Word: armstrong
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...place Louis and jazz were born, there was no direction to move but up. The music, at first a restless, syncopated blend of African dance rhythms, Negro blues, brass-band marches, and French Creole songs and dances, spent its raucous teens in brothels, cheap saloons and street parades. Armstrong came up from Jane Alley, a squalid, "back-o'-town" lane in what was then the toughest section of uptown Negro New Orleans. His parents were the nearly illiterate grandchildren of slaves, his father a worker in a turpentine factory, his mother a domestic. Never quiet, Jane Alley became...
...errands, hawked bananas, ground up old brick and sold it to prostitutes for scouring their front steps on Saturday mornings. When he was eleven, he also started a street quartet in which he sang tenor, picked up loose change by serenading through the red-light district. Says Armstrong: "A drunk come along, and maybe he'd give us a dollar. The grown folks were workin' for a dollar a day then." Only his mother was still calling him Little Louie. To everyone else he was Dippennouth or Satchelmouth. Satchelmouth was soon shortened to Satchmo, and it stuck. (Armstrong...
...dispersal that followed, some Storyville musicians put away their instruments for factory work and many moved away. A few, like Joe Oliver, headed north for Chicago. But Satchmo Armstrong stayed on in New Orleans for a while. With Oliver gone, Louis began to get his due as the finest cornet in town. At 18 he married a girl named Daisy Parker and bought himself a membership in the Zulus...
...Sent for Me. Armstrong's two years on river boats spread his fame up & down the Mississippi. When he came back to New Orleans, he was met at the landing by cheering crowds. Among them, a young white trombone player from Texas named Jack Teagarden waited at the gangway to say hello, asked to shake hands with Louis. Teagarden, soon to become a great name in jazz himself, remembers his first look at Louis: "[He] wasn't much to look at. Just a little guy with a big mouth. But, man, how he could blow that horn!" Louis...
...Armstrong bowled them over in Chicago. His tone was unsurpassed for purity -and stayed that way even up around F and G above high C; he had such sheer power that he could blow as many as 300 ceiling notes in succession. The songs that came from his shiny horn ranged from the most mournful of blues to the explosive abandon of numbers like Muskrat Ramble...