Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Tom Tom, and we're going to swing one of the good old good ones for you. Beautiful number. I cover the waterfront. I cover the waterfront.
I like it. Look out, I said. Look out there.
One, two. New Orleans, Louisiana could have been a parasite among cities. All it's ever really done is take America's goods as they come down the Mississippi and exchange them for produce arriving by sea. But New Orleanians decided early on that the people involved in this exchange were going to be given a good time. The wine was imported, but the women and song were local, and in the no doubt deplorable combination of the two, New Orleans discovered its raffish genius for enjoyment, which sooner or later was bound to find its complete human embodiment.
And at the turn of the Mrs. Armstrong called her son Louis. That's how he pronounced it, though the habit never really caught on with the rest of us. He was born, he said, on the 4th of July 1900, and since there's no...
evidence to the contrary it's rather unsporting to say that he wasn't they bulldozed his birthplace away long ago but before the concrete came it was called jane alley probably an energy-saving corruption of james alley louis had a ramshackle home life he hardly ever saw his father and his mother may anne for all her dignity in the family photograph may well have been forced into prostitution in the black section of the red light district known to history as storyville New Orleans has never been proud of the district. In mid-1984, the single plaque that commemorates the place could be seen reposing among some builder's rubble in the middle of the double carriageway that is Basin Street. The old Basin Street featured a row of opulent bordellos.
where the piano professors played, with sometimes a cornet or clarinet to carry the tune. But the real musical reputations were made in more public places, street parades, dances and picnics. The cornets were the natural leaders. Only a cornetist had the chance to be called the king. The first holder of the title was Buddy Bolden, or King Bolden as he came to be called.
He never recorded and information about him is pretty scarce. But the house he occupied at the height of his powers is still perfectly well preserved. This is it, 2309 First Street. Rather more well to do than the Armstrong abode. Buddy Bolden was carried away to the state mental hospital in 1907, so young Louis scarcely had the chance to hear him.
In any case, he was more interested for the time being in singing, with an itinerant quartet of kids who rendered the sentimental favourites of the day. Our theme song was, My Brazilian Beauty Down on the Amazon Captain with the nickels and quarters in there. Go down and just come in and stir a bill, you know. Yeah, most.
Yeah, yeah. Gamblers and everything. Roaming the streets, Louis was now getting beyond the control of his mother and grandmother. And one New Year's Eve around 1912, he saved them the trouble by firing off a borrowed pistol and getting arrested. He was sent for correction to the local waif's home, sternly run by Mr. Joseph Jones.
And it was in the Jones home that Louis finally joined a band. He made rapid progress, as any boy would who knows that he's had his life's work thrust into his hands. The teenage Louis was now strong enough to take a job delivering coal, often to the prostitution cubicles or cribs of Storyville. Well, quite naturally, they're standing there with nothing on but a shimmy, we'd call them teddies at the time, you know.
So they have to be a little boy and put some coal on the grate, you know. Quite nice and rustic. Well, dear, I'd quicker did see me than slap me down.
Yeah, I used to know that. But I used to hear all that good music, too. Louis'musical hero was the latest cornet king of New Orleans, Joe Oliver. There may have been no more than 15 years between their ages, but since one party was looking for a father and the other for a son, that's how the relationship worked. Louis never ceased to give thanks for Oliver's tutelage.
He used to tell me all the time, play more lead on. I was just like a clarion. Like the guys running down the hall nowadays, the bopping and things.
I was doing all that. Fast fingers and everything. So he used to tell me, play some lead on that horn, boy. In 1918, Joe Oliver went north.
to find fame in Chicago. His pupil began to travel too. Louis had landed a job playing on the Mississippi Riverboats of the Streckfus line, which in those days would travel to Davenport, Iowa, and even beyond, trips that could last for weeks at a time.
