Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong - Rilegato

Teachout, Terry

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0151010897 ISBN 13: 9780151010899

Casa editrice: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009

Riassunto

Louis Armstrong was the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century and a giant of modern American culture. He knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts, wrote the finest of all jazz autobiographies - without a collaborator - and created collages that have been compared to the art of Romare Bearden. The ranks of his admirers included Johnny Cash, Jackson Pollock and Orson Welles. Offstage he was witty, introspective and unexpectedly complex, a beloved colleague with an explosive temper whose larger-than-life personality was tougher and more sharp-edged than his worshipping fans ever knew.

Wall Street Journal arts columnist Terry Teachout has drawn on a cache of important new sources unavailable to previous Armstrong biographers, including hundreds of private recordings of backstage and after-hours conversations that Armstrong made throughout the second half of his life, to craft a sweeping new narrative biography of this towering figure that shares full, accurate versions of such storied events as Armstrong's decision to break up his big band and his quarrel with President Eisenhower for the first time. Certain to be the definitive word on Armstrong for our generation, Pops paints a gripping portrait of the man, his world and his music that will stand alongside Gary Giddins'Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams and Peter Guralnick's Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley as a classic biography of a major American musician.

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Informazioni sull?autore

Terry Teachout is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the chief culture critic ofCommentary. He played jazz professionally before becoming a a full-time writer. His books includeAll in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken andA Terry Teachout Reader. He blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com.

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Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong

By Terry Teachout

Houghton Mifflin Harcout

Copyright © 2009 Terry Teachout
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-1510-1089-9

Chapter One

"Bastards from the Start" Apprenticeship in New Orleans, 1901-1919

TO THE NORTHERNER New Orleans is another country, seductive and disorienting, a steamy, shabby paradise of spicy cooking, wrought-iron balconies, and streets called Desire and Elysian Fields, a place where the signs advertise such mysterious commodities as poboys and muffuletta and no one is buried underground. We'll take the boat to the land of dreams, the pilgrim hears in his mind's ear as he prowls the French Quarter, pushing through the hordes of tipsy visitors and wondering whether the land of his dreams still exists-if it ever did. Rarely does he linger long enough to pierce the veneer of local color with which the natives shield themselves from the tourist trade. At the end of his stay he knows no more than when he came, and goes back home to puzzle out all that he has seen and smelled and tasted. A. J. Liebling, a well-traveled visitor from up North, saw New Orleans as a Mediterranean port transplanted to the Gulf of Mexico, a town of civilized pleasures whose settlers "carried with them a culture that had ripened properly, on the tree." He knew what he was seeing, but Walker Percy, who lived and died there, cast a cooler eye on the same sights: "The ironwork on the balconies sags like rotten lace.... Through deep sweating carriageways one catches glimpses of courtyards gone to jungle." Unlike Liebling, he caught the smell of decay.

To the southerner New Orleans is part of the family-but a special, eccentric member, a city cousin who can't be counted on to play by the rules, French and Roman Catholic in the midst of the hardest-bitten of Anglo-Saxon Protestant cultures, politically corrupt without limit and as morally latitudinarian as the rest of the South is publicly upright. In 1897 the city fathers went so far as to legalize prostitution in the restricted district that came to be known as Storyville. (It was named after Sidney Story, the councilman who drafted the ordinances that brought it into being, though musicians simply called it "the District.") The vote supplied official confirmation of what a horrified visitor from Virginia had said six decades before: "I am now in this great Southern Babylon-the mighty receptacle of wealth, depravity and misery." No one there pretended otherwise.

"You can make prostitution illegal in Louisiana," said Martin Behrman, the mayor of New Orleans during most of Storyville's existence, "but you can't make it unpopular." Not even when it came to race did the Crescent City always toe the line. In the twenties, Danny Barker remembered, it was the earnest and general feeling that any Negro who left New Orleans and journeyed across the state border and entered the hell-hole called the state of Mississippi for any reason other than to attend the funeral of a very close relative-mother, father, sister, brother, wife or husband-was well on the way to losing his mentality, or had already lost it.... When it was decided to live somewhere other than New Orleans, Chicago was the place, and the trip there was preferably a direct one, by way of the Illinois Central Railroad.

New Orleans was no paradise for blacks, but it gave them a measure of personal safety that was harder to find elsewhere in the Old South. The same encroaching swamps that forced the city to "bury" its dead in tombs instead of graves forced its black and white citizens into closer geographical intimacy, and some neighborhoods remained racially mixed after the swamps were drained. Unlike the African slaves who had to wait for the Civil War to bring their freedom, New Orleans's "Creoles of color," the descendants of the mixed-race slave children who were freed by their French and Spanish owner-fathers before the war, did not consider themselves black. "My folks was all Frenchmans," Jelly Roll Morton proclaimed proudly (and falsely). Some had owned slaves of their own, and long after slavery had been abolished, their descendants continued to look down on the children and grandchildren of the plantation immigrants who lived on the wrong side of Canal Street in the quarter of "uptown" New Orleans known as "Back o' Town." "The worst Jim Crow around New Orleans," Pops Foster said, "was what the colored did to themselves.... The lighter you were the better they thought you were." One dark-skinned musician recalled that some Creole bandleaders "wouldn't hire a man whose hair wasn't silky." Slavery itself was a marginally more merciful affair in New Orleans, where most of the city's slaves were domestic servants and some became skilled artisans. The freedmen who crowded into New Orleans after the war, more than doubling the city's black population between 1860 and 1880, learned from the example of their urban brethren. As for the Creoles of color, they were already a full-fledged black middle class, among the first of its kind in America.

