[Dixielandjazz] Publishers Weekly: PW profiles Terry Teachout-- New biography of Louis Armstrong

Sat Nov 7 10:50:33 PST 2009

To:  Pensacola Mencken list;  Musician & Jazzfans list and DJML

>From Norman

As you can see, I’m sending this to the two musicians  lists and the
Pensacola H. L. Mencken list.

Terry Teachout, musician and music critic for Wall Street Journal, has
completed a biography of Louis Armstrong.  See the story below for details.

As the ones on the Mencken list know, Teachout also wrote an excellent
biography of H. L. Mencken.  As I’ve written here before, Teachout would be
an obvious choice for a speaker for the annual Satchmo Summerfest held first
weekend in August of each year.  That’s a delightful free festival with
meetings held at the old US Mint at the back of the French Quarter.  Search
Satchmo Summerfest and get on their e-list for details of this festival.

Norman Vickers

Jazz Society of Pensacola 

From: mencken at yahoogroups.com [mailto:mencken at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of
Premise Checker
Sent: Saturday, November 07, 2009 4:58 AM
To: Premise Checker:
Subject: [mencken] Sage Biographer Sighting! Publishers Weekly: PW profiles
Terry Teachout

PW profiles Terry Teachout
http://www.publishersweekly.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint
<http://www.publishersweekly.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6
701175> &articleID=CA6701175

Hello, Satchmo!
by Scott Martelle--Publishers Weekly, 10/12/2009

Cultural critic Terry Teachout first heard jazz legend Louis Armstrong
around 1964 when, as a boy in rural Sikeston, Mo., he was summoned by
his mother to watch Armstrong sing "Hello, Dolly" on The Ed Sullivan
Show. Most kids would have balked. Not Teachout.

"I was thrilled," Teachout says, relaxing in a padded chair in his
compact, art-lined Upper West Side Manhattan apartment. "He, from that
moment on, became an important part of my life."

Teachout went on to become a jazz musician himself, playing bass in
different combos before shifting careers to writing. Best-known as the
drama critic for the Wall Street Journal, Teachout is also the author
of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (HarperCollins, 2002), among
other works. And come December 2, he'll add Pops: A Life of Louis
Armstrong (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Teachout recalls, while on tour promoting The Skeptic, returning to his
hotel and flopping, exhausted, onto the bed. "I'm lying there looking
at the ceiling," he says, "and it was really just like a bolt of
lightning hit me on the forehead--Armstrong!"

The bolt wasn't quite out of the blue. Michael Cogswell, director of
the Louis Armstrong House and Archives in Queens, had planted the seed
earlier when he told Teachout about a remarkable and newly available
treasure trove. Armstrong, it turned out, had been an avid home
tape-recording buff. And the archives had recently converted his
collection of some 650 fragile tapes into listenable CDs.

"I am the first biographer ever to have had access to them," Teachout
says. "And they were invaluable."

Armstrong was part of the early wave of people to buy a recreational
reel-to-reel recorder in 1947. He initially used it to record, analyze
and improve his performances. But, says Teachout, Armstrong started
making "audio-verité tapes of chunks of his life: dinner parties,
getting high in the dressing room after a gig, trying to get his wife
into bed.

"To people who know about Armstrong in the general way that most of us
know about Armstrong, I think they're going to be surprised by a lot of
this book," Teachout says, pointing to Armstrong's own underappreciated
skills as a writer (he wrote two memoirs), his dealings with the
Chicago mob, his pot smoking, or that his "career was short-circuited
because of lip damage that caused him to withdraw from performing for
years before he became famous."

And while Armstrong's growl of a voice on such songs as "Hello, Dolly"
and "What a Wonderful World" echo through the culture, Armstrong broke
through the color barrier not with music but with acting--albeit mostly
in limited, race-restricted roles marked by his ever-present smile. But
he was also a regular on radio programs and, in the 1960s, he made the
move to TV, appearing on such top-rated programs as The Ed Sullivan
Show and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

"Most people don't know that it wasn't so much his music making as his
film career that made him a real star," Teachout says.

Armstrong, the son of a New Orleans hooker, was a more robust and
complicated man than the popular image, given to sharp outbursts of
anger over transgressions he quickly forgot about. He was married four
times "and had numerous dalliances in between and during these
marriages. For the average reader, the Armstrong that emerges from the
pages of this book is going to be a much more complex figure and I
think a much more interesting one."

But what makes the book stand out, Teachout says, is the nuance he was
able to introduce because the newly released tapes let him eavesdrop on
moments of Armstrong's life that were unavailable to previous
biographers.

"Armstrong, although he was a very self-aware man, was also a very
un-self-conscious man," Teachout says. "The tape recorder became a part
of his life.... He is the only major jazz musician who has left behind
a very large body of documents of this kind."

Author Information
Veteran journalist Scott Martelle is the author of Blood Passion: The
Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West (Rutgers, 2007).

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

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