[Dixielandjazz] Louis Armstrong

[Robert Ringwald]

Satchmo on St. Pat's Day
by George Bornstein
Detroit News, March 17, 2011
When making his breakthrough recordings with his Hot Five in 1926, young Louis Armstrong
took care to include a new song on which he had collaborated with Percy Venable.
Sandwiched between the better-known "You Made Me Love You" and "Willie the Weeper"
came "Irish Black Bottom," an Irish twist on the original New Orleans jazz classic
"Black Bottom."
With Armstrong breaking into raucous laughter at the line "And I was born in Ireland,"
the tune ends with the lines, "All over Ireland you can see / The people dancin'
in, / Cause Ireland's gone Black Bottom crazy now."
The playful racial masquerade, a reversal of more traditional Irish contributions
to blackface minstrelsy, signaled Armstrong's lifelong artistic devotion to racial
and cultural hybridity. "It's no crime for cats of any color to get together and
blow," he once remarked. "Race-conscious jazz musicians? Nobody could be who really
knew their horns and loved the music."
Such boundary crossing started early for Satchmo. In an interview with Life magazine,
he listed among his early influences the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band,
the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso and sopranos Amelita Galli-Curci and Luisa Terazzini
and especially "the Irish tenor, John McCormack -- beautiful phrasing." Later Armstrong
became one of the first jazz musicians to play to large audiences in Ireland, with
his wildly successful Belfast concert of 1962 and two shows in Dublin five years
later attended by 4,000 people.
Armstrong's connection to other groups than his own didn't stop with the Irish. Perhaps
most important among the others were Jews, beginning with the Karnovsky family who
hired, mentored and looked after him as a boy after he left the Colored Waif's Home
in New Orleans.
According to his moving late memoir "Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans,"
they fed him regular meals and staked him to his first horn. In tribute to them,
he wore a Star of David around his neck regularly after that. The jazz photographer
Herb Snitzer created a famous photo of Louis on bus tour in 1960 with striped white
shirt open, cigarette in hand, and the necklace clearly visible. "He wore the Star
his entire life," recalled Snitzer. "He was the least prejudiced musician I ever
knew."
Satchmo practiced what he preached, welcoming musicians of all backgrounds into a
majority African-American enterprise. He even dedicated "Louis Armstrong + the Jewish
Family" to his Jewish manager Joe Glaser, calling him "the best friend that I've
ever had." Similarly, he featured in concerts and recorded numerous hits by white
composers, including Irving Berlin's early "Alexander's Ragtime Band." Armstrong
also recorded Berlin duets with Ella Fitzgerald.
Such crossovers pervade the history of jazz and of popular music. The African-American
stride pianist Willie "The Lion" Smith, born four years before Satchmo, described
his own ancestry as French, Spanish, Negro and Mohawk Indian, calling himself "an
American pianist" in the subtitle of his autobiography.
The linkages and mixtures favored by Armstrong and the others pervade our past. A
son of Irish immigrants, Mayor John Hynes of Boston slyly undercut fantasies of purity
half a century ago in introducing at a rally the first Jew to become mayor of Dublin.
"We have here with us two fine fellows -- an Irishman and a Jew," he told the crowd.
"I give him to you now, Lord Mayor Robert Briscoe."
Satchmo would have agreed in his consistent opposition to barriers that divide us
into separate categories.
As he told a group of journalists who challenged his inclusion of Israel on a tour
of the Mideast with his All Stars, "Let me tell you something, man. That horn. You
see that horn? That horn ain't prejudiced. A note's a note in any language."
__________
George Bornstein is a professor of literature emeritus at the University of Michigan
and author of the book "The Colors of Zion: Blacks, Jews, and Irish 1845-1945," from
Harvard University Press.


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
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An Irish Man is sitting in the pub with his wife and he says, "I love you."
She asks, "Is that you or the beer talking?"
He replies, "It's me talking to the beer."