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[smooth jazz music playing]
[Orson Welles] I think it's time now to sweeten the air
with a little entertainment.
But not on the principle of escapism, but on the principle of affirmation.
And there's scarcely a more affirmative artist in, uh,
the musical world than my old friend whom I'm going to bring out now,
on the theory that music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.
And because he is,
past all question, one of the greatest influences,
uh, in American music
and the greatest influence in jazz of all time.
It's my… [sighs] …great pleasure to bring you my great friend,
-Louis Armstrong. -[applause]
[trumpet playing jazz melody]
["Black and Blue" playing]
[Wynton Marsalis] The whole world embraced Louis Armstrong.
He was bringing a gift, the gift of a presentness
and a naturalness and a depth of insight.
And the ability to act on those insights in the moment.
And it was in a difficult form like music.
And that type of electric virtuosity has not been seen before or since.
[Archie Shepp] Without him,
many things that happen today in jazz would not be possible.
And I think that Mr. Armstrong has not gotten a good deal
of the credit that's due to him.
[Count Basie] He has been the number one man in his department.
He is really the ambassador of the whole thing,
so there will never be another one like this.
[singing "Black and Blue"]
[vocalizing]
[singing continues]
[Lucille Armstrong] Well, he was a very, very deep person.
He was very much aware of world activities,
what was happening everywhere.
We would have our discussions at home.
He had been asked by many reporters in interviews
what did he think about a certain particular thing.
And Louis would say, "Well, man, you know, I'm just a musician."
He never would come out publicly
because his, uh, theory was that "what I say carries a lot of weight."
And he says, "And I just won't do it." But at home, he had his opinions.
[singing continues]
[Louis Armstrong] American people, they the most grandest people on Earth.
And I'm from America, well, quite naturally…
[stammers] …I don't have no fucking flag
other than a Black flag. [laughs]
[song ends]
[audience cheering]
[Armstrong] Thank you, folks.
Thank you.
♪ Now I'll be glad when you're dead You rascal you ♪
♪ I'll be glad when you're dead You rascal you ♪
♪ Boy, when you're laying six feet deep ♪
♪ No more fried chicken will you eat ♪
[laughs]
♪ Oh, you dog ♪
♪ I know that'll break your heart ♪
[Marsalis] My father would say, "You have to check Pops out."
I was going, "Man, I don't want Pops."
In New Orleans, too, where so much what we call
"Uncle Tomming" goes on.
Playing Dixie, shuffling.
In my time, I hated that with an unbelievable passion.
When I was growing up, there was no way for me to even express
the type of anger and hatred I had toward that type of behavior.
So, I could not appreciate Armstrong.
But when I left New Orleans, and I was in New York at that time,
my father sent me a tape.
He said, "Man, why don't you learn one of these Pops solos?"
[upbeat jazz music playing]
So I put it on and I started to work on it.
Man, I could not play this solo at all.
Just the endurance of-- of Louis Armstrong.
He never stopped playing. He was always up around high B's.
And when we got to the final chorus, I-- I called my father.
I said, "Man, I didn't understand about Pops."
He just started laughing. He said, "That's right."
[Dan Morgenstern] Louis loved his home in Queens.
Some people said that it wasn't palatial enough.
And he didn't wanna move anywhere else.
When tape came on the scene, Louis became enamored of that.
And he used it most of all for conversations.
He had friends come to the house, and he would tape it.
[Steve Allen] Louis had a lot of what I would describe as archival materials.
I mean, tapes and-- and things like that.
[Lucille] He had his own study. It was taboo to everyone.
That was his. He'd close that door and nobody bothered him.
He had his tapes and everything of his was in there.
[Marsalis] I've heard a lot of reel-to-reels of Pops just talking.
Everyday life recordings.
His humanity comes through.
[Armstrong] I got tapes on my wall in my den.
For 40 years, Lucille had one of them Tandbergs
put up there with two tapes together.
That really knocked me out because we couldn't afford no den
in, uh, them early days.
No, we've gotta sleep in that room. [laughs]
-[interviewer 1] Now you got a den. -Now I got a den.
I got all of my tapes around the walls and just pick out what I wanna hear.
[Lucille] He was the busiest person, taking care of things when he was home.
It was his relaxation.
He would sit up in his study for hours and hours,
indexing his tapes.
[Fred Ware] And he has a hobby of cutting out pictures,
you know, and paste them up on the ceiling in his den, all over the walls.
[Lucille] I've got scrapbooks that Louis had
that were made up when he first played the Palladium back in '32.
Most of the pictures and the newspaper write-ups have gone yellow.
[Ricky Riccardi] People asked all the time,
"Why is he recording these tapes?
Why is he writing down all of his thoughts?"
And all this kind of stuff.
He knew that one day they were gonna write about him in the history books.
And so he wanted to make sure all sides of him-- good, bad, ugly--
were gonna be captured and preserved by himself.
Not by anybody else.
Hello, folks. This is old Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong.
I just finished this concert here and, uh,
I feel good 'cause, uh, I had a nice supper of Wiener schnitzels.
Uh… [laughs]
Glad to see you around and, uh, dig the concerts.
We've been playing every night around the neighborhood cities.
So, later. Goodbye.
[singing "Mack the Knife"]
[Edward Murrow] Louis Armstrong is the prime minister of the world of jazz.
He and his trumpet are at the summit.
His European concerts have broken all records.
Satchmo is one of our more valuable items for export.
His recordings are hot on both sides of the iron curtain.
[song continues]
[interviewer 2] Satchmo, you always draw an audience, don't you?
Yeah, man. That shows you there's cats in all walks of life.
[laughs]
[Morgenstern] He broke so many barriers.
He would be the first Black performer to open up a club,
a ballroom, a radio station.
He was the first Black movie performer to have his name above the title.
[crowd cheering]
[Murrow] Don't you ever get tired?
[Armstrong] Well, daddy, I'm just a little beat from my youth.
You had quite a session here tonight.
Yeah, we just start playing it the same as we did in the tailgates in New Orleans.
-Mm-hmm. -It's the same music.
And it's, uh, universal, daddy.
♪ Yes, way down yonder in New Orleans ♪
♪ Man, you should have made All those scenes ♪
[Nas] "Just saying 'Hello, folks'
over a microphone sounds simple and innocent, doesn't it?
But I remember when it wasn't so simple.
Back in 1931, I was invited to play in my hometown,
New Orleans, at a fancy nightclub, the Suburban Gardens."
[Danny Barker] You spent a lot of time in New Orleans, in the South,
looking for signs.
You see a restroom that said, "White Gentlemen."
This always was a put-down.
So, you saw that flashing in your face all the time.
[train horn blares]
[George James] The only way Louis would agree to go to New Orleans
was on his own private train.
Which meant that we could have our private car, our cooks,
chefs, porters and things like that.
[Armstrong] In New Orleans, we're, quite naturally,
the first band on the radio down there…
[radio announcer] Fleischmann's Yeast presents
another great half hour of entertainment,
featuring music by Louis Armstrong and his orchestra.
[Armstrong] And you never heard of no spade playing on no radio
in those days. Just starting.
The night we opened, there's all the white boys
that I was raised with, you know.
Sitting up there, sharp. [stammers]
They done got rich. Maybe their fathers done left 'em the--
the produce places and different things
that when we was kids we used to hang around.
And after school, we'd go out in the lots and play cowboys and Indians
with old broken slates and things like that.
-You know what I mean? We-- -[Cavett] Mm-hmm.
We was the Indians, of course.
[audience laughs]
[James] And at that time, there was no mixing of the races at all.
The only way our people could hear the band
was to come out and sit along the levee and hear--
and hear the music from the-- from a distance.
[Armstrong] They had 50,000 Negroes on the levee to hear my music.
See, and I had been away about nine or ten years
and, uh, I done got northern-fied.
I done forgot about a whole lot of that foolishness down there, you know?
The night we're opening, and I'm charming,
-and there's-- place pack and jam. -[audience laughs]
But this night, they done brought this man up to-- "It's a big deal, now.
You-- You bring on Louis Armstrong.
He's a New Orleans boy and blah, blah, blah."
But… [stammers] …a second before this cat had to go to that mic
and bring me on, he walked away.
Say, "I just can't introduce that nigger. Can't do it."
They got me and told me what he says. I said, "Well, don't worry about it."
You know? I said, "Give me that card, boys."
And I walked to that mic. And when I went into…
♪ Pale moon shining ♪
Man, you thought the walls was coming in.
♪ Now the pale moon's shining ♪
♪ On the fields below ♪
♪ The folks are crooning soft and low ♪
♪ You needn't tell me, boy ♪
♪ Because I know, yes ♪
♪ When it's sleepy time down South, yes ♪
[Armstrong] And this announcer's standing there.
He said, "I didn't know this would happen in the South in New Orleans.
Never happened before."
So, they fired him and everything, and I took over myself.
[audience laughing]
[applause]
♪ Good evening, everybody ♪
[audience cheering, whistling]
[Marsalis] It was particularly galling for him to go home
after being lionized the way he was around the world
and see the same type of prejudice.
His feelings were perpetually hurt by the nation
and the injustice that he knew when he was a boy.
Pops grew up very hard.
[interviewer 3] It's been said, Pops,
that you were brought up in abject poverty.
You didn't have money when you were a kid, though.
[Armstrong] We always had money. I could shoot craps, sold newspapers,
and I always hustled on the, uh--
with the quartet and a little guitar, just sit and go busking.
And I always had a pocket full of money.
You know, in 1915, you had five dollars, you had a whole lot of money.
And I didn't ever have to beg nobody for nothing all my life.
Always a kid that had some get-up about him.
[Armstrong] I was born in, uh-- in James Alley, they called it.
It's… [stammers] …uh, back of town. That's the-- the real New Orleans.
We have a photo of your mama I wanna show everybody.
