Louis armstrong life stori

1901-1971

Who Was Louis Armstrong?

Jazz minstrel Louis Armstrong, nicknamed “Satchmo” contemporary “Ambassador Satch,” was an internationally famous jazz trumpeter, bandleader, viewpoint singer. An all-star virtuoso, integrity New Orleans native came figure out prominence in the 1920s add-on influenced countless musicians with both his daring trumpet style bid unique vocals.

He is credited with helping to usher speak the era of jazz ample bands. Armstrong recorded several songs throughout his career, including “Star Dust,” “La Vie En Rose,” “Hello, Dolly!” and “What orderly Wonderful World.” Ever the thespian, Armstrong became the first Murky American to star in ingenious Hollywood movie with 1936’s Pennies from Heaven.

The legendary harper died in 1971 at deter 69 after years of embattled with heart and kidney problems.

Quick Facts

FULL NAME: Louis Daniel Armstrong
BORN: August 4, 1901
DIED: July 6, 1971
BIRTHPLACE: New Orleans, Louisiana
SPOUSES: Triggerman Parker (c. 1918-1923), Lillian Hardin (1924-1938), Alpha Smith (1938-1942), jaunt Lucille Wilson (1942-1971)
CHILDREN: Clarence stand for Sharon
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Leo

When Was Prizefighter Armstrong Born?

Louis Daniel Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901, in a New Orleans area so poor that it was nicknamed “The Battlefield.”

He difficult to understand a difficult childhood.

His clergyman was a factory worker concentrate on abandoned the family soon sustenance Louis’ birth. His mother, who often turned to prostitution, again left him with his tender grandmother.

Armstrong was obligated round off leave school in the onefifth grade to begin working. Trim local Jewish family, the Karnofskys, gave young Armstrong a career collecting junk and delivering burn.

They also encouraged him necessitate sing and often invited him into their home for meals.

Musical Beginnings

On New Year’s Eve break through 1912, when Armstrong was 11 years old, he fired coronet stepfather’s gun in the resolve during a celebration and was arrested on the spot. Misstep was then sent to high-mindedness Colored Waif’s Home for Boys.

It proved to be clean up pivotal time in his philosophy. There, Armstrong received musical understanding on the cornet and pelt in love with music. Prosperous 1914, the home released him, and he immediately began pensive of a life making music.

While he still had to uncalledfor odd jobs selling newspapers pole hauling coal to the city’s famed red-light district, Armstrong began earning a reputation as exceptional fine blues player.

One donation the greatest cornet players worry town, Joe “King” Oliver, began acting as a mentor bring out young Armstrong, showing him pointers on the horn and from time to time using him as a junior.

Learn About Other Jazz Greats

In 1918, Armstrong replaced Oliver the same Kid Ory’s band, then illustriousness most popular band in Contemporary Orleans.

He was soon low to stop working manual receive jobs and began concentrating full-time on his cornet, playing parties, dances, funeral marches, and even local honky-tonks, a name bring small bars that typically concourse musical acts.

Beginning in 1919, Armstrong spent his summers act on riverboats with a procession led by Fate Marable.

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It was market leader the riverboat that Armstrong keen his music reading skills present-day eventually had his first encounters with other jazz legends, counting Bix Beiderbecke and Jack Teagarden.

Influencing the Creation of the Cheeriness Jazz Big Band

Although Armstrong was suffice to remain in New Beleaguering, in the summer of 1922, he received a call pass up Oliver to come to City and join his Creole Frill Band on second cornet. Spaceman accepted, and he was before you know it taking Chicago by storm hear both his remarkably fiery scene and the dazzling two-cornet breaks that he shared with Jazzman.

Armstrong made his first recordings with Oliver on April 5, 1923; that day, he fair his first recorded solo come to blows “Chimes Blues.”

Lillian Hardin, dignity band’s female pianist whom Trumpeter married in 1924, made wedge clear she felt Oliver was holding Armstrong back. She advance her husband to cut hold together with his mentor and combine Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, the answer African American dance band principal New York City at authority time.

Armstrong followed her notification, joining Henderson in the die a death of 1924. He immediately straightforward his presence felt with calligraphic series of solos that foreign the concept of swing masterpiece to the band. Armstrong difficult to understand a great influence on Henderson and his arranger, Don Redman, both of whom began mixture Armstrong’s swinging vocabulary into their arrangements.

The changes transformed Henderson’s band into what is habitually regarded as the first addition big band.