Every night, the steam calliope announced announced a stop, and in the vast and elegantly curved ballroom, the band would play for dances. The band leader was Fate Marable, but the man who taught Louis most was a multi-instrumentalist called David Jones. David Jones was a phenomenal musician. He played the reeds, he played trumpet, but his instrument really was the mellophone and the French horn. His harmony, I dig him like...
Now I can appreciate what he was doing. I didn't know what he was doing then. He was running all kinds of, you know, all kinds of strange changes and everything. And that had, I think he had had some help to Louis because Louis was a great guy. Louis could see from David Jones what could be done with that horn.
Because nobody had taken the livers and variated on a horn other than the clarinet players. But here was David Jones doing these things on a mellophone. At home in New Orleans, Louis now has a new horn.
had a wife a turbulent prostitute called daisy parker who seems to have spent most of this brief relationship throwing things at louis but in 1922 he was saved further bruises by a telegram from his mentor as it went on and king olive got set in chicago at the lincoln gardens he sent for me to play second trumpet and that was my man anyway i just can't wait i can't imagine you playing something to anybody oh it's great just to sit behind listen what he played. He used to figure out the duets and things while the band was romping, and the dicks and all them boys, Louis Furnickle, Paul Whiteman, and all them guys used to come sit down and watch how we did it, you know, but they never could figure out. I was so instilled in Joe there, you know. I loved him so much that whatever he played, I would for the second time. When Little Louie joined Papa Joe in Chicago, King Oliver probably wasn't fully aware that he had imported.
into his band the one man capable of taking his title away but for the moment the king was still the dominant figure king olive was more of a punch man than louis louis was a little smoother than king oliver but king oliver was uh was i say a more exciting person because of his style his punch the way he played his trumpet you know but together they were just Unbelievable. Oliver's Creole jazz band were all New Orleans men, apart from the piano player, Lil Hardin, a college-educated lady from Memphis, Tennessee. Lil, she was an excellent musician.
And she was a disciplinarian also. She was... She taught Louis a whole lot in regards to reading, music, and so forth. ...for banned. And even when the rest of the personnel left Oliver, Louie and Lil, who were now a married couple, remained, much to the disgust of the ambitious Lil.
I told him, I said, now, I don't want to be married to a second trumpet player. He says, well, what are you talking about? I said, well, I don't want to be married to second Trevor.
I want you to play first. He said, well, I can't play first. Joe's playing first.
I said, well, that's why you got to quit. He said, I can't quit, Mr. Joe. Mr. Joe sent for me, and I can't quit him.
I said, well, it's Mr. Joe or me. When Lil's campaign succeeded in detaching Armstrong from Oliver, Louis was left with no obvious musical home in Chicago. But a New York band leader, Fletcher Henderson, remembered the young man from an earlier trip to New Orleans and took him on.
In less than a year, Louis was able to make his first appearance on the show. year Louie's hot solos changed the Henderson band from a jerky novelty sort of outfit to a worthy prototype for the swing band era. But all in all it was a job that brought Henderson and his men more advancement than Louie.
Soon he was back in Chicago in his wife's band, not a comfortable position for a husband to occupy in the 1920s. It was very bad because they started kidding him about me being leader of the band. Look out there your wife will fire you and the other Musicians called him Hen-Pet, and they called him Henny for sure. Henny, Henny!
And it made Louie angry and it embarrassed him, and he became so hard to get along with at home and on the bandstand. I would get ready to start the band off, and he'd have all the musicians on one side telling him a damn joke. And I got after him about it, and he said, Well, if you don't like it, fire me! When the arrangement came to an end, Louie shared himself out among other employers, playing floor shows and theatres and musical interludes at picture houses. like the Vendome, where he was featured with Erskine Tate's band.
Whenever he missed a show, it was hard on deputies like Doc Cheatham, who had to play Armstrong's showpiece, Poor Little Rich Girl. He had a big band. He went, And then I stood up, the spotlight, right on me.