-Yeah. That's my mother there, Mayann. -[Douglas] How did she discipline you?
What did she do when you did something wrong?
[Armstrong] She had to whip the hell out of us both.
[audience laughing]
And, man, she hit me like a man.
And then she married Willie Armstrong.
I mean, I'm only going by what they tell me along that line.
'Cause as long as I can remember, they wasn't together.
We didn't have much money and things like that.
But we lived and, uh, enjoyed good food. And--
-[Douglas] You had a lot of fun? -Yeah.
My mother could take 15 cents and go to the Poydras Market
and come back and cook a meal.
And you had to lick your fingers, it was just so good.
-You know what I mean? Yes, sir. -For 15 cents?
In those days, you could take a newspaper,
and I'd go to the fish market
and buy a whole newspaper full of fish heads.
Just plain, chopped-off fish heads
that, uh, they wouldn't use, they put aside.
[Douglas] Yeah. That'd be garbage for them, wouldn't it?
Well, they just ain't got time to do what we did with--
-[Douglas] Yeah. -My mother would get them fish heads
and cook 'em and put a lot of canned tomatoes in 'em
and call it court bouillon and serve it on top of some rice.
Boy, you talking about beautiful food. And delicious.
And the next morning, I'd go to school with a cabbage sandwich.
-Kids would be begging for a bite. -[audience laughs]
-No kidding? -Absolutely. Yeah.
[Jelly Roll Morton] New Orleans was a stomping ground.
Well, they played every type of music.
Everyone, no doubt, had a different style. They had every class.
We had Spanish. We had coloreds. We had whites.
[Armstrong] I was working for some Jewish people at seven years old.
They had, uh, a rags-and-bones yard.
And then we used to go down to the red-light district
and deliver stone coal, five cents a water bucket.
♪ I've got those coal cart blues ♪
♪ I'm really all confused ♪
♪ I'm 'bout to lose my very mind ♪
♪ It always worry, worry me all the time ♪
[Humphrey Lyttleton] The center of entertainment in New Orleans
was Storyville, the notorious red-light district.
[Nas] "The Negroes were only allowed to work in the red-light district.
Most of the help was Negroes.
They were paid good salaries and had a longtime job.
The pay was swell no matter what your vocation was.
No mixing at the guest tables at no time.
As far as to buy a little trim, that was absolutely out of the question."
[Armstrong] Down in the district, the red-light district.
As you call them, "prostitutes,"
where they get five dollars for a job,
the whores where I'm talking about, up in my neighborhood,
they get, uh, 50 cents to a dollar.
Well, quite naturally,
they're standing there with nothing on but a-- a chemise.
We'd call 'em teddies at the time, you know. [chuckles]
So, there I'd be, a little boy, and put some coal on the grates, you know.
Quite naturally, you gotta take a mug there right quick.
If they'd seen me, they'd have slapped me down.
Yeah, I actually did all that.
[chuckles] But I-- I used to hear all that good music too.
[Armstrong] That's how I got a chance to hear Bunk Johnson,
Manuel Perez, and all the best bands and everything, you see?
[interviewer 4] They were all in the red-light district?
[Armstrong] Yeah, they-- Each corner had a band.
Cabarets, they called them, see?
And we'd dance. [laughs]
And I'd be waving at 'em all.
And when they'd go inside, we had to go to bed and sleep. [chuckles]
[narrator] New Year's Eve, 1912. Louis and his pals were out on the street.
And they were celebrating and making noise like everybody else.
And somehow, Louis got hold of a .38 revolver.
I found this pistol. Uh, got blanks in it.
But the noise is what everybody give you.
So when I look around, a little guy was shooting
a little old six-shooter across the street. Uh, you know.
[imitating gunshots]
So, I was singing in a little quartet, you know,
we used to go around and pass the hat, you know.
And they called me Dipper at that time. Dippermouth, you know.
They say, "Get him, Dipper."
And I reached up there to grab the .38 and…
[imitating gunshots]
…and brighten it up
until that detective was hugging me and-and I said, "Oh…"
[Armstrong] In those days, the cops would whip your head
and then ask you your name afterwards, you know?
And, uh, you think that's something that's, uh, changed?
Well, I haven't been down there in so long. I'm gonna go down and see.
[both laugh]
And I couldn't get away from him.
He took me down to the juvenile court
and, uh, then, the next day, they took me out to the orphanage.
It-- It was called Colored Waif's Home for Boys.
[interviewer 5] When was the first time in your life
that you actually picked up a horn?
[Armstrong] Oh, that was, uh, you know, when I went to the orphanage.
I was about 13.
This is the first horn that Louis Armstrong ever owned.
We did not have much money, but we are proud of encouraging him.
[Armstrong] The little brass band was very good,
and Mr. Davis made the boys play a little of every kind of music.
[host] When he first arrived at your home,
could you tell right away he wanted to be a musician?
-We could, yes. -How could you tell that?
-Because he organized quartets, singing… -[host] Mm-hmm.
…then he introduced dancing out there, tap dancing.
The boys would clap and sing, and he'd sing and dance.
Then when I did get him to play
"When the Saints Go Marching In,"
"Put On Your Old Grey Bonnet,"
there was a high note to be out on
-because it was at the end of the strain. -[host] Yeah.
None of the other boys couldn't make it.
-And I couldn't make it myself. -Mm-hmm.
But he would blow the high C above the staff
to let us know that's the end of the strain.
[Armstrong] Every day I practiced faithfully
on the lessons Mr. Davis gave me.
I became so good on the cornet that one day Mr. Davis said to me,
"Louis, I'm going to make you leader of the band."
I jumped straight up into the air.
[Bigard] You see, what people don't understand, in New Orleans,
the majority of the musicians haven't had the opportunity
of having a teacher.
And they only pick up an instrument and just fool around with it
until they begin to try to get some kind of tone or notes out of it.
And that's how they started.
[Armstrong] We had military training in the orphanage.
And "Star-Spangled Banner,"
we was taught that that was our national anthem.
And you're supposed to stand up and salute.
And I was taught to play that tune
with every spark I had in my soul.
On our lands we was taught.
And when we play it, that's the feeling I have.
And then they hoist that flag.
[vocalizing "The Star-Spangled Banner"]
Note for note, I still remember.
[continues vocalizing song]
[interviewer 6] Do you have a happy feeling when you play that song?
[Armstrong] I feel that I'm somebody.
Yeah.
When I finish playing "Star-Spangled Banner,"
I feel just as proud as anybody that-- that ever picked up a gun,
shouldered a rifle, and said, "Forward march."
[people cheering]
[band plays "Star-Spangled Banner"]
[Morgenstern] I was with James Baldwin, listening to Louis,
and he played a great set.
And then he ended with "The Star-Spangled Banner."
And James turned to me, and he said,
"You know, that's the first time I've liked that song."
What he heard from Louis
did away with all the stuff that was accumulated around it.
And just in the purity that Louis brought to it
made him appreciate it.
[Riccardi] Everybody talks about Hendrix and "The Star-Spangled Banner."
[guitar playing "Star-Spangled Banner"]
But Armstrong was performing it as early as World War II.
You know, right after Pearl Harbor, he started putting it in his repertoire.
And he is going on stage and pouring his soul into that song.
And there's pride,
but there's also a tremendous amount of hurt every time you hear him play it.
[Marsalis] Louis Armstrong was coming from a 40-year memory of what slavery was.
He understood that there was a battle in this country,
so he was trying to use his music to transform and reform
and lead the country closer to its higher ideals.
[trumpet playing "Star-Spangled Banner"]
[interviewer 7] Who, if anybody, was the biggest influence on your early life?
-What, in music? -[interviewer 7] In music.
[Armstrong] King Oliver.
'Cause I-- Outside of the Waif's Home… [stammers] …the orphanage.
When I got out, he took me over.
And he always told me, "Never play a lot of that jiujitsu music.
Play the lead. You got a good tone,
and you know how to phrase, and it says something."
And I carried his cornet when he wasn't blowing and marching.
And the police would have been running me out the parade.
You know, I stayed with him on it.
But that's my man.
You play in that hot sun, you know, with that uniform on,
and he put a hanky on his neck to keep the sun off his neck.
And he was really blowing that horn.
["Snake Rag" playing]
[radio reporter] When the authorities closed down sinful old Storyville,
more than 200 musicians suddenly found themselves out of work.
King Oliver had left town anyhow for Chicago,
where they had heard that their kind of music,
called jazz up north,
was getting very popular.
[Nas] "I have always been crazy over Joe Oliver and his playing.
So when Joe sent for me to join him in Chicago,
I was happy because I knew I'd feel at home
and he'd see after me."
[Barker] Chicago was about
the second most popular section for Black people in the country.
It was a great migration point where people went off
from Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas.
You could walk to Chicago,
just keep walking if you had enough muscles in your legs.
[Armstrong] I'd have gone back home
if I knew I'd be pushed out into all them tall buildings.
Finally, I went to the Lincoln Garden and, uh…
played that music.
I was so happy I did not know what to do. I had hit the big time.
I was up north with the greats.
I was playing with my idol, the king.
All of my boyhood dreams had come true at last.
[Lil Hardin] All along, I'd been hearing from all the musicians about Little Louis,
and what a good trumpet player he was gonna be.
So, when he brought Little Louis over to Dreamland to meet me,
Little Louis was 226 pounds. [chuckles]
So I said, "Little Louis?
How come you call him Little Louis as big as he is?"
I wasn't impressed at all. I was very disappointed.
I probably would have never paid any attention to Louis's playing
if King Oliver hadn't said to me one night
that Louis could play better than he could.
He says, "But as long as I keep him with me,
he won't be able to get ahead of me. I'll still be the king."
After he told me that, I started listening.
But when we got this recording date in Richmond, Indiana, for Gennett,
in trying to get the balance,
Joe and Louis stood right next to each other,
as they always had,
and you couldn't hear a note that Joe was playing
and only could hear Louis.