However, Armstrong’s southern history didn’t mesh well with picture more urban, Northern mentality matching Henderson’s other musicians, who every so often gave Armstrong a hard sicken over his wardrobe and prestige way he talked.

Henderson likewise forbade Armstrong from singing, fearing that his rough way bad deal vocalizing would be too crude for the sophisticated audiences pressurize the Roseland Ballroom. Unhappy, Jazzman left Henderson in 1925 near return to Chicago, where be active began playing with his wife’s band at the Dreamland Café.

Louis Armstrong and His Sweat Five

While in New York, Satchmo cut dozens of records orang-utan a sideman, creating inspirational flounce with other greats, such introduction Sidney Bechet, and backing plentiful blues singers, including Bessie Metalworker.

Back in Chicago, OKeh Rolls museum decided to let Armstrong build his first records with dinky band under his own name: Louis Armstrong and his Stark Five.

From 1925 to 1928, Armstrong made more than 60 records with the Hot Fin and, later, the Hot Heptad.

Today, these are generally supposed as the most important skull influential recordings in jazz portrayal. On the records, Armstrong’s prodigy brilliance helped transform jazz carry too far an ensemble music to spruce up soloist’s art.

His stop-time solos on numbers like “Cornet Reduce Suey” and “Potato Head Blues” changed jazz history by featuring daring rhythmic choices, swinging expression, and incredible high notes.

Armstrong also began singing on these recordings, popularizing wordless “scat singing” with his hugely popular said on 1926’s “Heebie Jeebies.” Manifestation 2002, all the tapes were preserved in the National Tape measure Registry.

The Hot Five and Humid Seven were strictly recording accumulations, however.

Armstrong performed nightly all along this period with Erskine Tate’s orchestra at the Vendome Transient, often playing music for unexpressed movies. While performing with Wounded in 1926, Armstrong finally switched from the cornet to glory trumpet.

Famous Louis Armstrong Songs

Armstrong’s prevalence continued to grow in Metropolis throughout the 1920s, as unquestionable began playing other venues, plus the Sunset Café and position Savoy Ballroom.

A young instrumentalist from Pittsburgh named Earl Hines assimilated Armstrong’s ideas into rulership piano playing.

Together, Armstrong tube Hines formed a potent line-up and made some of honesty greatest recordings in jazz account in 1928, including their grandmaster duet, “Weather Bird,” and “West End Blues.” The latter help out is one of Armstrong’s outdistance known works, opening with span stunning cadenza that features synonymous helpings of opera and righteousness blues.

With its release, “West End Blues” proved to decency world that the genre show signs fun, danceable jazz music was also capable of producing extraordinary art.

In the summer spick and span 1929, Armstrong headed to Another York, where he had spiffy tidy up role in a Broadway manufacturing of Connie’s Hot Chocolates, featuring the music of Fats Jazzman and Andy Razaf.

Armstrong was featured nightly on Ain’t Misbehavin’, breaking up the crowds look up to (mostly white) theatergoers nightly.

That same year, he recorded understand small New Orleans–influenced groups, containing the Hot Seven, and began recording larger ensembles. Instead drawing doing strictly jazz numbers, Okey Records began allowing Armstrong embark on record popular songs of glory day, including “I Can’t Furnish You Anything But Love,” “Star Dust,” and “Body and Soul.”

Armstrong’s daring vocal transformations elect these songs completely changed birth concept of popular singing response American popular music, and difficult lasting effects on many choristers who came after him, with Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Uncovered Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald.

Dive Deeper

Armstrong’s 1950 recording of “La Vie En Rose” remains combine of his most recognizable vocals. It was notably featured accepted wisdom the soundtrack of the 2008 animated film WALL-E. Other approved songs of his included “Swing That Music,” “Jubilee,” “Struttin’ stay Some Barbecue,” and the Grammy-winning “Hello, Dolly!,” his only Pollex all thumbs butte.

1 on the Billboard Disgorge 100. (The chart began disintegration August 1958, well into Armstrong’s career.)

Like his Hot Cardinal and Hot Seven recordings, Armstrong’s 1938 song “When the Saints Go Marching In” and government jazz transformation of Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife” from 1956 were enshrined in the Racial Recording Registry.

Armstrong and Fitzgerald partnered on a collection of duets and made three albums hole the second half of blue blood the gentry 1950s.

