Why Louis Armstrong is the defining figure of the 20th century

“I’m all Armstrong, all the time!” is how Ricky Riccardi neatly describes his obsession to me, on a call from his home in New York. Having first discovered Louis Armstrong’s music at age 15, he has gone on to become the director of research collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum, given lectures worldwide, won Grammys for his album notes and written several books about the man who is widely credited as one of the architects of modern music. The latest of which, Stomp Off, Let’s Go, focuses on his early life. Why, specifically, did he want to write about this period? 

“In jazz circles, the recordings that Armstrong made in the 1920s represent some of the most influential music ever created,” he tells me. “I wanted to dig deeper and examine just how he got to the position in the first place, to be able to change the course of American popular music with his trumpet and with his voice. The odds were a million-to-one against him.”  

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The book depicts how, abandoned by both parents and raised in poverty, Armstrong worked long, gruelling hours delivering coal as a child. At age 12 he was arrested for firing a pistol on the street and sent to a home for waifs where he was subjected to extreme corporal punishment. Similar horrors continued throughout the young Armstong’s life. It’s hard to reconcile these relentlessly bleak vignettes with the Louis Armstrong that we picture in popular culture – the laid back, affable bandleader, a smiling emblem of The Big Easy. 

Music is the ley line which leads Armstrong out of the darkness. Before formal instruction, he would sneak into a saloon in New Orleans to fool around with Bunk Johnson’s cornet. Johnson later said, “Louis used to slip in there and get on the music stand behind the piano… until he could get a sound out of it.” However it was at the waif’s home that his formal musical education began.

Amid the cruel treatment he received there day to day, a stern but dedicated music teacher spotted his nascent talent. Aside from the joy of playing, Armstrong loved the attention: “I commenced to being the most popular [boy] in the waif’s home,” he wrote years later. That popularity grew and still endures to a monumental degree.

His influence on popular music is unmatched in ways that are too numerous to list here, but to pull one example from the book, he redefined how players approached their instruments. Before him, jazz was largely a group effort, with musicians improvising collectively. Armstrong demonstrated that one soloist’s emotional voice could drive an entire performance. 

He also gradually conquered the recording industry, film, radio and later television. He was a Black man on screen in the 1930s and 1940s who wasn’t playing a caricature, he was himself. “His whole story cannot be separated from the topic of race in America,” Riccardi says. “To me, he’s the defining figure of the 20th century. He’s born in 1901 and is there for everything: World War I, the Spanish flu epidemic, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights struggle, Vietnam. He has hit records in every decade.” 

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Riccardi also points out to me that he’s answering my questions on a day, 53 years after Armstrong’s death, when pop star Katy Perry has chosen to sing “What a Wonderful World” while floating through outer space. The song is ubiquitous, and beautiful; it’s become a universal folk song of gratitude, peace and positivity.

The book muses on a quote from Louis Armstrong, where he describes himself as being “in the cause of happiness”. A notion that, despite or maybe owing to the hardship he endured in his childhood, he has made a conscious decision to spread joy through his music. 

I was inspired while reading to explore Armstrong’s back catalogue beyond what was already familiar to me, particularly his earlier work like the “Put ’Em Down Blues”, which introduced him as a vocalist, along with tight, playful ensemble pieces like the Hot Five Sessions and the better-known “West End Blues” from 1928, which inspired a young Billie Holiday to copy the sound of the horn to create her own inimitable vocal style. A century later the music is still hot, debaucherous, dramatic, technically profound. 

What’s striking about Stomp Off, Let’s Go is that it reads, at times, like a Dickens novel; full of hardship, colour, vivid characters and improbable twists of fate. Louis Armstong’s early life was full of chaos and noise, and he distilled it into music. “With the deck stacked against him,” Riccardi says, “he changed the whole world.”

Stomp Off, Let’s Go: The Early Years of Louis Armstrong by Ricky Riccardi is out on 12 June (Oxford University Press, £26.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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