So he said, "Well, I gotta do something."
So they put Louis about 15 feet away, over in the corner, from the band.
And, uh, Louis was sitting in the co-- standing in the corner, looking so sad.
You know, he thought it was bad for him to have to be separated from the band.
And so, I-- I looked at him and smiled
to reassure him that he was all right, you know.
And then I said to myself,
"Now, if, uh, they have to put him that far away in order to hear Joe,
he's gotta be better."
Then I was convinced.
Then Louis and I started getting to be sweethearts.
Then we decided to get married.
I told him, I said, "Now, I don't want to be married to a second trumpet player."
He says, "What are you talking about?"
I said, "Well, I don't want to be married to second trumpet.
I want you to play first."
He said, "Well, I can't play first. Joe's playing first."
I said, "Well, that's why you gotta quit."
He said, "I can't quit Mr. Joe.
Mr. Joe sent for me, and I can't quit him."
I said, "Well, it's Mr. Joe or me." [chuckles]
[Armstrong] I listened very carefully when Lil told me
to always play the lead.
[Doc Cheatham] He played 30 or 50 high notes, high C's,
on this one tune they were playing.
And the next day, everybody on the street was talking about it.
[Lil Hardin] People would come to two or three shows
waiting for him to miss it one day. [chuckles]
So, he said to me,
"Do you know people are coming to the show four or five times
to hear me miss that F?"
I said, "Yeah? Well, make some G's at home."
So, he started blowing around the house. [imitating trumpet]
I said, "Oh, my God. Why did I say that?"
[announcer] He never misses hitting that high note, does he, folks?
[Riccardi] Armstrong extends the range of the horn,
ending every show with hundreds of high C's.
Just from that, more and more musicians start playing higher notes.
He really perfects the art of improvisation.
He shows the world what it could be.
[Lucille] Tommy Rockwell had heard him,
so it was he who suggested that he form an, uh, recording outfit.
And as a result, it was called, uh, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five.
["Gut Bucket Blues" playing]
[musician] Oh, do that thing, Papa Dip.
[interviewer 8] You didn't work in clubs with the--
[Armstrong] No, we never did, uh, think about nothing like that.
Uh, we just, uh, make up them things and, uh, scat. [stammering] Yeah.
[interviewer 8] Wait. "Make up them things."
-What do you mean? -Make up those tunes.
-[interviewer 8] Just in the studio? -Yeah, sure.
♪ Say, don't you know it ♪
[scatting]
[Cavett] There's a rumor that you invented scat. Is that true?
[Armstrong] Well, they claim when we was recording "Heebie Jeebies,"
we get down to this part for the second chorus,
and I drop the paper.
President in the control booth, he says, "Keep on singing."
-See? -[Cavett] Yeah.
Well, that, uh, brought back memories of when I was a kid,
going around in the quartet.
You know, Rampart Street in New Orleans.
Whenever we'd get to a part we didn't know the words,
we'd go to scatting and blowing like a trumpet,
or something like that.
-[Cavett] Mm-hmm. -And it came to me just like that.
[Armstrong scatting]
[Marsalis] When he's scatting, the notes he's picking,
and how sophisticated the melodies he's creating--
Louis Armstrong is never out of tune.
He could do with his voice what he could do with his horn.
[Stanley Crouch] When people sang in those days,
they often sang in a very corny manner like…
♪ And I love you ♪
♪ And you and me ♪
♪ And the baby makes three ♪
-♪ Dinah ♪ -[vocalizing]
-♪ Is there anyone finer ♪ -[vocalizing]
-♪ In the state of Carolina? ♪ -[vocalizing]
♪ If there is and you know her Know her ♪
[harmonizing]
[Marsalis] But Armstrong came in with another kind of thing
where he had that kind of…
[vocalizing]
…you know. [vocalizing]
♪ Oh, Dinah ♪
♪ Is there anyone finer In the state of Carolina? ♪
♪ If there is and you know Show me ♪
♪ Dinah With her Dixie eyes blazin' ♪
♪ How I love to sit and gaze ♪
♪ Into the eyes of Dinah Lee ♪
♪ Babe, every night ♪
♪ When I shake with fright, oh ♪
♪ 'Cause my Dinah might Change her mind ♪
[scatting]
[Riccardi] Armstrong completely changes the way people sing.
I'm talking soul singing. I'm talking Ray Charles.
I'm talking Sam Cooke. I'm talking James Brown.
I'm talking hip-hop. I'm talking funk. I'm talking pop music.
I'm talking rock and roll. I'm talking the Beatles.
[chuckles] Anybody who has basically uttered a sound
on American pop radio in the last 90 years,
it's because of Louis Armstrong's innovations.
[trumpet playing jazz melody]
[trumpet plays high note]
[Leonard Feather] I met Louis on records.
That "West End Blues" was a very, very moving experience,
and it actually made a jazz fan out of me
and ultimately found the direction for my whole career,
as it did for so many people.
"West End Blues" was a miniature masterpiece.
[Artie Shaw] I would say that jazz almost stems from Louis Armstrong.
People are accustomed to saying,
and I've heard it said a lot, that he was a genius.
Uh, but very few people talk about why he was a genius
and what it was that his particular form of genius did.
I could say now that what he was really doing
was playing music for which there was no accounting
in his immediate environment.
[Shepp] Louis Armstrong is the first important soloist
because he is the first to break away from Western harmony
and to reintroduce the melodic
and rhythmic developments of-- of African music.
Stop it! Stop it!
You are playing notes between flat and natural.
It's like discovering, uh, a secret scale just made for this type of music.
The so-called jazz scale is used only melodically.
That is, in the tune.
In the harmony underneath, we still use our old unflatted notes
against the flatted note in the tune.
So that causes a dissonance to happen.
Jazz pianists are always using this dissonance.
I'm sure it sounds familiar to you.
-[plays piano] -And there's a reason for it.
It's because they are looking for a note that isn't actually there,
but which lies somewhere between the two.
This is called a quarter tone.
The quarter tone comes to us from Africa, which is, after all, the cradle of jazz
and where quarter tones are everyday stuff.
Now, ladies and gentlemen,
we gonna take a little trip through the jungles this time,
and we want y'all to travel with us.
That tiger's running so fast.
Gonna take a few choruses to catch him, so I want y'all to count with me.
Yes, sir.
Because this son-of-a-trumpet is gonna get away from you this time.
Lay it out there, boys. I'm ready.
[Lyttleton] At this time in his career, Louis was having problems with managers,
and, inevitably, the gangsters took a hand in his affairs.
There were certain interests in New York
who thought the trumpet king belonged there.
[Armstrong] The gangster which was the toughest man in, uh--
in Chicago at that time, Frankie Foster,
he said, "You know you're going to New York tomorrow?"
I told him, "I didn't know nothing about that.
Nobody told me nothing about it."
I said, "Excuse me a minute. I'm going back on the stand."
He said, "You're going to New York tomorrow."
-That's when he pulled that .45. -[acquaintance] Mmm.
[Armstrong] I said, "Well, maybe I am going to New York."
[acquaintances laugh]
[Feather] The whole business end of music at that time
was controlled by white people.
They were not all crooks.
They were not all manipulating Black people,
but, uh, quite a few of them were.
It was very difficult for a Black musician
not to be very bitter about the entire system at that time.
But Louis was one of those few, rare people
that never gave the impression of being bitter,
whether it was under the surface or not.
[Armstrong] Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Mr. Armstrong.
And we're gonna swing one of the good old good ones for you.
Beautiful number, "I Cover the Waterfront."
"I Cover the Waterfront," I like it.
[mumbles]
One, two.
[band playing "I Cover The Waterfront"]
[singing]
[Armstrong] In 1932, first time I went to Europe.
We used to travel by boats.
Johnny Collins was my manager then.
[interviewer 9] Didn't they give you the name of Satchmo over here?
Yeah. Given by, uh, Fuzzy Brooks.
Uh, he was the editor of the Melody Maker at that time.
When I arrived in Plymouth, England, on the ship,
and then somebody's going up there, "Hello, Satchmo."
When I went all through Europe and everything with different cats,
you know, trying to be managing things,
I said, "These are the people I don't want to be bothered with.
They're doing everything but protecting their trumpet."
See, I had a manager who would--
who would grab all the money out the box office.
You know, that frantic stuff, you know.
I say, "Well, that ain't what I wanna do."
[Briggs] Around about that time that Louis Armstrong found out
that his managing director, Mr. Collins, was making, uh, £20,000 a week for him,
and Louis was getting about-- say, about £100 a week.
And he asked for more money,
and Mr. Collins, uh, he used some beautiful adjectives.
[Armstrong] I said, "Listen, cocksucker, you might be my manager
and you might be the biggest shit,
and… [stammers] …and book me in the biggest places in the world,
but when I get out on that fucking stage with that horn and get in trouble,
you can't save me."
He said, "Take that nigger off the boat."
Got to brawling, goddamn it.
Shit.
[muttering]
They gonna have this shit under control.
And there's a big bottle of wine.
All I had to do was take it like that.
And the bald-headed motherfucker had his head down.
And said, "I gotta just tap it like a pansy and kill the motherfucker."
See, but the first thing I thought,
all of them Black cocksuckers in Harlem who'd say,
"I knew he would blow his top someday."
I don't know why… [indistinct] "Fuck it. I got this shit."
"Go on and eat your meal, man." [mumbles]
Not that I hadn't been called a nigger before.
[Trummy Young] He fired Collins. He got rid of him.
But Collins had a contract on him.
So, Louis remembered that he had worked for Joe Glaser,
and that Joe Glaser was tied in with some pretty rough boys around Chicago.
So Louis got in touch with Joe, and he told Joe, he said,
"I'm having a lot of trouble with this guy managing me."
He said, "I'm kind of scared."
He said, "I don't know what he's gonna try to do to me."