Yet such privileges as were enjoyed by New Orleans's blacks, whatever their hue, could be withdrawn at any time, a fact of which the Creoles were intensely aware. With the coming of the post-Reconstruction "Jim Crow" laws, they were pushed back across the color line. It was a Creole of color, Homer Plessy, whose attempt to ride in the first-class section of a train car led to Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that made racial segregation legal. After an interlude of heterodoxy, New Orleans was back in the fold. "No matter how much his Diamond Sparkled," the dark-skinned Louis Armstrong wrote of the light-skinned Jelly Roll Morton, "he still had to eat in the Kitchen, the same as we Blacks." A black man who came out of the kitchen, Armstrong knew, could end up dead: "At ten years old I could see-the Bluffings that those Old Fat Belly Stinking very Smelly Dirty White Folks were putting Down ... they get full of their Mint Julep or that bad whisky, the poor white Trash were Guzzling down, like water, then when they get so Damn drunk until they'd go out of their minds-then it's Nigger Hunting time. Any Nigger."

In matters of sex as much as race, the city struggled with its confused heritage. Many plantation owners slept with the black women they owned, but in New Orleans such liaisons were conducted openly, and long after the half-open door of borderline acceptability slammed shut on interracial sex, the city's bordellos catered as openly to white men who shared their grandfathers' appetites. The same Basin Street celebrated in song as the street / Where the dark and light folk meet was also the main drag of Storyville, and when dark and light folks met there, it was often to engage in sexual commerce, sometimes accompanied by a still-unnamed style of music in which the written-out dance tunes performed by Creoles of color were infused with the rhythmically freer style of African American blacks.

Sex, race, and music: put them together and you get New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century, a city with one foot in Europe and the other in the Deep South, committed to a tolerance bordering on libertinism yet unwilling to fully recognize the humanity of a third of its people. "I sure had a ball there growing up," its most distinguished native son would remember long after he moved away, never to return save as a visitor. He loved his hometown with all his heart-but he saw it as it was.

* * *

Until the day he died, Louis Armstrong claimed that he was born on July 4, 1900. He said so in Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans and Swing That Music, his two published memoirs, and on innumerable other occasions, and although at least one biographer found the date too pat to be plausible, it was only in 1988 that a researcher located an entry in Latin for "Armstrong (niger, illegitimus)" in the handwritten baptismal register of New Orleans's Sacred Heart of Jesus Church. According to that record, Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901, the natural son of William Armstrong (known as Willie), who spent most of his adult life working in a turpentine factory, and Mary Ann Albert (known as Mayann, though her son spelled it different ways over the years), a fifteen-year-old country girl who came to New Orleans to work as a household servant. The event went unremarked by the local papers, which had more important things to cover than the birth of yet another "niger, illegitimus." The front page of the next day's Daily Picayune concerned itself with a lynching in Mississippi and a speech in which a South Carolina senator declared that "the 'niggers' are not fit to vote." (The latter story also made the front page of the New York Times.) Three weeks later Armstrong was baptized a Roman Catholic, the faith of his paternal great-grandmother, though he never practiced it and did not even know that he had gone through the ceremony as an infant. By then his father had left Mayann for another woman. In 1903 Willie and Mayann reconciled for a short time and had a second child, a daughter named Beatrice (known as Mama Lucy), but Armstrong did not live with his father, or spend any amount of time with him, until he was a teenager.

No one knows when or why Armstrong added a year to his age. He never celebrated his birthday as a boy, and it is possible, even likely, that he did not know the true year of his birth. All that can be said with certainty is that the incorrect year became a matter of legal record when he registered for the draft in 1918 and that he stuck to it with unswerving consistency thereafter. We do know, however, that it was Mayann who told him that "the night I was born there was a great big shooting scrape" in the neighborhood. Later on he claimed that it was "a blasting fourth of July, my mother called it, that I came into this world and they named me the firecracker baby." She was right about the incident but misremembered the date-it took place a month later. It is only because of surviving baptismal and census records that we now know both the date and year to have been wrong. Outside of these records, most of the rest of what we know of Armstrong's childhood is what he tells us in his writings, augmented by our knowledge of New Orleans and the memories of those who knew him as a boy. He wrote at length about his young years, and the picture he paints is often chaotic and sad, though he did not find it so. But he never glossed over the hardships that he faced, or left much doubt as to whom he blamed for them.

