Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901, in a poor section of New Orleans known as the Battlefield, though for most of his life he believed and told interviewers he had been born on the Fourth of July, 1900^[1]. His father left the family soon after his birth, and his mother struggled to support him and his sister, at times turning to sex work to get by^[1]. A Lithuanian Jewish immigrant family, the Karnofskys, gave the young Armstrong odd jobs, fed him at their table, and eventually loaned him the five dollars he needed to buy his first cornet, a debt of kindness he honored for the rest of his life by wearing a Star of David pendant^[1].

At eleven, Armstrong was arrested for firing a pistol into the air on New Year's Eve and sentenced to eighteen months at the Colored Waifs' Home for Boys. It was there, under bandmaster Peter Davis, that he received his first real instruction on cornet and bugle, later saying simply that this was when "me and music got married"^[1]. He worked the brass bands and dance halls of the Storyville district as a teenager, and when the district was shut down in 1917, he pieced together a living around New Orleans before leaving in 1922 to join his mentor Joe "King" Oliver's band in Chicago^[2].

His second wife, pianist Lil Hardin, played a decisive role in his rise, pushing him out of Oliver's shadow and into a solo career, securing him a featured spot at Chicago's Dreamland Café where she insisted he be billed as the world's greatest trumpet player before he had fully believed it himself^[1]. Through the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of the late 1920s, Armstrong reoriented jazz around the virtuoso soloist rather than the collective ensemble, a shift that set the template for the rest of the genre's development and made him, alongside his daring trumpet playing, one of the music's first great singers, prized for a scatting, conversational vocal style built on his gravelly, instantly identifiable voice^[2].

By the 1950s and 60s, Armstrong toured constantly with his small group, the All Stars, and traveled the globe as a goodwill performer so widely recognized that he was nicknamed "Ambassador Satch," a role made official in 1960 when the U.S. State Department sponsored a three-month tour across Africa^[2]. That diplomatic image made his rare public political statements land with particular force. In 1957, breaking with his usual reluctance to comment on politics, he condemned President Eisenhower's slow response to the school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, telling reporters that given how his people were being treated in the South, the government could go to hell, and calling the president "two-faced" and lacking "guts"^[1].

Armstrong remained commercially vital into his sixties: "Hello, Dolly!" hit number one in 1964, displacing the Beatles at the height of the British Invasion and making him, at 62, the oldest artist to top the American singles chart^[1]. He and his fourth wife, Lucille, settled in a modest house in Corona, Queens, in the early 1940s, and it was that neighborhood, watching its families and children grow across generations, that he later pointed to as the real inspiration behind "What a Wonderful World," the gentle 1967 ballad that flopped in the United States on release but became a chart-topping hit in Britain and, after its use in Good Morning, Vietnam two decades later, an enduring American standard^[3]. Armstrong died on July 6, 1971, in that same Corona home.