He says, um, "But I want you for my manager."
[Armstrong] The toughest guy in the honky-tonk that runs the gambling,
he knew I was getting ready to come up north,
and, uh, this is the pep talk he gave me.
He said, "Look here, son. I like the way you blow that quail."
Talking about my cornet.
I knew what he was talking about. I said, "Yeah."
He said, "Now, you go up north
and always have a white man behind you to say, 'That's my nigger.'"
And that's the way he put it to me.
Now, you can figure that out yourself.
That was the talk.
And Joe Glaser came right in the scene.
-What did the-- -We were just like that.
Because he knew I wanted to blow my horn, and he saw to that.
I said, "This is my man."
I said, "You tend to business, Daddy Glaser.
And I'll blow the horn. And that's where it is."
And it's-- it's been over twenty-some years
and, uh, we ain't even signed a contract. [laughs]
[Slim Thompson] Joe Glaser's a nigga.
Joe Glaser loves Negroes.
[Armstrong] He was raised with niggas.
-He went to school with them. -[Thompson] That's right. That's right.
[Jack Bradley] You know, I always felt there was a weird relationship
between Joe Glaser and Louis.
And I felt Louis was exploited.
Louis believes that he never would've made it without Joe Glaser.
[Ray Nance] I think he wouldn't have.
-[Bradley] That's possible? -[Nance] Quite possible.
You got to have good management. I don't care how great you are.
Good management goes hand in hand with success and talent.
[Bradley] He never wanted anything to do with business, right?
He never even hired the guys in his band.
He just wanted to concentrate on that horn.
["Struttin' With Some Barbecue" playing]
[Young] Glaser-- On the strength of being with Louis--
Louis used to tell us stories
about they used to ride the bus down South with Glaser,
and Glaser didn't-- None of them hardly had enough to eat with.
But on the strength of that, Louis started getting real popular.
Glaser started getting good PR for Louis.
[Chuck Cecil] By 1935, there were probably some who hadn't heard of Louis Armstrong,
and perhaps even those few were erased that year
when he recorded "La Cucaracha,"
"Red Sails in the Sunset," "On Treasure Island."
[Feather] In the summer of 1936,
he said to me, "We're going on a tour of one-night stands.
Why don't you ride along in the bus so you can see what it's like?"
It was a very exhausting trip for musicians in those days.
There were no air-conditioned buses at that time.
[Charlie Holmes] Now, we've traveled 800 miles.
You know, you get up, you can't hardly stand up.
You'd think he would take it easy the first few sets or something like that.
No, you'd get in there and that first number, boy.
Pow, pow, pow.
There was no letup. He was there to entertain the people.
And believe me, that's what he believed in.
No other leader I know would've put up with what he had to go through.
[Morgenstern] Louis became attached to laxatives.
When you traveled on the band bus with him,
and you didn't know too much about laxatives,
he would find a way for you to, uh, imbibe some of it. [chuckles]
When I first got to know him, it was Pluto Water.
But then come Swiss Kriss, which he really got to like.
[ad narrator] Enjoy the fun of eager living.
That radiant, refreshed feeling that comes from everyday regularity.
Don't think for once that Swiss Kriss wasn't in the rudimentals of my life.
But I always did believe in herbs.
-My mother always-- -[David Frost] Believed in?
-Herbs. -[Frost] Herbs.
How do you say it? "Herbs"? "Erbs"?
No, I-- I say-- I say, "Hoibs."
-Well. Okay. -[audience laughs]
-Well, I'll say "herbs." -Herbs.
-You know what I'm talking about. -Herbs. Right.
-They make you trot. -Pardon?
-Anyway. [laughing] -[laughs]
[Armstrong] Have some and just leave it all behind you, daddy.
[audience laughs]
[Morgenstern] He believed that the laxatives
were of primary, uh, significance to your health.
[Young] His doctor traveled with him.
Dr. Schiff told us, "Don't try to emulate this guy at home
because you'd die, probably tomorrow."
Louis was perhaps the strongest guy I ever worked around
because he-- he didn't try to live carefully or anything like this.
He lived the way he wanted to live, and to heck with it.
That's how he lived, you know.
[newscaster] At five o'clock in the morning,
Louis Armstrong had to be rushed to the hospital.
[Young] Louis had a case history of-- of a bad heart for a long time.
We did a thing over in Spoleto, Italy,
and, um, he had a pretty bad heart attack over there.
[Armstrong] In, uh, Spoleto, Italy,
they sent to Rome to get this, uh, special nurse in.
-She was here fast. -[person laughs]
[person] Oh, yeah. She was good-looking too.
[Armstrong] Well, I ain't went with that. I'm trying to get well now.
[both laugh]
When she said, "Uh-huh, Satchmo, eh?" [chuckles]
-She come with this thermometer, you know? -[person] Uh-huh.
[Armstrong] I said, "What you gonna do with that?"
-She said… -[acquaintances laughing]
[Armstrong] And this thermometer…
I said, "Okay. Ah."
"Ah, what?"
[exclaims]
Like, "Ah, y'all trying to kill me."
Now here is one of the miracles of show business,
because when Louis Armstrong was with us in Spoleto, Italy,
certainly Bob Precht and I never thought to see him alive again
because, as you know, he was desperately sick over there.
On the verge of dying, recovered and is now back playing his horn.
♪ Nah, I ain't gonna give nobody None of my jelly roll ♪
[Armstrong scats]
♪ Give you none of it To save your soul ♪
[scatting]
♪ Ain't gonna give nobody None of my jelly roll, jelly roll ♪
[person] You see, the other day I met a man from, uh, Zanzibar
who was telling me quite a lot about racial prejudice.
-[Armstrong] Where? -[person] In, uh, East Africa.
[Armstrong] What, Africa? You get it all over the world.
Right here, you get prejudice. Are you kidding?
-[person] They were-- -[Armstrong] All over the world.
-Not only in Africa. -[person] Many places.
-Right here, you get prejudice. -[person] Here?
[Armstrong] Yeah, everywhere.
-[person] How is it here? -[Armstrong] Well, essence of it all over.
[person] Have you any, uh, examples of it here?
[Armstrong] Well, you can see a whole lot of example--
I can go out there right now, within an hour's time
and see five situations where there's, uh, race prejudice.
[Feather] The discrimination was unbelievable.
I think you had to be part of it,
or to be very close to it,
to get any idea of what it was like to be Black in those days.
It seemed, on the surface,
that, uh, a lot of Black musicians and Black people were accepting it
or were trying to live with it as best they could.
But the resentment, you know, understandably, was tremendous.
And the conditions for living--
I mean, just for finding a place to stay overnight, you know,
uh, finding a place to go get something to eat--
Everything presented its difficulties because everything was segregated.
And I'm talking about even in New York.
[Barker] But it was tragic, what you had to go with this discrimination.
And you had to be tough.
'Cause discrimination, in a sneaky sort of way,
killed a whole lot of musicians because they couldn't understand the code.
[Nas] "Do you know I played 99 million hotels I couldn't stay at?
When I was coming along, a Black man had hell.
On the road, he couldn't find no place to eat, sleep, or use the toilet.
Service station cats see a bus of colored bandsmen drive up,
and they would sprint to lock their restroom doors.
One time in Dallas, Texas,
some ofay stops me as I enter this hotel where I'm blowing the show--
me in a goddamn tuxedo, now--
and tells me I gotta come around to the back door."
[James] In Memphis, at the bus station,
they claimed that the bus needed some work done on it
and they were gonna take it back to have it overhauled.
At that particular time, all the guys in Louis's band were young
and just about as obstinate a bunch of people
as you ever met in your life if they thought they were right.
When nobody would give up the bus,
then they sent for the police and arrested us for inciting a riot.
With the intention of burning up all of our baggage and everything,
luggage and everything,
and putting us in the hoosegow, which they did.
They arrested us all.
[Shaw] He was playing in Los Angeles one time. I don't remember where.
And I, along with some other friends, drove out to hear him play.
And, uh, we got to this place, we were put-- given a table,
and Louis saw me.
He was in the middle of a radio broadcast.
And, uh, then the broadcast was over,
and he disappeared in back.
And I waited.
I thought he'd come over and have a drink,
or a Coca-Cola or a cup of coffee or something.
And he never showed up. I waited about ten minutes.
And finally, I thought, "Well, what's wrong?" I went backstage.
He was back there with his little typewriter.
He was always writing these marvelous letters he wrote.
And I said, "Hi, Pops." He said, "Hey, Artie. How you been?"
I said, "I thought I understood you to indicate
that you'd come over to the table."
He looked at me. He said, "Man, I can't come to your table."
And I said, "Why?" He said, "Oh, they don't allow me to sit--
Well, I can't sit at the tables out there."
Well, I looked at him in total astonishment.
My first reaction was, "Well, why the hell are you playing these places?"
My next reaction was the practical one of, you play where you gotta play.
And, uh, Louis was not in a what we now call civil rights fight.
Louis was in a-- a-- in an individual, uh, fight to survive.
I guess his own inner dignity was able to make him prevail
over all these awful conditions he must have worked with.
[Nas] "As time went on and I made a reputation,
I had to put it in my contracts
that I would not play no place I couldn't stay at.
I was the first Negro in the business to crack them big, white hotels.
Oh, yeah. I pioneered, Pops."
["Rockin' Chair" playing]
[Bigard] People got tired of that situation,
you know, that, uh-- the separate this and the separate that.
If a man is able and capable enough
and could put the-- the things together, what a leader wants, he's--
and he wants to hire 'em, he'd hire 'em.
♪ Old rockin' chair's got me ♪
♪ Old rockin' chair got you, father ♪
[Robbins] What a marvelous, democratic thing music is.
[Armstrong] That's right. We went everywhere together.
and, uh, we never had a hard word or nothing.
We didn't worry about, you know, color.