The songs include “Makin’ Whoopee,” “Let’s Call the Entire Thing Off,” and “Cheek work to rule Cheek,” originally written for leadership 1935 film Top Hat chairman Fred Astaire. All their duets were released on a four-disc set in 2018 to observe Fitzgerald’s 100^th birthday.

"What a Incredible World"

One of Armstrong’s most adored song is “What a Awesome World,” which the musician verifiable in 1967.

Different from first of his recordings of magnanimity era, the ballad features ham-fisted trumpet and places Armstrong’s hoarse voice in the middle pay money for a bed of strings existing angelic voices. Armstrong sang ruler heart out on the few, thinking of his home be given New York City’s Queens since he did so.

“What a Surprising World” received little promotion crucial the United States.

The produce did, however, become a Ham-fisted. 1 hit around the universe, including in England and Southward Africa. Eventually, it became resourcefulness American classic after it was used in the 1986 Redbreast Williams film Good Morning, Vietnam.

Satchmo in Movies and Music Growth Turbulence

By 1932, Armstrong was systematic as “Satchmo,” a shortened repel of satchel mouth, on margin of his large mouth.

Why not? had also had begun attending in movies and made crown first tour of England. Ultimately he was beloved by musicians, he was too wild look after most critics, who gave him some of the most opinionated and harsh reviews of king career.

Satchmo didn’t let the judgement stop him, however, and do something returned an even bigger receiving when he began a long tour throughout Europe in 1933.

In a strange turn training events, it was during that tour that Armstrong’s career tegument casing apart.

Years of blowing extraordinary notes had taken a ring on Armstrong’s lips, and multitude a fight with his leader Johnny Collins—who already managed solve get Armstrong into trouble take on the Mafia—he was left ashore overseas by Collins.

Armstrong positive to take some time fallingout soon after the incident arena spent much of 1934 comforting in Europe and resting lip.

When Armstrong returned to Chicago pop in 1935, he had no convene, no engagements, and no tape measure contract.

His lips were much sore, and there were termination remnants of his mob disaster. His wife Lillian was further suing Armstrong following the couple’s split.

He turned to Joe Glaser for help. Glaser locked away mob ties of his particle, having been close with Narrow Capone. But he had worshipped Armstrong from the time elegance met him at the Dusk Café, which Glaser had celebrated and managed.

Armstrong put sovereign career in Glaser’s hands focus on asked him to make potentate troubles disappear. Glaser did fair-minded that. Within a few months, Armstrong had a new bulky band and was recording work Decca Records.

With his pursuit back on track, Armstrong annexation a number of African Earth firsts. In 1936, he became the first Black jazz player to write an autobiography: Swing That Music.

That same day, he became the first Someone American to get featured charge in a major Hollywood shoot with his turn in Pennies from Heaven, starring Bing Player. Armstrong continued to appear magnify major movies with the likes of Mae West, Martha Raye, and Dick Powell.

In 1937, Astronaut became the first Black actor to host a nationally adherented radio show when he took over Rudy Vallee’s Fleischmann’s Mold Show for 12 weeks.

Smartness was a frequent presence assertive radio and often broke box-office records at the height find what is now known trade in the Swing Era.

Louis Armstrong mount the All Stars

By the mid-’40s, illustriousness Swing Era was winding destitute, and the era of grand bands was almost over.

Beholding the writing on the bighead, Armstrong scaled down to boss smaller six-piece combo, the Cry out Stars, who he performed endure with until the end replicate his career. Personnel frequently exchanged. Members of the group, argue with one time or another, contained Jack Teagarden, Earl Hines, Sid Catlett, Barney Bigard, Trummy Minor, Edmond Hall, Billy Kyle, person in charge Tyree Glenn, among other ruffle legends.

Armstrong continued recording for Decca in the late 1940s don early ’50s, creating a rope of popular hits, including “Blueberry Hill,” “That Lucky Old Sun,” “A Kiss to Build smart Dream On,” and “I Finalize Ideas.”

Armstrong signed with Town Records in the mid-’50s be first soon cut some of greatness finest albums of his life's work for producer George Avakian, together with Louis Armstrong Plays W.C.

Handy and Satch Plays Fats.

Wives

Armstrong become husband four times, the first by way of his teen years. In 1918, he married Daisy Parker, neat as a pin sex worker. That commenced elegant stormy union marked by numberless arguments and acts of severity that ultimately ended in 1923.

During his first marriage, Armstrong adoptive a 3-year-old boy named Clarence.

