138 Culture, Identity, and Community: From Slavery to the PresentAft er a few years with his grandmother, a time that he
remembered as idyllic, Louis went to live with his mother,
sister, and a succession of “stepfathers” in Back O’ Town,
New Orleans’ poorest neighborhood. At age seven, Louis
began working for the Karnofskys, Jewish immigrants who
had emerged from poverty and worked their way up in the
world buying and selling junk. Louis relished eating din-
ner with them and listening to their Russian lullabies. For
much of his life, Armstrong let people think the Colored
Waifs’ Home gave him his start playing cornet. But in his
private writings, he wrote extensively about the Karnofskys
and the way they had helped him buy a used cornet as an
upgrade from the tin horn he blew driving their rag wagon.
He began singing and playing the cornet with a quartet on
street corners for spare change.
On January 1, 1913, celebrating the New Year, Louis
fi red a gun and was arrested and sent to the Colored Waifs’
Home. Th ere he received his fi rst formal musical training,
from Peter Davis, who ran the school’s brass band. Louis
became the student leader of the band. Unbeknownst to
him, his biological father took a keen interest in getting
him released from the home, even though Louis wanted to
stay. When he left at age 13, at least a hundred establish-
ments in the city featured jazz. Louis chose to hang around
the one featuring Joe “King” Oliver. He played with Oliver,
whom he credited with most of his musical education, until
the older man’s move to Chicago. Also during this period,
Louis informally adopted his cousin’s son, Clarence, aft er
her death. Clarence, mildly retarded from an accident, re-
mained Armstrong’s only child.
At 17, Armstrong entered into the fi rst of four mar-
riages, with a prostitute named Daisy Parker. For most of
the six-year marriage, Armstrong was playing jazz else-
where. For two years, he played with Fate Marable’s orches-
tra on a riverboat. At a stop in Davenport, Iowa, he met and
infl uenced Bix Beiderbecke, an aspiring white musician
who also became a 1920s jazz standout.
Aft er his riverboat stint, Armstrong received a sum-
mons to join King Oliver’s band in Chicago. Th ere he mar-
ried the pianist Lil Hardin. Lil had studied music at Fisk
University and led Armstrong to believe she had been vale-
dictorian. Actually, she had dropped out aft er a year because
of frustration over her lack of proper training. Th ough
Armstrong was later less than complimentary about Lil’s
playing, she became a sensation in Chicago when she took
a job playing piano for a music store and was picked up byGates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay. Th e Norton Anthol-
ogy of African American Literature. New York: Norton, 1996.
Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness. Lon-
don: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Armstrong, Louis
Louis Armstrong (1901–1971), more than any other single
fi gure, took jazz, the music of his New Orleans childhood,
and made it into an internationally recognized art form,
in part by pioneering the improvisational solo. A cornet
player who later switched to trumpet, Armstrong also in-
fl uenced generations of singers with his gravelly voice and
early use of scat singing. His style exemplifi ed the 1920s,
known as the “Jazz Age,” when many jazz critics thought
he peaked. He went by colorful nicknames—Dippermouth,
Gatemouth, Pops, Satchelmouth (shortened to Satchmo
by a British journalist)—and invented or popularized jazz
terms such as “jive,” “chops,” and “mellow.”
Th e New Orleans of Armstrong’s youth was a place
saturated with cultural infl uences—French, Spanish, Cana-
dian, British, Caribbean, and African—and the innovative
styles of music springing from that interaction. Before the
Civil War, black musicians were already combining Euro-
pean and African traditions in the music they played for
dancers at Congo Square (now Louis Armstrong Park). At
the turn of the century, band leaders competed for predom-
inance in nightclubs, and early jazz pianists such as Jelly
Roll Morton honed their skills providing musical entertain-
ment in New Orleans’ Storyville, the vice district.
Into this milieu, Armstrong was born to Mayann Al-
bert, a 15- or 16-year-old girl who had come to the city from
rural Louisiana seeking opportunity, and Willie Armstrong,
whom she had met there. Armstrong always maintained his
birthday was July 4, 1900, a patriotic coincidence for a man
who also liked to say he and jazz grew up together. Aft er his
death, the discovery of a Catholic baptismal record showed
he was born August 4, 1901. Willie left soon aft er his son’s
birth, though he later reunited with Mayann, who then
gave birth to Louis’s sister Beatrice, known as Mama Lucy.
Mayann left the two children with their grandmother until
Louis was fi ve. He later strongly hinted that his mother
probably turned to prostitution at this time, though she
carefully hid such work from her children.