♪ …gin, son ♪
♪ You know you don't drink gin, father ♪
[Armstrong] I mean, in the early days, we did this.
When those things wasn't happening,
Jack and I was busting those down barriers. [laughs]
Hitting the South there, and just going all over.
[Robbins chuckles]
Some guy asked me,
he said, "Man, you're gonna take Jack Teagarden?"
I said "Now, who am I to tell a white man he can't go down South?"
[all laughing]
And it's all through New Orleans, Texas… [mumbles, laughs]
[Robbins] I guess, more than all of the laws,
music has had more to do with better race relations through the years.
-Hasn't it, Pops? -[Armstrong] It's done a lot.
You remember that white boy, he's a sailor or something,
uh, on one of these battleships a-at Pearl Harbor?
And he caught my show.
And come to find out, he has damn near every record I made
from-- from-- from childhood, even his parents.
But still and all, he expressed himself.
He come up, and he shook my hand after the whole show was over, didn't he?
And he said, "You know, I don't like Negroes."
Right to my fucking face, that motherfucker told me.
And so I said, "Well, I admire your goddamn sincerity."
He said, "I don't like Negroes,
but you one son of a bitch I'm crazy about, baby."
Didn't he?
There, now, you take the majority of white people.
There's, uh, two-thirds of them don't like niggers.
But they always got one nigger that they just crazy about, goddamn it.
Ain't that a bitch?
[Marsalis] Pops, he faced a lot of challenges,
and he always faced them with style
and maintained his sanity and his joy and his embrace of life.
And it was not a simpleminded happiness. It was a transcendent joy.
He had a blessing inside of him that he was acutely aware of.
[Dizzy Gillespie] I remember when I was a neighbor of Louis Armstrong.
We lived within one block of one another
in Corona, Queens, New York, for 15 years.
I went over to his house to wish him a happy birthday…
and to bring him a little present.
And I wound up getting a present myself and also a present for my wife, Lorraine.
[Lucille] If you had a hard-luck story
and you needed something, and you came to Louis, you got it.
This is a throwback.
It's been instilled in him in the old days of-- in New Orleans,
when Louis was a youth coming up.
It was a way of life down there.
They were all poor,
and the one that had a little more than the other
saw to it that the one that has less had a little bit.
So he never outgrew it.
He liked to get to know the people.
That's where it was at with Louis, and I think everyone knows that.
You can see Louis-- see that, uh, in all the years
and with all of the success that Louis has had,
Louis still remained the man in the street himself.
[Armstrong] Royal Theatre was in a poor Negro neighborhood.
Real poor people, I'm telling you.
Until we arrived in town,
it was actually colder--
I'm telling you, it was colder than a well digger's-- Well, you know the rest.
And when I heard about those poor people who couldn't afford to buy hard coal,
I bought it for them.
I went to the coal yard, ordered a ton of coal,
and had the company to deliver it to the lobby of the Royal Theatre.
And had all the folks who needed coal to help themselves,
which made them very happy.
Of course, it all made me stick out my chest with pride.
[Barker] To be in his presence, to see the power that he had--
See, you'd go in his dressing room,
he'd be sitting up, in his underwear, with a towel around his lap
and one around his shoulders and had a white handkerchief on his head.
And he put that grease around his lips.
Looked like a minstrel man, you know, with the white.
And laughing. Natural, see, the way he is.
And in the room, you'll see maybe two nuns, a streetwalker.
You see maybe a guy that's come out of penitentiary.
You see a rabbi. You see a priest.
All of the-- All of the different levels of society in a dressing room.
And he's talking to all of 'em.
[person] I'd like you to meet my son.
[Barker] First time we see important-looking whites
be so, like, uh, putty in the presence of a-- a figure
who had opened up the world of music to new heights, you know?
♪ Now you know I don't lie much ♪
[scatting]
♪ Fellas she can't get The fellas she ain't met ♪
[vocalizes]
[person] Louis, you had, obviously, a very eventful life.
Ever since I've known you, they've been making a film on you.
[Armstrong] They make a whole lot of films now. You know?
Well, now I hear they're finally gonna do a film on you.
Yeah. Glad they can't come up to me and say,
"You must be a movie star. I can tell by the film on your teeth."
[all laugh]
[Nas] "Hollywood fascinates me.
Everywhere I go, there's a warm greeting for me.
But you still have some small-minded prop men, carpenters, callboys.
One of the moments that dragged me the most happened in 1952
during the making of Glory Alley."
♪ Glory Alley, Glory Alley ♪
♪ Hear that trumpet moan in Glory Alley ♪
[Armstrong] And this ofay, he wasn't nothing but a callboy.
He called, uh… [indistinct] …the extras, uh-- the extras and different things.
Then he'll come to the stars' dressing room,
let them know when they want them for the camera.
And he was hanging around on the set all the time.
-You know what I mean? -[person] Yeah.
[Armstrong] So now, he'll come up,
"Mr. Gilbert Roland, Ms. Caron," and everything.
And then he'll come to my dressing room with a whole lot of bullshit.
-[knocking] -"Satchmo, you better come on out there,
or they'll, uh-- uh, they'll send in Harry James."
I said, "Listen, you cocksucker.
If they wanted Harry James, they'd have had him in front."
I said, "The first place, he ain't gonna play what I played out there."
He said, "Why?" I said, "'Cause he can't."
Just had to be a nasty son of a bitch with him.
And I said, "You take it-- You tell MGM to shove that picture up their ass."
Then he left me alone.
I said, "I don't-- I ain't a movie star nohow."
I said, "Why you hand me that shit? 'Cause I'm colored?"
I didn't appreciate it. I'm just showing you what I go through for no reason.
You take the smallest fucking peckerwood,
hand you that shit, and the big bosses appreciate you.
[Morgenstern] He made as many as 30 films.
The Glenn Miller Story, the way he's cast in that is very positive.
♪ Yes, Basin Street is the street ♪
♪ Where the folks really meet ♪
[gasps] Who is he?
Who? Louis Armstrong.
[Morgenstern] A Song Was Born, what Louis does there is just performing.
♪ They took a reet jungle beat Brought it to Basin Street ♪
♪ And that's how jazz was born ♪
[Morgenstern] In High Society, he is Louis Armstrong.
[singing "Now You Has Jazz"]
[trumpet playing]
[Morgenstern] Hello, Dolly! Of course, it's the last one.
-♪ Well, hello, Dolly ♪ -Look who's here.
-♪ This is Louis, Dolly ♪ -Hello, Louis.
♪ It's so nice to have you back ♪
♪ Where you belong ♪
[Armstrong] They didn't write a whole lot of parts,
you know, character parts--
They just let me be myself in pictures. That's what made it awful nice.
We all can't be, uh, Reinhardts and things like that.
So they just tell me, "Be yourself."
All my days were happiness 'cause I'm born with nothing,
come here with nothing.
And I come through the world,
whatever nothing I had, I enjoyed playing the music.
And what little, uh, advancement or whatever it was,
it was more than I had at all times.
And right now, it's still more than I had.
And the fans are still happy with Satchmo.
And I wouldn't give a damn if they had ten trillion dollars.
They can't be no happier than Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong and Lucille.
We never want an estate where servants be falling all over each other.
They're working for colored people. And then-- We don't wanna go through that.
And I want to live the life that I come through
with what Mayann, my mother, taught me… enjoy the rudimentals.
To hell with the rest of it.
[audience applauding, chattering]
["I'm Confessin' That I Love You" playing]
♪ I'm confessin' that I love you ♪
♪ Tell me, do you love me too? ♪
♪ I'm confessin' that I need you ♪
♪ Honest, I do ♪
♪ Oh, baby, need you every moment ♪
Oh, yeah?
[Mike Douglas] Lucille, how did he propose? I mean--
-What did he say to you? -[Lucille] Well, actually--
-[Douglas] How long did you know him? -[Lucille] Uh, about two years.
-[Douglas] Two years? -[Lucille] Oh, yes.
Well, it wasn't love at first sight then, was it, Louis?
Mmm, plenty love going on then.
[audience laughing]
But not at first sight. I see.
Well, you know, I'm Louis's fourth wife.
-Oh, I see. -Uh-huh.
And, uh, he was separated from his third wife.
And so the-- We couldn't marry.
And he kept saying, "Well, you just stick around,
-you know, wait for Pops." -[Armstrong] Mmm.
"And, uh, I'll get a divorce." You know.
And he's taking care of-- This woman's getting alimony.
-She's not about to give him up. -Yeah.
-[Lucille] And I just laughed. -[audience laughs]
He just tells me, "Now, you just stay put, you know.
And one of these days, um, I'll…
She'll give me a divorce, and we'll marry."
-[Armstrong] Yeah. -And I'm young. But how long do you wait?
So I was seen on the scene with the young boys,
and Louis got tired of that.
And he says, "Look, I can't hold you down.
I guess I better marry you."
-[Armstrong] You right. -"I'll get the divorce."
[Armstrong] ♪ Am I guessin' that you love me, babe ♪
♪ Oh, yeah ♪
♪ Dreaming dreams of you in vain, vain ♪
♪ I'm confessin' that I love you ♪
-Chops. -[Lucille laughs]
♪ Over again ♪
[audience cheering]
[interviewer 1] Well, what has been, uh, to you, the most encouraging things?
[Armstrong] My fourth wife, she fixed a nice home,
not elaborate, just s-someplace where you settle down.
Uh, your castle.
It's such a pleasure to go home. That's why I canceled the road tour.
[Armstrong stammers] 3456 107th Street.
-[interviewer 2] 107th? -[Armstrong] Yeah. Street.
Corona, New York. The Queens.
It should be Long Island, but, uh, New York for many.
[Lucille] We would stay at my apartment,
but my mother had to get out of her bedroom and sleep in my small room
so Louis and I could have the large bedroom
for the few days of-- that we went home.
So I decided to buy a house.
