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chapter 1 “I have always been a great observer” New Orleans Musicking Reviewing Louis Armstrong’s second autobiography, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, the music historian Henry Kmen wrote in 1955: “Unfortunately , the earliest jazz musicians were not given to keeping written records, and their music was not, nor could it be, formally composed on paper.” For Kmen, Satchmo disappoints those interested in the “obscure period” of prerecorded jazz because “Louis has written little that is not already known about the origins of the music” and because “there is little [. . .] here that is concerned with jazz itself.” Armstrong’s depiction of the musical culture of his youth, Kmen concludes, is merely a “group of vignettes ” and a “kind of montage of the life surrounding a poor Negro family in New Orleans during the ‹rst two decades of the twentieth century.”1 In fact, Armstrong’s autobiographical narratives accomplish much more than Kmen realized. They document the personal and cultural signi‹cance of New Orleans music making, question the very notion of “jazz itself,” and intervene repeatedly in the discursive construction of the “jazz tradition.”2 This is why these narratives should not be reduced to mere historical source texts about the past, but can be more fruitfully read as performative engagements that continue to participate actively in shaping our efforts to understand the musical and cultural history of New Orleans jazz. And indeed, Armstrong was very much aware of the discursive power wielded by music journalists and historians and sought to accommodate their interests in addition to furthering his own. As early as 1941, he wrote to Leonard Feather, “I ‘Dug’d that write up in the Down Beat about the Trumpet players and thought it was pretty nice,” and on one of his late tape recordings, he reads from a letter to his biographer Max Jones, stating that he “shall try to answer all of your questions.”3 Taking a more disgruntled stance, Armstrong once told Richard Meryman that jazz histo30 riography basically amounted to the production of popular myths. Here, he sought to reestablish his authority as a jazz autobiographer in the 1960s: “What they say about the old days is corny. They form their own opinions, they got so many words for things and make everything soooo big—and it turns out a—what you call it—a ‹ctitious story.”4 Such disavowal of jazz criticism is a dominant topos among jazz musicians. George “Pops” Foster, for instance, announces that his autobiography “is gonna straighten a lot of things out,” while Sidney Bechet asserts: “You know there’s people, they got the wrong idea of Jazz. [. . .] And the real story I’ve got to tell, it’s right there.” Danny Barker is even more confrontational: “Many books came on the scene together with many falsehoods, lies and cooked-up stories. I read much of this crap and then I was told that I should write some truth, and explanations of many jazz subjects that were not clearly explained.”5 These statements suggest an understanding of jazz autobiography “as a reaction against previous writing on jazz,” as a chance to offer alternate takes on the musicians’ personal histories and the history of their music.6 While “[j]azz critics may think of what they are doing as an exercise in formal analysis,” as John Gennari observes, “musicians read jazz criticism as a ‹rst draft of their history,” seeking to revise, correct, or build on previous representations of their lives and music.7 Armstrong’s memories of New Orleans music are therefore triply coded: they aim to set the record straight by relating his version of past events, they afford him prominence as a cultural icon whose life story resonates with American myths of race and black music, and they deliver the raw material for others to present his life story to the public. If jazz autobiographers intervene in the shifting discourses of jazz, offer alternate takes on jazz history, and revise drafts written by others, the question is how they realize these objectives. As participant observers whose understanding of the past is necessarily shaped by the pitfalls of memory as well as by complex personal signi‹cances and strategic concerns, they nevertheless speak with special authority as cultural insiders and musical creators. This authority rests on speci‹c linguistic and narratological means, which is why this chapter sets out to conduct a series of literary close readings of Armstrong ’s autobiographical recollections. The goal is to reconstruct...

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