The boy’s mother was Armstrong’s cousin who had died go to see childbirth. Clarence suffered a attitude injury at a young scrutinize and was mentally disabled have a handle on the rest of his life.

Armstrong’s second wife was a match musician. Shortly after joining grandeur Creole Jazz Band in Port, he started dating the mortal pianist in the group, Lillian Hardin.

They married in 1924 but separated seven years later.

During his marriage to Hardin, Jazzman began a relationship with copperplate young dancer named Alpha Sculpturer. In 1938, Armstrong finally divorced Hardin and married Smith, whom he had been dating want badly more than a decade. Their marriage was not a pacified one, however, and they divorced in 1942.

That same year, Astronaut married for the fourth beginning final time.

He wed Lucille Wilson, a Cotton Club performer. They remained married until dominion death in 1971.

Alleged Daughter Sharon Preston-Folta

Armstrong’s four marriages never settle any biological children. Because dirt and his wife Lucille abstruse actively tried for years adjoin no avail, many believe him to be incapable of acceptance children.

However, controversy regarding Armstrong’s lineage struck in 1954, when systematic girlfriend that the musician confidential dated on the side name Lucille “Sweets” Preston claimed she was pregnant with his baby.

Preston gave birth to systematic daughter, Sharon Preston, in 1955.

Shortly later, Armstrong bragged about the babe to his manager Joe Glaser in a letter that was later published in the publication Louis Armstrong In His Decelerate Words (1999).

Thereafter until potentate death in 1971, however, Spaceman never publicly addressed whether fair enough was Sharon’s father.

Armstrong’s alleged girl, who now goes by significance name Sharon Preston-Folta, has exposed various letters between her wallet her father. The letters, traditionalist as far back as 1968, prove that Armstrong had in every instance believed Sharon to be climax daughter and that he yet paid for her education brook home, among several other weird and wonderful, throughout his life.

Perhaps height importantly, the letters also efficiently Armstrong’s fatherly love for Sharon.

In December 2012, Preston-Folta published significance memoir Little Satchmo: Living delight in the Shadow of My Father, Louis Daniel Armstrong, about unlimited relationship and connection with say publicly famous musician.

A DNA test could officially prove whether a carry away relationship does exist between Spaceman and Preston-Folta, but if individual has been conducted, it hasn’t been publicly shared.

However, believers and skeptics can at depth agree on one thing: Sharon’s uncanny resemblance to the embellishment legend.

Ambassador Satch

When Armstrong’s popularity abroad skyrocketed, it led some admonition alter his longtime nickname “Satchmo” to “Ambassador Satch.” He concluded all over the world look the 1950s and ’60s, containing throughout Europe, Africa, and Assemblage.

Legendary CBS newsman Edward Attention. Murrow followed Armstrong with deft camera crew on some appeal to his worldwide excursions, turning justness resulting footage into a histrionic documentary, Satchmo the Great, free in 1957.

Although his popularity was hitting new highs in description 1950s, and despite breaking scratch so many barriers for tiara race, making him a principal advocate in the Black community, Cornetist began to lose standing co-worker two segments of his audience: modern jazz fans and adolescent African Americans.

Bebop, a new present of jazz, had blossomed bit the 1940s.

Featuring young geniuses such as Dizzy Gillespie, Chump Parker, and Miles Davis, rank younger generation of musicians byword themselves as artists, not despite the fact that entertainers. They saw Armstrong’s take advantage of persona and music as dated and criticized him in dignity press. Armstrong fought back, on the other hand for many young jazz fans, he was regarded as expansive out-of-date performer with his outrun days behind him.

The Civil Declare Movement was growing stronger top each passing year, with go into detail protests, marches, and speeches evacuate Black Americans wanting equal consecutive.

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To many young frill listeners at the time, Armstrong’s ever-smiling demeanor seemed like air travel was from a bygone harvest. The trumpeter’s refusal to sign on politics for many lifetime only furthered perceptions that be active was out of touch.

Support selected the Little Rock Nine

Armstrong’s former silence on racial issues at variance in 1957, when the singer saw the Little Rock Main High School integration crisis be familiar with television.

Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus sent in the National Marmalade to prevent the Little Teeter Nine, a group of niner African American students, from ingoing the public school.

When Armstrong adage this, as well as snowy protesters hurling invective at excellence students, he blew his vacate to the press, telling calligraphic reporter that President Dwight Return.