And I told Louis, "Let's get a house."
And he said, "What do you want a house for?
We'll be traveling. I-I'll get a hotel room."
And I wasn't about to be cooped up in a hotel room.
And after being married to Louis for a few months,
I found that it wasn't very easy to argue with Louis.
If he made his mind up about something,
he was very, very positive that you couldn't change his mind.
And so he kept not wanting this house.
And I'm a very stubborn person myself.
And so I said, "This guy doesn't know what the house is all about."
I bought the house myself and didn't tell him.
I had had the house eight months before I told Louis.
Eight whole months.
Meanwhile, my mother's writing me about what's happening,
and they're planting flowers and this, that and the other.
So finally, I tell him, two weeks before we were to go back to New York.
And I told him, I said, "Pops, I got something to tell you."
So he said, "Well, what have you done now?"
I said, "I haven't done anything--
I don't think you're going to be unhappy about what I've done.
But, uh, I wanna-- Uh, I have to tell you that we've moved."
And he said, "We've what?" He said, "We've moved?"
He said, "That's all right. You got a larger apartment?"
I said, "No, I bought a house."
So he looked at me like I was, you know, like I was a cow with seven horns.
Now he said, "How did you pay for it? You didn't ask me for any money."
I said, "You have to remember, I have been working for 13 years.
I have a little money saved up.
And so, when I approached you about a house and you were so down on it,
I didn't ask you. I just took my money, and I put the down payment on the house,
and I've been keeping the payments up."
I said, "Now that you know about the house,
you can take the payments over." [chuckling]
But I've never been able to move Louis from that place.
Once he got in that place, he loved it.
[singing "Blueberry Hill"]
[interviewer 3] Mrs. Armstrong, do you always go with Louis wherever he goes?
[Lucille] Yes, I do…
[interviewer 3] It's your job to look after him?
[Lucille] That's part of my marital vow to take care of the husband.
-[interviewer 3] Yes. -And, uh, while I, uh-- We travel a lot.
We try to maintain a home life wherever we go.
So we were constantly together.
There was-- There wasn't that-- that, uh, separation,
as most musicians and wives have.
But then, I was fortunate
for the simple reason that Louis wanted me with him.
And secondly, he could afford to keep me with him.
And the other chaps couldn't afford to take their families.
[interviewer 4] Did it get boring at any time,
-listening to Louis night after night? -[Lucille] You gotta be kidding.
-[interviewer 4] Really? -[Lucille] How could anyone be bored
with those beautiful notes?
[Armstrong] Yeah, I had a audience with the pope.
[interviewer 5] You had an audience with the pope?
[Armstrong chatters]
And I remember that morning,
there was 10,000 people there waiting just to see him.
And my wife, she's dressed for the occasion,
had on a outfit with a black veil.
And-- And I'm sharp.
So he asked me, "Have you any children?"
I said, "Well, no, daddy. But we still wailing."
-And, uh-- -[audience laughs]
["Jeepers Creepers" playing]
[singing]
[interviewer 6] Now, let's talk about pot.
[Armstrong] Yeah.
[John Daly] I'm only sorry you couldn't be here with us longer.
I wish you could have gotten higher.
But why don't you go and say hello to the folks on the panel?
Well, I'm getting higher next time round.
[panel members laugh]
[Armstrong] Mary… wouna.
[chuckles] Honey, you sure was good and I enjoyed you very much.
Marijuana is more of a medicine than dope.
[Morgenstern] Why did he do it? Well, because it relaxes you.
It does something to your hearing.
And if you're a musician, it does something to your playing.
[Nas] "I have to go through the whole world with this horn,
making millions happy,
and at the same time ducking and dodging cops, dicks, so forth.
Why? 'Cause they say it's against the law.
I'm not so particular about having a permit to carry a gun.
All I want is a permit to carry that good shit."
[Armstrong] On the West Coast, California, in 1931,
when I got busted, it was during our intermission.
Two big, healthy dicks-- detectives, that is--
come from behind a car, man, and say to us,
"We'll take the roach, boys."
I spent nine days in the downtown Los Angeles city jail.
And when all of those prisoners looked up
and saw me walk in with this great big deputy sheriff,
they all en masse started, "Hey, Louis Armstrong!"
The judge gave me a suspended sentence,
and I went to work that night, wailed just like nothing happened.
[song ends]
[audience cheering]
[playing "St. Louis Blues"]
[Bernstein] Ladies and gentlemen,
Louis Armstrong has told me
that his most honored ambition is being fulfilled tonight
in playing with the New York Philharmonic.
I should say that it is rather we,
on the longer-haired side of the fence,
who are honored in that when we play "The Saint Louis Blues,"
we are only doing a blown-up imitation of what he does.
-And what he does is real and true… -[audience cheering]
…and honest and simple, and even noble.
[Lucille] I never shall forget the first time we went to Africa in 1956.
[Nas] "My God, darling.
I had no idea I would be so thrillingly received
by my brothers and sisters in my homeland, Africa."
[interviewer 7] This is, though, a tour to make friends and influence people.
[Armstrong] Well, I guess that's the idea when they did it.
But all-- We want to get out there and blow for them cats. They're all fans.
[fans cheering]
Yeah, we got off the plane and… [indistinct]
♪ All for you Lord, for you, Louis ♪
["All For You, Louis" playing]
♪ La la la ♪
[audience cheering]
[Lucille] The attendance was so fantastic that there wasn't a place to hold it
except the polo grounds, which was just a big stadium.
[band playing upbeat jazz song]
And then one of the chiefs said to Louis, "Hello, Satchmo."
And Louis told me, he said,
"See that, Moms? They even got my records in the bush."
You know, everybody knows Pops.
-[playing traditional Ghanaian music] -[cheering]
-[Armstrong] I had a wonderful time. -[Murrow] I take it you did.
[Armstrong] Yeah, they had about nine tribes down there.
That's-- That come from miles away just to dance with us.
And in one of those tribes, they had a chick swinging there,
looked just my mother.
Man, I made the cameraman call her over here
and let her put a couple of Wiggle Waggle Woos on there for me.
[both laughing]
["King of the Zulus" playing]
[Armstrong] Here's a song we did
that was all about one of the big events of the year
in my hometown,
the Zulu Parade in Mardi Gras week.
But it wasn't until 1949, 23 years after I made this record,
that they elected Satchmo to be the king of the Zulus. [laughs]
[Feather] I got to New Orleans,
and it was like everybody was crazy in that city.
Everybody was packing the streets,
and there were all kinds of racial paradoxes,
like the Zulus were prepared to present Louis that night
in a concert at Booker T. Washington Auditorium.
[radio host] Armstrong's All Star Band has played 45 minutes
of New Orleans's own Dixieland music to an enthusiastic capacity crowd.
[Feather] I went to the concert, and I saw
Black spectators seated on the left and the center aisles,
while the whites were over on the right aisle.
But on the stage, I saw Louis and Jack Teagarden
with their arms around each other,
ra-radiating interracial brotherhood, singing a duet.
And I saw white officials shaking hands with Louis on stage,
and congratulating him, and paying tribute to his talent.
I saw Louis bursting with pride
when the mayor of New Orleans gave him the keys to the city.
That was the week he made the cover of Time.
It was on every white newsstand in town.
[DeLesseps Morrison] On behalf of the people of New Orleans,
the city with a colorful past and a promising future,
we want to present you the key to the city.
-[Armstrong] Aw. -[Morrison] To Louis Armstrong.
[Armstrong] Thank you very much, Mayor.
This is really a treat. This is the thrill of my life.
[Feather] But I also knew that there were hundreds of places
to which those keys would never admit him.
[Alexis] When he was king, everybody was getting out.
People that didn't get out on Carnival, they going out to see Louis Armstrong,
king of the Zulu.
And there was so many people.
Everything got held up, you know what I mean?
It was stopping everything,
and he just had to get off the float, you know.
'Cause sooner or later, man, he might have got hurt up there.
You understand me?
[Marsalis] Rex was the biggest parade of all the white parades.
And by white, I mean it was what it was. It was segregated.
But Zulu was like the height of everything.
So, for Pops, he wanted to be the king of Zulu his entire life.
The king of Zulu would dress up in blackface.
That's what he did.
So Louis Armstrong did it, and it became, you know, a crime.
-[Armstrong] That was a great thing then… -[acquaintance] Yeah.
…'cause what's going on now with all these marches and organizations,
they won't let it happen no more now, you know, all that makeup.
[Crouch] First thing about blackface is
we have to understand that it comes out of minstrelsy.
Minstrelsy was not invented to elevate Negroes.
Minstrelsy was invented to get jobs for white guys who were imitating Negroes.
Now, what it became, ironically,
was the first mass popular phenomenon in American culture.
[Marsalis] You have to know what the tradition is.
So it's people everywhere who don't know what that tradition is.
All they're seeing is a blackface minstrel,
but he wasn't looking at it like that.
You had a lot of traditions and things that you had
that were-- were viable and good and meaningful.
And then, during the movement, we threw all of that stuff out.
Dancing a certain way, cheesing, Tomming.
And, uh, we didn't want to be a part of any of that.
[James Baldwin] "And after the funeral,
with just Sonny and me alone in the empty kitchen,
I tried to find out something about him.
'What do you want to do?'
'I want to play jazz,' he said.
'You mean-- like Louis Armstrong?'
His face closed as though I'd struck him.
'No, I'm not talking about none of that old-time, down-home crap.'"
[Frost] Pops, how much do you think you've lost out of--
not your own life and certainly not your own pride,
but out of commercial life by being born Black in a white country?
No, I don't look at it that way.
Your color don't mean shit to me if you're a dumb son of a bitch.
-You understand? -Mm-hmm.
Right, so, are you a man or mouse? It's up to you.
[Amiri Baraka] A lot of young people resented the way
they thought Armstrong was too submissive to the United States.
