Louis Armstrong: humility and hard work

A couple of excerpts from a compelling portrait of Louie Armstrong from Terry Teachout:

Satchmo and the Jews

Today Armstrong’s views on individual responsibility are the source of considerable disquiet among his admirers, many of whom prefer to ignore them altogether. Contrary to his desire that it be published, “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish People” was buried among his personal papers after his death and was not published in its original form until 1999. To this day, most scholars cite it cautiously, if at all. [. . .]

On occasion Armstrong has been compared to Booker T. Washington, whose long-unfashionable vision of racial redemption through self-improvement had a powerful influence on the turn-of-the-century blacks who heeded his call to “cast down your bucket where you are.” Louis Armstrong was one of them, as can be seen by visiting his New York home, an elaborately decorated three--story brick-covered frame house located seven blocks from Citi Field in a rundown but respectable working-class neighborhood. The house, which Armstrong bought in 1943, looks like what it is: the residence of a poor boy who cast down his bucket and pulled it up overflowing. Yet it says as much about him that even after he became wealthy enough to live in a tonier neighborhood, he preferred to stay in Queens. “My home . . . is good, but you don’t see me in no big estates and yachts, that ain’t gonna play your horn for you,” he wrote in his old age.

To visit the Armstrong house, which is now a museum, is to see how its proud owner achieved “everything he has struggled for in life.” It was the outward symbol of the lessons in life that he learned from Mayann, his devoted mother—and from the Jews of New Orleans, who helped teach him to return love for hatred and seek salvation in work.

Please read the whole thing. Musical accompaniment:







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