294 PART 3 | FROM WORLD WAR I THROUGH WORLD WAR II
perhaps as a prostitute. While Armstrong grabbed some schooling as a boy, he
claimed as his real diploma the common sense and consideration he learned
from his mother. Armstrong went to work at the age of seven. He also formed
a vocal quartet with friends, who sang on street corners for tips. In 1913 he was
declared delinquent and sent to the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys, a local reform
school, where he received his fi rst instruction in music. He left home two years
later as a cornet player determined to make a career as a musician. W hen cor-
netist King Oliver left New Orleans for Chicago in 1918, Armstrong took Oliver’s
place in a band led by trombonist Edmund “Kid” Ory. In 1922 Oliver, who was
leading his Creole Jazz Band in a Chicago cabaret, invited Armstrong to join his
group as a second cornetist.
Chicago’s jazz scene was rooted in the African American population on
the city’s South Side. In 1910 approximately 44,000 black residents lived there.
Between 1916 and 1919 the Great Migration from southern states added thou-
sands more, so that by 1920 the count stood at almost 110,000. This demographic
shift, besides strengthening local black political infl uence, also ushered in the
city’s jazz age. Cabarets, vaudeville and movie theaters, and dance halls were
opened to serve the growing market for black musical entertainment. And by
the later 1910s some of these establishments were featuring the energetic, syn-
copated, often raucous-sounding dance music that, under the name of jazz, was
gaining national attention.
The cabarets in which Chicago’s jazz scene fl ourished were South Side
“black-and-tans,” where black and white customers mingled. Some clergymen
condemned the cabarets as dens of iniquity, yet they brought jobs and paying
customers to the South Side. And they supplied residents with professional
entertainment, cast in familiar idioms of speech, humor, dancing, and music.
The undisputed leaders of the Chicago jazz scene, however, were black musi-
cians, and they deeply impressed young white jazz musicians, including banjoist
and guitarist Eddie Condon. Condon’s description of King Oliver’s band play-
ing at the Lincoln Gardens in 1922 has often been quoted: “It was hypnosis at
fi rst hearing. Everyone was playing what he wanted to play and it was all mixed
together as if someone had planned it with a set of micrometer calipers.”
Thanks to his association with Oliver, Armstrong’s reputation began to grow,
especially after the band began recording in 1923. The next year, Armstrong
left the Creole Jazz Band for the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra in New York. But
late in 1925 he returned to Chicago and for the next several years performed
in clubs and theaters while also leading record dates with small groups, at the
same time making the switch from the mellow-sounding cornet to the brighter,
louder trumpet. The sixty-fi ve recordings that Armstrong and his Hot Five and
Hot Seven groups made in 1925–28 are now recognized as musical classics.
Armstrong moved to New York in 1929 and soon appeared in Hot Chocolates, a
Broadway rev ue. T hen he emba rked on a ca reer a s a solo enter t a i ner: a ja z z t r u m-
peter who also sang, led a big band, hosted his own radio show, and appeared in
fi lms, all with supreme musicianship and a personality that seemed to welcome
and embrace the audience. He also toured the world for the U.S. State Depart-
ment in the 1950s. A heart attack in 1959 slowed his pace somewhat, but he kept
performing until a few weeks before his death. When Armstrong died in 1971, he
could claim an audience as large and varied as that of any musician in the world.
Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven groups, like Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot
Peppers, were studio ensembles put together for the express purpose of makingChicagoblack-and-tansThe Hot Five and Hot
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