A Life of Louis Armstrong
I just finished reading Terry Teachout’s terrific biography, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Beautifully written, evocative, very entertaining, not to mention informative, I can’t recommend it enough.
I quote the last paragraphs below, which brought me to tears as I read.
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Not long before he [Armstrong] died, he wrote to a friend that “my whole life has been happiness. Through all of the misfortunes, etc, I did not plan anything. Life was there for me and I accepted it. And life, what ever came out, has been beautiful to me, and I love everybody.”
A few years earlier, he had spoken to a journalist about a confrontation that burned itself into his memory:
Years ago I was playing the little town of Lubbock, Texas, when this white cat grabs me at the end of the show – he’s full of whiskey and trouble. He pokes on my chest and says, “I don’t like niggers!” These two cats with me was gonna practice their Thanksgiving carving on that dude. But I say, “No, let the man talk. Why don’t you like us, Pops?” And would you believe that cat couldn’t tell us? So he apologizes – crying and carrying on…. And dig this: that fella and his whole family come to be my friends! When I’d go back through Lubbock, Texas, for many many years, they would make ole Satchmo welcome and treat him like a king.
The whole story of Louis Armstrong’s life is in that one encounter. Faced with the terrible realities of the time and place into which he’d been born, he did not repine, but returned love for hatred and sought salvation in work. Therein lay the ultimate meaning of his epic journey from squalor to immortality: his sunlit, hopeful art, brought into being by the labor of a lifetime, spoke to all men in all conditions and helped make them whole.