The house was like this. And you could hear the people scream when I stood up. They screamed through the top of their voice. Whistling and screaming.
couldn't hear the band anything for the speech and then it just went right down to where you could hear a piano fall while I was playing. That hurt me more than anything in my life. I have never got over that.
Because they knew that that wasn't living. Armstrong's... The first Hot Five with Lil on piano existed only in the recording studio, but the records were enough to revolutionize musicians'thinking in Chicago and beyond.
I got the Hebrews, I got the Jeeves, talking about them. Then Pony Chop Suey. The old care people recorded, released the record on the lower about every six weeks. And everybody waited for the records. Because each one of his records was a lesson in something new, things to come.
A high C in those days was, we called that a high note. He played maybe 50, 30 or 50 high notes, high Cs on this one tune they would play. And the next day, everybody in the street was talking about it.
Everybody in the street. The old... that at sunset to hear Louis do it. He didn't do it again. I guess he could have, but he didn't.
Louis was now changing to trumpet because it looked more showy. From time to time, he would try a new model or a new mouthpiece, and all the trumpeters would change along with him. A fellow named Rudy Muck, who was making a mouthpiece, very cushioned rim, with the edge is like a razor, the edge that grips the lip.
That enabled you to place it at the same place all the time. all the time, because it would cut, it would make a groove in there, and every time you put the mouthpiece up there, that thing would fit right in there. That's what bothered him.
That was the beginning of his lip trouble. One way of resting his lip was to sing, which Louis did a great deal on his Hot Five records. But it proved impossible to state on the label whether he was tenor, baritone, or bass. Louis broke all this business down, so that's where the song stylist came in.
People began to buy records because they like a certain personality. You could have a grass-bred whiskey voice or a high soprano voice or a monkey shine voice or anything. People like you, they bought your records.
Louis Armstrong is responsible for that. He's the first person to scat sing on a record in Heba Jeebus. I've got the Heba, the Heba Jeebus, scoop, scop, scoop, bop, doop, bop, doop, scoop, scop. Never heard nothing like that scat singing he taught.
He introduced that. Keep her feet on it all deep, down deep 50 seconds to come on down To that day, they called the heebie-jeebies there Sweet mama, papa got to do the heebie-jeebies there More refined electrical recording processes arrived just in time to catch Armstrong's second Hot Five, featuring on piano Earl Hines, the only available instrumentalist whose sense of time was equal to Armstrong's. They recorded one amazing duet together, a King Oliver tune called Musically, Armstrong was living in the future.
Domestically, when he was at home, he was living in the past. The breakup of his marriage to Lil had already been accurately predicted in 1927 on the records they'd made together. You may have somebody else, I'll agree, but baby you lost a gold mine when you lost me.
Now when your hair drags the ground and... Stop flying around, then I'll come back to you, baby. Yes, dearie. Papa, then he'll bow his face and come back to you.
But it wasn't only from Lil that Louis was gradually parting. He was also ceasing to be merely a jazz instrumentalist. and joining the mainstream of show business.
In 1929, he left Chicago and journeyed by car to New York with Carol Dickerson's band. And while playing club dates with them, he doubled with another band in the Broadway review, Hot Chocolates. The numbers that he recorded show him using a simpler, broader, more declamatory style, as though he were deliberately trying not to baffle his audience.
You see, Leung changed a lot. He slowed down a lot. His technique...
unique. I think that's with the times. Because you know he was playing like Chop Sir and all those things. But I think he slowed down to play more beautiful and beautify his solos.
That's natural. That's just progress. There was no future for the Carol Dickerson band, which broke up in New York when Louie abandoned it. It wasn't his fault. His fate was in the hands of agents who had no time to be considerate.
This was 1929. There were gangsters to be appeased, and they weren't kidding. And I know one instance where, in a loop in Chicago, there was a fight for a singer, a singer's contract. And this man was warned not to sing at the opposite supper club.
And he sang against their orders and things like that. And they actually paralyzed him so that he couldn't sing anymore for anybody else at all. Which was an extreme case, but it actually happened.
