[Dixielandjazz] Louis Armstrong biography reviewed

[Robert Ringwald]

Louis Armstrong biography reviewed
On Louis Armstrong
by David Schiff
The Nation, March 1, 2010
Reading "Pops," Terry Teachout's new biography of Louis Armstrong, I was reminded,
over and over again, of the line about the Broadway show where you walk in humming
the tunes. No sooner has the audience settled into their seats than Teachout begins
revisiting hallowed moments in Armstrong's career. Here is Armstrong's inauspicious
birth, on August 4, 1901, into the gritty depths of the New Orleans caste system,
and here his musical mentorship with Joe "King" Oliver, a lifelong hero, and their
groundbreaking recording of "Dippermouth Blues." A little later, there's Armstrong's
partnership with Earl Hines, which widened the spectrum of jazz with "West End Blues"
and "Weatherbird," and his recordings of cheesy pop numbers like "Sweethearts on
Parade," which showed singers from Billie Holiday onward how to transmute tin-pan
tunes into gold. And here, too, are familiar moments from the later career: the endless
tours with the All Stars, no gig complete without "Rockin' Chair" sung (and ritually
mocked) with Jack Teagarden; the State Department tours; "Blueberry Hill," "Mack
the Knife," "Hello, Dolly!"; and the charges, from the jazz establishment, of selling
out, and from younger jazz giants, like Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, of being
an Uncle Tom. As Gary Giddins has explained, they reconsidered the charge after Armstrong
told a reporter that President Eisenhower was "two-face" and had "no guts" for acting
indecisively when Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus barred black children from entering
a white school.
The story is a familiar one, and not only because "Pops," as Teachout admits, is
"less a work of scholarship than an exercise in synthesis." (In other words, there's
little evidence of original research, and no new revelations about the life or the
music.) Gary Giddins's "Satchmo," from 1988, remains the best appreciation of a musician
whose genius as a trumpeter, improviser, singer and entertainer still defies comparison.
Other biographies, most notably Laurence Bergreen's "Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant
Life" (1997), sleuthed much of the life story. More important, Armstrong told his
own story, and in words more pungent than any scholar's or critic's, in "Swing That
Music" (1936) and "Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans" (1954), as well as in less guarded
private writings edited by musicologist Thomas Brothers for the collection "In His
Own Words" (2006).
"Pops" also has a didactic bent, and with it far older precedents. Teachout has tailored
Armstrong's life story along lines that recall Horatio Alger, a parallel he notes
early on, and "The Pilgrim's Progress," an analogy not explicitly drawn but implicit
in the scene setting: "Faced with the terrible realities of the time and place into
which he had been born, he did not repine, but returned love for hatred and sought
salvation in work." I must have been humming a hymn. Stories repeated, embellished
and reinflected in an "exercise in synthesis" may be pleasing or flattering to read,
especially if they confirm one's tastes or prejudices, but they amount to mythology,
not history. Even if we accept the premise that "Pops" is not scholarship but journalism,
it violates the first principle of that form: don't give the reader secondhand news.
-30


--Bob Ringwald K6YBV
rsr at ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
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