If you coming up in the '50s and '60s,
there's a different aesthetic,
a different kind of attitude, political attitude, in the street.
And they didn't understand Louis because Louis was always affable,
always smiling.
[singing "Now You Has Jazz"]
Yay!
♪ Keeps that Georgia on my mind ♪
♪ Yeah ♪
♪ Mmm ♪
-[person laughing] -[audience cheering]
[Miles Davis] They don't realize that Louis was doing that
when he was around his friends.
-He was acting the same way. -[person] That's right.
[Davis] But when you do it in front of white folks
and try to make them enjoy what you feel--
-That's what he was doing. -[person] Right!
-[Davis] They call him Uncle Tom. -[person] Yes.
♪ Oh, you can bend her legs Bend her arms and bathe her too ♪
♪ Let's fly down or drive down To New Orleans ♪
[Thompson] First time you misplace words and do that shit,
they gonna say you Uncle Tomming. And goddamn it--
And every fucking nationality comedian stays right in this category.
Look at the Jew, doesn't he use his dialect?
[Armstrong] I ain't supposed to be no comedian.
That's just everyday life, you know.
[Thompson] "Suppose" my ass. You are a natural comedian.
[Armstrong] Yeah, well, that's all right.
[Marsalis] A lot of his film roles, the early ones, I never liked those.
For my generation to see him singing to horses and stuff,
or the kind of way Black people acted in films,
it's not just Louis Armstrong.
[Armstrong] ♪ Gosh all, git up ♪
♪ How'd they get so lit up? ♪
-♪ Gosh all, git up ♪ -[horse whinnies]
♪ How'd they get that size? ♪
[Armstrong] Archie got his nose broke for fighting a nigga
'cause he didn't like the way he talked about me.
This smug motherfucker said, "Louis Armstrong,
Uncle Tom nigga."
When the fuck have I "Uncle Tommed" in my life?
[Thompson] I tell ya. All you have to do is
break up your face and mug, and a nigga say you're Uncle Tom.
-[Armstrong] I'm blowing this horn… -[Thompson] A man got expressions.
[Ossie Davis] Most of the fellas I grew up with, myself included,
we used to laugh at Louis Armstrong.
We knew he could play the horn,
but that didn't save him from our malice and our ridicule.
Everywhere we'd look, there would be old Louis.
Sweat popping, eyes bugging, mouth wide open, grinning,
oh, my Lord, from ear to ear.
"Ooftah," we called it.
Mopping his brow, ducking his head, doing his thing for the white man.
Oh, yeah.
It wasn't until 1966, when we were working together
on a picture in New York with Sammy Davis Jr., Cicely Tyson,
that I got to know Louis better.
One day, we'd broken for lunch,
and I decided to stay inside.
It was quiet, so I thought everybody had gone.
I went back on the set to lie down on the bed,
and there was Louis by the door, sitting in a chair,
staring up and out into space
with the saddest,
most heartbreaking expression I've ever seen on a man's face.
I just stared at him for a moment.
And then when I tried to turn and sneak away,
the noise snapped Louis out of it.
And all of a sudden, there was that professional grin again,
mouth wide open.
He whipped out his handkerchief, mopped his brow.
[imitating Armstrong] "Hey, Pops,
look like you cats trying to starve old Louis to death, yeah."
[chuckles]
[normal voice] I put on my face and grinned right back.
But it wasn't funny.
Not anymore.
What I saw in that look shook me.
It was my father.
My uncle.
Myself, down through the generations,
doing exactly what Louis had had to do,
for the same reason,
to survive.
I never laughed at Louis after that,
for beneath that gravel voice and that shuffle,
under all that mouth with more teeth than a piano had keys,
was a horn that could kill a man.
That horn is where Louis had kept his manhood hid all those years.
Enough for him, enough for all of us.
["Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child" playing]
[trumpet playing melody]
[singers vocalizing]
[interviewer 1] I understand you're somewhat of a politician.
Do you know anything about politics?
[chuckling] No. No.
Uh, politics, uh… [indistinct] I don't think you could print that--
that are African golfers, and stuff like that. [laughs]
[Baraka] We confuse what we perceived as the social demeanor
in that context of lynching--
You understand? Overt segregation.
And we thought that Louis was submitting to that.
♪ Sometimes I feel ♪
♪ Like a motherless child ♪
[Baraka] You know, Louis's expression was musical and artistic
and transcended that.
When it was possible for Louis to speak, he spoke.
[Morgenstern] Louis was very sensitive
when people did something that he felt-- I guess the word would be "unethical."
[interviewer 2] What about you? Do you think the colored students will show up?
If I got anything to do with it, they won't show up.
Well, I think it's a breaking point of the school integration.
I don't feel that they should have a right to go to school.
[Danny Kaye] ♪ Oh, when the saints ♪
[Armstrong] ♪ When the saints ♪
[Kaye] ♪ Go marching in ♪
[Armstrong] ♪ Go marching in ♪
-[Kaye] ♪ When the saints go marching in ♪ -[Armstrong] ♪ Yeah ♪
♪ Oh, yeah ♪
-[Kaye] ♪ I want to be in that number ♪ -[Armstrong scatting]
[Armstrong] ♪ Oh, yeah ♪
[Kaye] ♪ When the saints come marching in ♪
-[Kaye] ♪ When the saints ♪ -[Armstrong] ♪ Oh, when the saints ♪
-[Kaye] ♪ Go marching in ♪ -[Armstrong] ♪ Are marching in ♪
♪ Who's gonna play on the day That the saints go marching in? ♪
♪ Well, man The mostest and the greatest ♪
[both] ♪ From the oldest to the latest ♪
♪ Gonna play in the band In the big bandstand ♪
♪ When the saints go marching in ♪
-Now, Louis, how about Brahms? -[Armstrong] Oh, he ain't no bum.
[reporter] Little Rock, Arkansas.
The white population are determined
to prevent colored students from going to the school their own children attend.
[Armstrong] ♪ And Mozart composed With all he had ♪
[Kaye] ♪ With symphonies And operas and all that jazz ♪
[reporter] Later, the Central High School of Little Rock storm center was sealed off
by orders of the governor,
who called out the state National Guard.
[Kaye] ♪ Oh, when the saints Go marching in ♪
[Armstrong] ♪ Oh, when the saints ♪
[reporter] Colored youngsters arrived under safe conduct by the guards,
but no sooner had they arrived than they were off again.
Arkansas had evidently decided to make its own laws
on the subject of integration.
[Armstrong, Kaye] ♪ Go marching in ♪
[interviewer 3] What are you gonna tell the Russians
when they ask you about the Little Rock incident?
It all depends what time they send me over there.
I don't think they should send me unless they straighten that mess down South.
[protesters chanting] Two, four, six, eight!
We don't want to integrate!
They've been ignoring the Constitution. Al-Although they're taught it in school.
But when they go home, their parents tell them different.
Say, "You don't have to abide by it
because we've been getting away with it a hundred years.
So, uh, nobody tells on each other, so don't bother with it."
So, if they ask me what's happening, uh, if I go now, I can't tell a lie.
That's one thing. There's no worth lying the way I feel about it.
-[interviewer 3] Thank you, Louis. -Okay.
Now I'll say this to you.
I'll never open the public schools in Little Rock
on an integrated basis until the people say so.
[audience cheering]
[Marsalis] You know, there's a certain type of naivete
that a country like this has,
in those who are super patriotic and they don't see anything.
It's just, "Everything we do is great."
And then those who are not patriotic at all and see that we don't do anything.
Louis Armstrong was not in either camp.
And I dare say that he was actually more in the forefront of civil rights
in terms of making statements
than a lot of the so-called modern musicians of that time were.
And even when he said what he said about Eisenhower in the '50s.
Yeah, he was upset about segregation.
[Larry Lubenow] Well, he said that as far as he was concerned,
Ike and the government could go to hell,
and he sang his version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" to me
with very dirty, uh, lyrics.
"Oh, say, can you mothers-- MFs see by the MF early light."
He was very mad.
[Ernie Anderson] Then he said a number of things,
one of which was, "As for Orval Faubus, he's just an ignorant plowboy."
[Armstrong] Well, I think it's a damn shame
for people to be so deceitful and two-faced.
I mean, that, uh-- that governor.
I mean, I bet you right now,
he's got an old colored mammy there nursing his baby.
The nation alone, I mean, is misguided, cold-blooded.
Shame just to keep it up.
They can't stand it.
I mean, how can they rest well at night
thinking they have to go through that tomorrow?
The kids, uh, they're only doing what their parents told 'em.
They wouldn't do it if--
I mean, the colored people who, at the end of the day,
they-- I don't know why, but, uh, when they throw their… [indistinct]
We throw our heart in it and everything,
because we're just doing it for our country.
[Morgenstern] Everybody was astonished when Louis did it publicly,
but privately he had expressed stuff like that all his life.
You know, he was very conscious of what we now call civil rights.
[Lucille] He blew up. He put it on the line.
You know, and, of course, he had very, very, very, very bad comments
from our political leaders about making this particular statement.
That-- You know, they interviewed Adam Clayton Powell.
They interviewed Sammy Davis.
They put Pops down
because they said he was a musician, he didn't know what he was talking about.
Louis was that kind of person.
He-- Either he said nothing,
and when he got angry,
he said what was in his heart and his mind.
[Al Cobette] It seems that the White House was waiting for
some big name to speak out,
and Louis made his statement today,
and the troops were in Little Rock the next morning.
[Lucille] After he'd made the statement, he sent Eisenhower a wire saying that
"If you will go in with the troops, I'll go with you."
[interviewer 4] That's little known, you know, uh… [stammers]
[Lucille] Oh, you know, it's a funny thing.
Nobody really stopped to really dig Pops, and it's an unfortunate thing.
He felt it deeply. He really did.
[interviewer 4] A prophet is without honor in his own country.