When they told you not to do anything, that's what they meant. Absolutely. Several syndicates of mobsters already felt they had first call on Armstrong's services.
He began to dodge from city to city, seldom making an unforced... move. In 1930 he escaped to California taking a job at the Cotton Club in Culver City.
Armstrong's current manager was a plump, rowdy, hard-drinking individual called Johnny Collins. With his hats and cigars, Pop Collins looked the part, but he was really no better at placating gangsters than anyone else. Eventually, there was no place left to escape to within the United States. Quite suddenly, Louis Armstrong was billed to appear in London.
The first difference England made to his life was that it took away his old nickname, Satchel Mouth, and substituted a music hall minstrel abbreviation, which Louis found oddly appealing. When we land at Plymouth. And Percy Brook come up, he shook my hand and said, Hello, Sashmo!
Yeah. See that there? So I asked the trumpet player, Charlie, who played the trumpet for me from Paris, and the band, who were going to join us.
Yeah. I say, uh, this cat called me Satchmo, and my name is Satchmo Mouth. He say, the man think you have more mouth. That's the way it is.
So Satchmo, a name more useful to showbiz, than to Louis'close friends, went on at the Palladium, facing an audience composed half of people who had no idea what he was doing and half of Hot Five record fanatics longing for the Armstrong of 1928. Now, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to take a little trip through the jungle this time and we want you all to travel with us. That tiger's running so fast. It's going to take a few quarters to the kitchen. So I want you all to come with me.
Yes, sir. Me and this little son of a trumpet is going to get away for you this time. Let's go. I'm ready!
To see this character, it was manifestly high on something more than a dress. or to my mind out of his senses so that I was an uneasy audience I mean I felt uneasy about somebody who I thought of as great his trumpet playing was on the scusi but he was, his famous record that came out, Memories of You, I think it's called. He finished on a top F.
I think it was the first recorded event of that note. for a trumpet player and of course came to England and people came to hear this trumpet player so he wanted to show them that he was really a trumpet player in spite of that working conditions were a lot smoother for Louis in Europe than at home after a few unsettled months back in the States he returned to London always in the company of his steady girlfriend alpha Smith he made continental tours to Scandinavia and later to Western Europe where the Jamaican born trumpeter Leslie Thompson was in the band we used to play the introductions which was always um a sleepy time down south and the curtain would gradually open the band playing and then big claps next minute louis would appear a rush under the stage right in the center. Bowels and head like that. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Diner? Diner. Look out, they're gone.
Are you ready? Look out. One, two, three.
Yeah. Dino, is anyone final in the state of Carolina? If there is, then you know, show to me. Dino, the dick's not pleasant.
Love is in occasion to the eyes of Dino me. Baby, every man wants... It's an extraordinary stage demeanor built on a kind of aggressive shyness. It's full of signs of what from anyone else would look like embarrassment.
He gradually toned down this effect, but not till the end of his life did he really lose it. When he went back to America, he never felt the same again as when he left America in July 1932 to come over to England. He had a new sense of his own importance as an artist.
He also had a new sense of freedom, since the manager Pop Collins had successfully been ditched, and a certain amount of rest had been arranged for Armstrong's battered lip. Back in America, he put his affairs in the hands of a new manager, Joe Glazer. The band Glazer...
sent Louie into battle with was one of the better ones, an expanded version of the Louie Russell band whom he'd partnered before. Greeley Walton was on tenor sax. The band would still have to do their part when he would go and rest.
So we still kept our same beat and personality. The guys could play very well. Red Allen was a beautiful trumpet player.
He used to play his things when Louie would go and rest. And the band went on. and just the same, and of course they had Higdon by them there, and they had Albert Nicholas, and those guys could play, so, and Charlie Holmes, so it went right on.