Beyond describing him as "a sharp man, tall and handsome and well built," Armstrong had little to say about his father, none of it good. From childhood onward he attached himself to older men, and it is reasonable to suppose that he was looking for some small part of what his own father had failed to give him. In the same breath that he praised Willie's looks, he added that "my father did not have time to teach me anything; he was too busy chasing chippies." That was in Satchmo, in which he often withheld comment about matters he otherwise described frankly, letting them speak for themselves. In later years he was franker still:

The man who May Ann told us was our father left us the day we were born. The next time we heard of him-he had gone into an uptown neighborhood and made several other children by another woman. Whether he married the other woman, we're not sure. One thing-he did not marry May Ann. She had to struggle all by herself, bringing us up. Mama Lucy + I were bastards from the Start.

Armstrong was born in his parents' home, a wooden shack at 723 Jane Alley, located on the edge of "black Storyville," the separate red-light district three blocks uptown from Storyville where blacks were allowed to purchase sex. When Willie left her, Mayann gave Louis to Josephine Armstrong, Willie's mother, and moved into black Storyville proper. "Whether my mother did any hustling, I cannot say," he wrote in Satchmo. "If she did, she certainly kept it out of sight." In fact she was almost certainly working as a prostitute on Perdido Street, a part of town that was rough even by New Orleans standards, and when her son finally rejoined her, that was where he would live as well. For the moment he stayed with his grandmother in Jane Alley, and his memories of life there were mostly happy, though it, too, was in a rough neighborhood known to locals as "the Battlefield." It was, he later wrote, a place full of "churchpeople, gamblers, hustlers, cheap pimps, thieves, prostitutes and lots of children." Josephine kept her grandson as far away from the hustlers and pimps as she could, sending him to Sunday school and kindergarten and whipping him with switches that she made him cut from a tree that grew in the front yard. He sang gospel songs in church, rejoicing in the variegated clouds of sound emitted by a "sanctified" congregation of working-class blacks who took literally the psalmist's command to "make a joyful noise unto the Lord," worshiping loudly, jubilantly, and without any of the self-conscious decorum of their better-off brethren: "That, I guess, is how I acquired my singing tactics.... [T]he whole Congregration would be Wailing-Singing like mad and sound so beautiful." On weekdays he played hide-and-seek with the poor white children of the neighborhood and helped deliver the washing his grandmother took in, earning a nickel each time he carried a load. At some point it must have been made known to Louis that his parents were living together again and that he now had a sister. Yet Willie and Mayann made no effort to reclaim their son, and it was not until 1905 or 1906 that he first saw Mama Lucy. One day Mayann sent a friend to Jane Alley to tell Josephine that Willie had deserted her once again and that she was sick and in need of help. Louis went with his mother's friend to black Storyville, riding on a segregated streetcar for the first time in his life. He found Mayann in bed with Mama Lucy in a one-room flat on Perdido Street. "I realize I have not done what I should by you," she told him. "But, son, mama will make it up." Then she sent him to Rampart Street to buy fifty cents' worth of meat, bread, red beans, and rice, the staples of her kitchen and the main ingredients of the southern-style home cooking that he would savor all his life. (As an adult he signed many of his letters "Red Beans and Ricely Yours, Louis Armstrong.") On the way he ran into a gang of bullies who called him a mama's boy and threw mud on his treasured white Lord Fauntleroy suit. He punched the ringleader in the mouth and went about his business.

It is close to impossible for anyone not born into poverty to picture such a scene, yet Louis appears to have taken it in stride, save for a moment of panic when he first saw his sick mother. After that he adjusted to his new situation with the resiliency of youth. He looked on as one "stepfather" followed another into Mayann's bed (and remained tactfully silent as he and his sister overheard the sounds of lovemaking in their one-room home). "I couldn't keep track of the stepdaddies, there must have been a dozen or so, 'cause all I had to do was turn my back and a new pappy would appear," he recalled, adding that some of them "liked to beat on little Louis." Whenever his mother "got the urge to go out on the town" and disappeared "for days and days," he went without complaint to stay with an uncle. Though he had only just begun to attend grade school, he took it for granted that he would also work at odd jobs to bring in extra money and was proud to help pay the bills. But he was not a passive onlooker, recording without thinking: the more he saw, the more he questioned, and his father was not the only man on whom he would someday render judgment.

Louis knew that Mayann, unlike Willie, was doing the best she could to take care of him and his sister, and he loved and admired her for it. All that remains of her is a formally posed family portrait taken around 1919 (in which the teenaged Louis can be seen to take after his broad-beamed, plump-cheeked mother) and the recollections set down by her son in Satchmo and his other writings. Yet it is more than enough to come away with a sense of what she was like, and why he revered her memory. A plainspoken woman who liked a drink and knew how to fight, she taught him the simple code to which he hewed ever after: "I had to work and help May Ann,-put bread on the table, since it was just the three of us living in this one big room, which was all that we could afford. But we were happy. My mother had one thing that no matter how much schooling anyone has-and that was Good Common Sense (and respect for human beings). Yea. That's My Diploma-All through my life I remembered it."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrongby Terry Teachout Copyright © 2009 by Terry Teachout. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0151010897
• ISBN 13: 9780151010899
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 475
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile