Da Capo, 1993); Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (New York: Prentice Hall, 1954; New York: Da Capo, 1986). 11. Qtd. in Joshua Berrett, Louis Armstrong and Paul Whiteman: Two Kings of Jazz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 21. 273 12. Researcher Tad Jones located Armstrong’s birth date in a baptismal registry in the 1980s. See Gary Giddins, Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong, 1988 (New York: Da Capo, 2001), 21–25; Ralph Blumenthal, “Digging for Satchmo’s Roots in the City That Spawned Him,” New York Times, Aug. 15, 2000. 13. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 238. 14. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952 (New York: Random House, 1982), 7. 15. Albert Murray, “The Function of the Heroic Image,” 1985, in O’Meally, Jazz Cadence of American Culture, 575. Ronald Radano deconstructs this argument in “Myth Today: The Color of Ken Burns Jazz,” Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir 3.3 (2001): 43–54. 16. The phrases “modern-day Sambo” and “black genius” are Radano’s (“Myth Today,” 45). 17. Ken Burns, introduction to Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward, Jazz: A History of America’s Music (New York: Knopf, 2000), x. 18. Dan Morgenstern, review of Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life, by Laurence Bergreen, 1997, in Dan Morgenstern, Living with Jazz: A Reader, ed. Sheldon Meyer (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 89. 19. Thomas Brothers suggests that “Nenest” probably refers to Ernest “Ninesse ” Trepagnier. See Thomas Brothers, ed., Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words: Selected Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 43. 20. Michael Cogswell, Louis Armstrong: The Offstage Story of Satchmo (Portland: Collectors, 2003), 39. The Louis Armstrong House Museum, whose catalog can be searched at www.louisarmstronghouse.org, holds a number of these letters; others are held at the William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University and the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. 21. Kaiser Marshall, “When Armstrong Came to Town,” in Selections from the Gutter: Jazz Portraits from “The Jazz Record,” ed. Art Hodes and Chadwick Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 85; Teddy Wilson qtd. in Terry Teachout, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (Boston: Houghton Mif›in, 2009), 192. 22. Louis Armstrong to Joe Glaser, Aug. 2, 1955, in Brothers, In His Own Words, 158–63; “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, La., the Year of 1907,” Mar. 31, 1969–70, in ibid., 5–36. 23. The letter is reprinted in Hugues Panassié, Louis Armstrong (1969; New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 19. An earlier article attributed to Armstrong ran in the Aug. 1932 issue of the British magazine Rhythm (“Greetings to Britain!”). It contains very few of his stylistic idiosyncrasies and is most likely based only very loosely on an original letter. An excerpt...