The rhythm was Paul Barbarin, Pop Foster, and it was Bill Johnson on the guitar, and Russell on piano, of course. On the band's tours, Savannah, Georgia was a frequent stopping place, and it was there in August 1937 that Armstrong ran into King Oliver again. The king was down and out, selling vegetables in the street.
And Louis, according to a local newspaper report of their meeting, gave him a hundred dollar bill. Good publicity, but... Too late for Oliver, who died in Savannah the following August, and was buried in the Bronx.
He wound up a very pathetic man there. First place was too far away from home, you know? If I'd get in a shape like that, I'd go back to New Orleans. But he got stranded in Savannah and that's where he stayed.
The ones that enjoyed his days and did the best they could, but generations, you gotta watch them generations, they grew up so fast. That's why an old-timer told me all wasted... for the public. Well, I've been around for years and years for a joke's sake, I couldn't realize I could play with white boys. But I know.
And playing for white people. Yeah. And you've always had-And I've always sided with him, he didn't just book me. colored dancers yeah and they'd have more white people and he'd call it me yeah so i mean and it still goes like that all through the sound with a new big band under the musical direction of joe garland louis life was ruled by joe's he took to the road again and so on it went into the war years the only real interruptions coming in louis private life in 1938 he'd made the mistake of marrying alpha smith after which the end wasn't long in coming she was a very barrel house joyous game and they were great fun together they were a very very devoted couple but she finally broke his heart she ran off with a white drummer and Louis was terribly upset about it but he said He's a good drummer.
A dancer called Lucille Wilson became wife number four in 1942. Louis'other marriage to the big band was in a bit of a rut. Jazz was in a phase of looking back to its small group origins, but Louis had only been... marginally involved in this, until 1947, when the promoter Ernie Anderson went looking for Joe Glazer with a thousand dollar check in his hand. When we got in his office, I said, you are selling Louis Armstrong for $650 a night with a 16-piece band.
Oh, he said, that's nonsense. Well, of course, I knew it was true, and he did too. I said, that thousand dollars is for Louis Armstrong for one night without the band. It was a terrible strain, but he couldn't give the check up. And he knew it must be all right with Louie because he knew I was a friend of Louie's.
So we finally, very reluctantly, agreed. Then I went out and got Jack Teagarden for $75. I got Sidney Catlett and Peanuts Huckle and Bob Haggart. George Wettling.
I gave everybody $50. Scale was $18. And I handed Louis this list we had made up of the numbers. He said, that's a great list.
And that list is exactly what was played, starting with Cornette Chop Suey, which he hadn't played in maybe 25 years. Louis Armstrong. The Town Hall concert not only provided a magnificent set of recordings from a fully recharged Armstrong, it also forced a change of style. When I got the call, then I knew that that was the end of the big band. They said, well, Louis wants you to join him.
We want to have a small band. we're going to see if it works while Louis is doing the picture. So opening night, it was a sensation. It was just a sensation.
Because that's what people had been waiting for, the Armstrong to get back to his roots. The Armstrong All-Stars had Teagarden on trombone, Barney Begard from New Orleans on clarinet, Earl Hines resurfacing on piano, so there was plenty of solo talent. But small group work is hard work, and Louis, by any calculation, was nearly 50. He had to take care of himself. He had a ritual, he had a little case full of vitamin pills, you know, he had in the little vials, he had red ones, green ones, blue ones, purple ones, you know.
And so one was for eating with your salad, one was for meat, one was for vegetables, one was for dessert. There was a new generation of musicians. generation of black Americans coming up who were less than pleased by Armstrong's willingness to resemble an old-time minstrel. But Louis in that sense was not a modern thinker, nor did he have much time for the bebop music that was the modernists rallying point.
All the riffs these cats are playing are crazy, cool and gone. Like this. Oh, scooby-coo, ooby-dooby-dooby, who bought me to happen like that? One of the personal highlights of Armstrong's now perpetual tour of duty was the All-Stars trip to Nkrumah's Ghana in 1956. Among the vast crowds of welcome, he saw a woman who so closely resembled his mother that he became convinced that his family roots were here in what used to be the Gold Coast.