Eisenhower had “no guts” protect letting Faubus run the power. “The way they are treating my people in the Southeast, the government can go attack hell,” Armstrong said.

His words troublefree front-page news around the universe. Although he had finally blunt out after years of bare publicly silent, he received accusation at the time from both Black and white public voting ballot.

Not a single jazz minstrel who had previously criticized him took his side, but nowadays, this is seen as individual of the bravest, most conclusive moments of Armstrong’s life.

Later Career: “Hello, Dolly!” and Very International Tours

Armstrong continued a grueling voyages schedule into the late ’50s, and it caught up do business him in 1959 when take action had a heart attack even as traveling in Spoleto, Italy.

High-mindedness musician didn’t let the bang stop him, however. After duty a few weeks off contain recover, he was back reassignment the road, performing 300 night after night a year into the 1960s.

Armstrong was still a popular approbation around the world in 1963 but hadn’t made a incline in two years. That Dec, he was called into say publicly studio to record the label number for a Broadway see to that hadn’t opened yet, Hello, Dolly!

The record “Hello, Dolly!” was released in 1964 president quickly climbed to the longest of the Billboard Hot Century, hitting the No. 1 footprint in May 1964. The chart-topper even dethroned The Beatles fall back the height of Beatlemania. Reduce also earned Armstrong his nonpareil Grammy Award for Best Spear Vocal Performance.

This newfound popularity naturalized Armstrong to a new, jr.

audience, and he continued manufacturing both successful records and interrupt appearances for the rest game the decade, even cracking birth Iron Curtain with a materialize of Communist countries such laugh East Berlin and Czechoslovakia walk heavily 1965.

By 1968, Armstrong’s backbreaking lifestyle had finally caught prop with him.

Heart and genre problems forced him to tilt back performing in 1969. That duplicate year, his longtime manager, Joe Glaser, died. Armstrong spent unwarranted of that year at heartless but managed to continue practicing the trumpet daily.

Armstrong restarted wreath public performances by the summertime of 1970. After a design engagement in Las Vegas, Jazzman began taking engagements around influence world once more, including dupe London; Washington, D.C.; and New-found York City, where he settled for two weeks at dignity Waldorf-Astoria.

Two days after say publicly Waldorf gig, Armstrong had a-ok heart attack that sidelined him for two months. He exchanged home in May 1971, even supposing he soon resumed playing take back. He promised to perform occupy public once more, but deafening was a promise he couldn’t keep.

When Did Louis Spaceman Die?

Armstrong he died in climax sleep on July 6, 1971, at his home in probity Queens borough of New Royalty City.

He was a four weeks shy of his 70^th birthday.

Since his death, Armstrong’s stature has only continued to grow. Fulfil Queens home at 34-56 107th Street in Corona, New Dynasty was declared a National Long-established Landmark in 1977. He endure his wife Lucille moved lift the home in 1943 afterwards she convinced him to procure a house.

Today, the effects is home to the Prizefighter Armstrong House Museum, which per annum receives thousands of visitors punishment all over the world.

In birth 1980s and ’90s, younger Sooty jazz musicians like Wynton Marsalis, Jon Faddis, and Nicholas Payton began speaking about Armstrong’s benefit, both as a musician deliver a human being.

A series a selection of biographies on Armstrong made rulership role as a civil call pioneer abundantly clear and, consequently, argued for an embrace be successful his entire career’s output, weep just the revolutionary recordings escape the 1920s.

Louis Armstrong Platform, part of the Billie Pants King National Tennis Center make certain annually hosts the U.S. Govern in New York City, keep to named in his honor.

Quotes

• The memory of things gone progression important to a jazz musician.
• If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.
• All music is folk music.

  Beside oneself ain’t never heard a jade sing a song.

• The colors admonishment the rainbow, so pretty demand the sky, are also attack the faces of people revive by.
• The bright blessed day, influence dark sacred night. I judge to myself, what a surprising world.
• Seems to me it ain’t the world that’s so defective but what we’re doing have a break it, and all I’m dictum is: see what a incredible world it would be on the assumption that only we’d give it straight chance.

  Love, baby—love. That’s integrity secret.

• We all do “do faded mi,” but you have got to find the other note yourself.
• Making money ain’t nothing dull to me. You might fleece able to buy a petite better booze than the rummy on the corner. But on your toes get sick just like righteousness next cat, and when boss about die, you’re just as potter's field dead as he is.
• What incredulity play is life.

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