The Rise of Satchmo: Louis Armstrong was a legend from the start. (Alan Pell Crawford, June 19, 2026, Modern Age)
The age-old slam on Armstrong among those who consider themselves sophisticates is that he might have been an admirable enough musician in his early days but in time succumbed to the temptations of showbiz and sold out to the squares. As Louie, not Louis, he mugged and shuffled and grinned, playing to his white audiences in a manner that was subservient, undignified, and degrading.
The fact is, he was mugging, shuffling, and grinning when he was a boy in the streets of New Orleans, busking for coins as a member of a vocal quartet. He would do little buck-and-wing dances to entertain the crowds, and long after he mastered the cornet and then the trumpet, he continued to amuse himself as well as his audiences with his exuberant capers. “They called it Tomming—it wasn’t Tomming!” the guitarist and singer Danny Barker explained. “He just loved people!”
Knowledgeable fans of pop music today seem to make a fine distinction between the black jazz musicians of Armstrong’s generation and what the cognoscenti see as their white imitators. But there is little evidence, at least from Riccardi’s exhaustive research, that the musicians themselves felt this way. Oliver, it turns out, mentored white musicians, and Armstrong followed his example. He befriended them too, and vice versa. Armstrong admired white musicians who are seen these days as corny and square. He was a fan of Paul Whiteman, “whose very name might have been chosen by a satirist to illustrate what black musicians were up against,” in Clive James’s words. He was a fan of Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians as well. “Everything they play is perfect,” Armstrong said. “They can play anything . . . a whole lot of things I did remind me of Guy Lombardo.”
Armstrong, who said he was always “trying to Cultivate Myself,” was that lifelong learner we hear so much about these days. He couldn’t read music or follow a basic arrangement until, at nineteen or so, he joined Fate Marable’s band on a riverboat. Before long, he was playing passages from Wagner’s Tannhauser, and of his 1926 solo on “Big Butter and Egg Man,” the late Gunther Schuller wrote, “no composer, not even a Mozart or Schubert, composed anything more natural or simply inspired.”