Louis Armstrong

Louis Daniel Armstrong was born in New Orleans on the fourth of August 1901, in a tenement on Jane Alley that bordered the city's red-light district. He learned the cornet in the New Orleans Colored Waif's Home for Boys, to which he had been committed at thirteen for firing a pistol in the street on New Year's Eve. He left in 1914 and apprenticed under the cornetist Joe "King" Oliver in the brass bands of New Orleans.

He joined Oliver's Creole Jazz Band in Chicago in 1922. Within four years he had produced — under his own name with the Hot Five and Hot Seven studio groups in Chicago between 1925 and 1928 — the recordings that established the soloist as the central voice of jazz. "West End Blues," "Heebie Jeebies," "Potato Head Blues," and "Cornet Chop Suey" reorganized the rhythmic, harmonic, and improvisational possibilities of the music. Subsequent generations of jazz musicians — Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis (also placed in this archive), John Coltrane — built on the foundation Armstrong laid.

He led big bands through the 1930s and 1940s, fronted the All Stars small group from 1947, and across the 1950s and 1960s became the most recognizable Black American figure in the world. His 1964 recording of "Hello, Dolly!" displaced the Beatles from the top of the Billboard Hot 100 — Armstrong was sixty-three.

He appeared in over fifty films, hosted nationally syndicated radio programs, and conducted State Department-sponsored tours to thirty-five countries on five continents through the late 1950s and 1960s.

He died in his Queens, New York, home on the sixth of July 1971, age sixty-nine.

He is honored here as the trumpeter who founded the soloist tradition of American jazz.