-[Lucille] That's it. -[interviewer 4] Mmm.
[Armstrong] ♪ Yes ♪
-[director] Great. -[Armstrong laughs]
[director] We're gonna do this once more. Louis, and say…
♪ Set man free ♪
-[Armstrong] Me too? -[director] We-- No.
When they get through…
♪ Set man free ♪
[Armstrong] ♪ They say I look like God ♪
[singers] ♪ In the image of God Created he them ♪
[Armstrong] ♪ Could God be Black? ♪
♪ My God ♪
[Morgenstern] The Real Ambassadors. It was meant to be a stage show.
And, uh, unfortunately, it never made it to Broadway.
The tale of it was
that jazz represented America in a very special way
and that jazz musicians were the real ambassadors,
not politicians or speech makers.
[Armstrong] ♪ Can it be? ♪
[chorus] ♪ Hallelujah ♪
[Marsalis] He brought the same thing to every song he sang,
understanding the human condition.
Any kind of lyrics, he could just imbue with that.
That understanding, it's like a-- It's a spiritual thing.
It's a depth and an insight.
[Armstrong] ♪ He's watching all the Earth ♪
[host] The simple emotional impact of jazz has cut through all kinds of barriers.
Louis Armstrong has become an extraordinary kind of…
roaming ambassador of goodwill.
Well, you might say he's America's ambassador with a horn.
[Armstrong] ♪ I'm the real ambassador ♪
♪ It is evident I was sent By government to take your place ♪
♪ All I do is play the blues ♪
[Armstrong] See, Jack, I think you're wrong
about me being the ambassador.
I think jazz is the ambassador.
Well, I might be the courier that takes the message over there.
But it's jazz that does the talking.
My horn and me have traveled from Sweden to Spain,
and when I played Berlin,
a lot of them cats jumped the iron fence to hear old Satchmo. [laughs]
Ah, which proves that music is stronger than nations.
I don't know much about politics,
but I know these people in foreign countries
hear all kinds of things about America,
some good, some bad.
I'm pretty sure what comes out of this horn
makes them feel better about us.
One thing is sure, they know a trumpet ain't no cannon. [laughs]
[John F. Kennedy] It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color
to receive equal service in places of public accommodation,
such as hotels and restaurants and theaters and retail stores,
without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street.
[interviewer 5] When you return to the United States,
do you intend to take a more active part in civil rights?
They have, uh, other people, politicians, who take care of things like that.
And so the best I can do is, uh, put a little, uh, something in their till.
And that's my part.
-That's the best I can do. -[interviewer 5] Uh…
Because, uh, I love everybody.
I mean, uh, the white people,
they're my greatest fans all through the South.
We stay in the best hotels, and they give us the best courtesies,
and, uh, my biggest audience is people all over the United States.
So I can't abuse e-either one.
So I don't ignore the-- the-- the march and the-- the-- whatever it is.
I just do my little part by putting a little money in my part.
Which some of them don't do, but I do.
-You understand Pops? That's right. -[interviewer 5] Mmm.
[Nas] "For me, if I'd be out somewhere marching with a sign
and some cat hits me in my chops,
I'm finished.
A trumpet man gets hit in the chops, and he's through.
If my people don't dig me the way that I am, I'm sorry.
If they don't go along with me giving my dough instead of marching…
Well, every cat's entitled to his opinion.
But that's the way I figure I can help out and still keep working.
If they let me alone on this score, I'll do my part in my way.
Pops, I come out of a part of the South where it ain't no way in the world
you can forget you're colored.
My own mother went through hell down there.
My grandma used to have tears in her eyes
when she'd talk about the lynchings and all that crap.
Even myself, I've seen things that would make my flesh crawl.
But it wasn't a damn thing I could do about it and keep on breathing."
[interviewer 6] Louis, how much weight have you lost? You're skinny as a rail.
[Armstrong] Well, uh, I don't know,
around 40, 45 pounds, like that, in a couple of months.
Just took it easy, you know, and--
What'd you do about the wardrobe?
Well, I just got rid of it. I mean, it was a pleasure.
Y-You can't take them up but once.
So, I took it up once, and it was still too big.
So that was it.
[interviewer 7] Mr. Armstrong, everybody calls you Louis,
-and I hope I can. -[Armstrong] Yes.
[interviewer 7] You've been very sick the last couple of years. How you feeling?
[Armstrong] Well, I feel fine now, you know, and like the old saying, uh…
"I've left it all behind me."
[interviewer 7] You went into the intensive care unit twice.
[Armstrong] Twice, yeah, yeah.
[interviewer 7] Did you think your life was coming to an end?
A man going into intensive care twice,
you know, he's looking right at Gabriel,
and he's calling me.
He wants to blow a duet with me.
[both laughing]
But I said, "No, daddy, your-- your union card ain't straight.
I better wait."
[both laughing]
[Armstrong] When I was in the Beth Israel Hospital,
boy, I got boxes and boxes of mail
from everywhere over the waters.
"Come on, Satch, get out of that bed and come blow. We're waiting for you."
[Tomasso] Hello, Louis. This is Enrico.
I hope you are getting better, and we are all praying for you.
[interviewer 8] How many more years do you think you'll be blowing that horn?
[Armstrong] Well, I'll be blowing all my life.
I mean, that's the way it'll be, you know.
And I-- Even if I'll be teaching some kids or something, I'll always be around music.
Satchmo, you've been everywhere and done just about everything.
Is there anything you haven't done that you'd like to do?
Yeah, keep living. [chuckles] I ain't finished yet.
[Armstrong] ♪ I see trees of green ♪
[audience applauding]
♪ Red roses too ♪
♪ I see them bloom for me and you ♪
♪ And I think to myself ♪
♪ What a wonderful world ♪
♪ I see skies of blue ♪
There's a zillion people who dug that tune the way I did it when I felt it
because, uh, there's so much in "Wonderful World"
that brings me back to my neighborhood where I live in Corona, uh, New York.
Lucille and I, ever since we married,
we've been right there in that block.
And everybody keeps their little homes up like we do.
And it's just like one big family.
I saw three generations come up in them blocks.
So that's why I can say,
♪ I hear babies cry and ♪
♪ I've watched them grow ♪
♪ They'll learn much more Than I'll ever know ♪
♪ And I think to myself ♪
♪ What a wonderful world ♪
♪ Yes, I think to myself ♪
♪ What a wonderful world ♪
My doctor came to hear me blow, and he was perfectly satisfied.
He examined me thoroughly
to see if my blowing affected the old ticker, you know.
And the beats were perfectly normal.
Yeah.
[singer] ♪ Happy birthday to you ♪
♪ Happy birthday, dear Louis ♪
♪ Happy birthday to you ♪
This is seven-- seventy steps.
And ten more steps, I'll be in heaven.
[host laughing]
[Lucille] It had been my opinion
that Louis was gonna drop dead on stage one day.
I didn't feel bad about that because if he had to go, I think,
"What better way to go than doing the thing you love to do?"
[Feather] A lot of us would be very happy to have accomplished
to the extent that he did what we originally set out to do.
He had all the material things that he needed, but more importantly,
he had the respect and the love of millions of people.
I mean, literally millions, all over the world.
What more could any man ask for?
[Lucille] The night Louis passed, I had no idea, this man--
He disappointed-- He was doing so well.
It was a shock to me.
And he was telling me, he says, "You know, I feel good."
He says, "You know, I've got to get back to work."
So that's the mood Louis was in on the 5th of July of 1971.
[Ella Fitzgerald singing "April in Paris"]
[trumpet playing]
[reporter] Music kept Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong rolling
for 71 years,
until this morning when he died in his sleep in his home in New York.
He had been battling heart and kidney ailments for years.
[Walter Cronkite] We aren't saying goodbye to Louis tonight,
for a man's music does not die with him.
Certainly not this man's.
While we can only guess how Beethoven played the piano
or Mozart conducted an orchestra,
the sounds of Louis singing, playing, or just plain talking
will live as long as there is anyone to listen.
[interviewee 1] Well, he was a great artist and a very sweet man.
[interviewee 2] Down-to-earth, a lovely neighbor,
he was a regular, and he just loved to be around people.
He was more of a friend instead of celebrity in the neighborhood.
[interviewer 9] Bobby Hackett, learn anything from him?
[Hackett] To me, Pops was truly an immortal man.
And the truth of the matter is that he will never die.
I think what he left will always be heard all over the world and enjoyed,
and a very gentle reminder to everybody to love thy neighbor
and cut out the nonsense.
[Marsalis] He was a man that was beloved
with a certain depth and intensity that you cannot fathom.
It was 'cause of how he touched people.
[song continues]
[trumpet playing]
[song ends]
[Armstrong] Well, folks, that was my life, and I enjoyed all of it.
Yes, I did.
I don't feel ashamed at all.
My life has always been an open book, so I have nothing to hide.
Bye-bye. Love aplenty.
Soul foodly, "Satchmo" Louis Armstrong.
[Armstrong] This is one number I like to do, folks,
and it tells you a whole lot about my life.
-I can't tell it all, you know. -[crowd laughs]
But let's give you a good synopsis. [laughs]
[piano playing "Boy From New Orleans"]
♪ When I was born long ago ♪
♪ July the 4th, 19-0-0 ♪
♪ It was back of town in James Alley ♪
♪ A boy from New Orleans ♪
♪ When I was only five or so ♪
♪ Down Rampart Street I used to go ♪
♪ That's when I heard The great King Oliver ♪
♪ Blowing jazz from New Orleans ♪
Now folks, all these years…
I've had a ball.
Oh, thank you, Lord. [chuckles]
And I thank you all. [stammers]
♪ You are very kind ♪
♪ To old Satchmo, yes ♪
-Nice looking boy, ain't he? [chuckles] -[audience laughs]
♪ A boy from New Orleans ♪
[scats]
[audience cheering, applauding]