In Accra, he played for 100,000 people, whom the police had to keep back by flicking at them with the soft leather loops on their truncheons. It was Louis who got hold of the wrong end of the stick. He said he'd seen audiences being truncheoned in the Deep South, and he never expected to see this to his audience in Africa. And he stopped playing, and he came and appealed to me with tears in his eyes.
He said, for goodness sake, stop them. Stop them truncheoning my audience. Well, the police had to come and explain that they were either going to crush themselves to death or be urged back.
So he started to play again, but then ultimately he had to give up. He couldn't play under those conditions. He played for about an hour by that time.
But I've never seen a man so upset he couldn't speak for an hour after that. He was a very emotional man when it came to that sort of thing. I think that he was comfortable in a lot of ways with his blackness.
He was a success. And he could afford to be just the way he wanted to be. afford to be uncle tommy's a lot of people consider he can afford to make the you know the the black jokes you know sort of tommy's jokes and i've talked to a lot of the older guys that knew him way back when so he was just always that way and yeah he was sort of a tom but lovable and honest.
And he didn't have to kid around. He could make, you know, his handkerchief head jokes or whatever, and he was comfy with that. The tours resumed, some of them sponsored now by the State Department, which gave Louis the honorary title of Ambassador Satch.
In 1959, the traveling embassy got as far as Spoleto in Italy, and there it very nearly stopped. Louis had a heart attack, one of the best camouflaged heart attacks in show business history. All the time. I said that Louis did not have a heart attack.
Louis had a respiratory condition, pneumonia. I brought this man up from Rome to agree with my diagnosis. so that Louis'career would not be ended. In what friends regarded as a suicidally short time, Armstrong was back at work.
The call of his art was too strong, you might say, though Louis didn't quite take that view of it. The only time I ever heard him refer to his music and his art, which is great in my estimation, and we're still talking about him years after he died, books, records, all his records were in print. And one of the guys in the band got drunk or something, screwed up. And he looks at the guy and he says, don't with my hustle.
He refers to it as, whole thing is my hustle. Like a street gambler or something. Which I thought was kind of nice.
Joe Marini joined the All-Stars in the mid- 60s. While I was on the road with him through the years, he every once in a while would send me a letter. I would get a letter at home and there's one which just made me cry, you know.
He told me, you know, how much he dug me as a clarinet player and as a man and stuff and it was... like a testimonial. I only show it to my children. It's kind of an odd little document. But he was encouraging, yes.
Commercially, the 60s were a high point for Louie and a time of deep satisfaction for Joe Glazer. We were in the same building, 445 Park Avenue, and I would say, Joe, Louie's making a lot of junk. Why don't you bring them back? He says, find a hit song, and you can have them back again.
When the hit that Glazer had been hunting arrived, nobody in the All-Stars noticed at first, least of all the leader. We flew into New York, you know, and they gave Louie the music, and Billy Cowell ran it down on the piano, so Louie got kind of irritated. He said, you mean you called me on my only day off to record this? This is terrible, you know.
So we recorded it, you know, and went back to that job. And about three months, three or four months later, we were out in the Midwest or our way of Nebraska doing one-nighters, you know. So we kept hearing the audience holler, hello, Dolly, hello, Dolly. So the first couple nights, Louie just, he didn't pay it into mind. So then it kept getting loud, hello, Dolly.
So Louie turned to Bill and said, what is that hello, Dolly? What are they talking about? Bill said, you remember that record date we did about four months ago?
That was one of the tunes that we recorded. It's from a Broadway show that just opened, you know. So then we had to call New York to get the music and then we had to learn it. And when we learned it the first time we put it on in the concert, pandemonium.
Because people waiting for it. And that was his biggest commercial hit of his life. Commercial-wise.
Made millions. Millions. A worldwide hit made Louis Armstrong yet more saleable and tourable. It was the last time we in Britain saw him at something like full power. He now returned to the quiet road in un-luxurious Corona, New York, where he and Lucille had settled.
He built himself a nice home in Corona, or rebuilt a house, fixed up the grounds, probably brought extra property. He lived well. He lived the way he wanted to live. He had his limo and chauffeur, and he had a lovely wife, and a lot of friends. If their windows were open and he was practicing, you could hear it and you would, it caused people to stop because they realized that this was Louis Armstrong.
home and then they were thrilled to think that maybe they were hearing him. When they first came we had quite a few children and he associated himself very well with the children. He was never too busy and he took them on trips. He was with them.
He had parties for them when he was home and when he was available and Mrs. Armstrong the same way. It's our recording of Kiss the Village. Nobody wanted to admit it, but the trumpet playing was now very sparse. Louis had been blowing for 55 years, and at last the bodily power was ebbing away. I haven't...
I haven't... To be with him in a big benefit out in Long Island just before he was hospitalized, and he couldn't play his trumpet, he sang, see? And I know he was doing a piece, I think it was in the 90s, doing back the knife and he he started singing and he started the pivoting on one note you know catching his breath and just the idea of him catching his breath he was swinging joe morania recorded one of these very last performances. He plays Indiana and he's got no chops at all.
He's in physically in terrible shape. And the old man, I cried when I heard it. A couple of times and I couldn't play it anymore. He plays Indiana with all the mistakes and he tries to make something happen with the mistakes.
And it's, you know, he wouldn't give up. Louis made it home again to celebrate what by common consent was his 71st birthday on the 4th of July, 1971. On the morning of the 6th, Doc Schiff received his last call. And when we got there, there was Louis in bed with a smile on his face. And naturally I...
I examined him. I had no heartbeat, no blood pressure, no nothing. Dr. Zucker examined him and confirmed the findings. So we just took and covered his face.
With his blanket, it took an awful lot out of me because he was like a brother. He wouldn't go anywhere without me. He wouldn't do anything without me.
We were so close that people couldn't realize why I stayed with him. It wasn't the money. It was the love for the man, his kindness, his goodness, his chattableness, and of course, his artistry. It was really something to have known him. Louis Armstrong was buried in the Flushing Cemetery, Brooklyn.
The trumpet attached to the top of his gravestone was stolen. Fortunately, you can't steal genius. You can only try to describe it. I'll tell you something Louis could do that I never saw another trumpet player do. Louis could play with dancers and people right out in front of him, and they would never put their hands...
up and hide up to the ears and close the ears or make any grimacing and any faces or anything, you know, to hide from his playing. Because it was so pleasing and his tone was so... so nice. It didn't, wasn't harsh at all. You didn't have to worry about him making a fumble over, missing the note, nothing like that, you know.
He get up there to reach something, you know, that was it. He hit it. I've seen people give me a Mickey Mouse smile, a lucky three cents smile, a quarter smile. Give me a, what, a shilling smile. What's that got a big denomination on it?
A pound? Yeah. Louis Armstrong, I'll give you a ten pound smile.
Ah! So in a way you keep Louis always with you. Always with me all the time, because whenever I play a solo, this seems to say something to me all the time.
All of my work. In 1994, nearly a quarter of a century after his death, Louis did it again. A boxed set of his early recordings from the 20s and 30s made it to the top of every jazz critic's list of the best albums of the year.
It was even nominated for a Grammy. As the song says, Louie, it's so nice to have you back where you belong. And now, let's do it.
With my evangelist. How do evangelists sway so many people with their words? Bill Curtis. Curtis explores the Jim and Tammy Faye Baker case. Tomorrow on American Justice.
Now, Cracker helps jog the memory of a suspect with amnesia. Robbie Coltrane stars in the 80 mystery movie. Next on A&E. It's time well spent.
Let me hold chaps for just a moment. And my imagination will make that moment live. Yeah.
Give me what you alone can give I can't stop in that dream I