July 2024

In this striking new exhibit, the New Orleans Jazz Museum offers a love letter to Louis Armstrong – just in time for Satchmo SummerFest.

– by Doug Brantley

photos courtesy New Orleans Jazz Museum and by Ellis Anderson

For generations, Louis Armstrong has been synonymous with the Crescent City.  From the international airport bearing his name to the Tremé park featuring his towering bronze likeness to the French Quarter’s New Orleans Jazz Museum, where each August the annual Satchmo SummerFest celebrates his birth, life and musical legacy, “little Louie” still looms large—both here and abroad—some 50-plus years after his death.

“Louis Armstrong is a pivotal figure in the history of modern music,” notes Jazz Museum director Greg Lambousy.  “New Orleans is the Vienna of the 21st century in large measure because of his influence worldwide, embodying the music and culture of an endlessly interesting city.”

A special envoy for the U.S. State Department during the 1950s and ’60s, “Ambassador Satchmo” traveled the globe, winning over kings and commoners alike with his signature smile, trademark trumpet and waving white handkerchief, spreading the joy of New Orleans-born jazz and breaking through racial barriers of the day along the way.

The Jazz Museum’s new “It All Started in Jane Alley: Louis Armstrong in New Orleans” exhibit traces the beloved musician’s journey, from his ragtag beginnings “back o’ town” to his rise as a global culture icon, through a variety of artifacts and ephemera, including excerpts from his many manuscripts and massive collection of private audio recordings. 

Born into poverty on Aug. 4, 1901, to help make ends meet, Armstrong spent his formative years selling newspapers, collecting salvage and delivering buckets of coal to Black Storyville prostitutes for the Karnofskys, a kind-hearted Jewish family with a shop on South Rampart.  

Noting his musical leanings, the Karnofskys, who embraced young Louis as one of their own, taught him “to sing from the heart” and helped purchase his first horn, a cornet – which you’ll find on display in the exhibition.

Armstrong’s big break came following his arrest at age 11 for firing a gun in the air outside of the Little Gem Saloon on New Year’s Eve, which landed him in the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys.  There, he fell under the tutelage of music director Peter Davis, who taught him both discipline and how to properly play the cornet, a talent later honed through the mentorship of Joe “King” Oliver who was heralded in the museum’s recent exhibit, “New Orleans Stomp.”

He was soon busking on street corners he’d formerly hawked papers from and performing with early brass bands in the city’s dance halls and honky-tonks.  He would go on to replace Oliver, who moved to Chicago in 1918, in the Kid Ory Band.  Armstrong followed a few years later to join Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, broadening not only his musical influences but his worldview as well.

Chicago led to New York and the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, which led to recordings with fellow New Orleanian Sidney Bechet and blues greats Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, among others, including his own Hot Five band, which led to national tours, catapulting him to fame. Armstrong would not return to New Orleans until 1931.

But New Orleans’ now-favorite son wasn’t so warmly embraced back then.  Greeted with great fanfare and jubilant crowds upon his arrival that June, Armstrong called it “the happiest day in my life.”  His tune changed, however, a few days later.

Booked for a summerlong run at Suburban Gardens, a white’s-only club in Metairie, he packed the house with more than 5,000 opening-night attendees and an additional 10,000 Black fans listening from along the levee behind, with even more tuning into the show’s broadcast. 

But despite his immense popularity, the evening’s announcer refused to introduce Armstrong because of the color of his skin.  Undeterred, he took the stage and introduced himself, later claiming to have been the first Black man to speak live on New Orleans radio.

He revisited the city again for performances in 1938 and 1940, and famously in 1949 for Mardi Gras as king of the Zulu parade, which Armstrong recounts in a letter included in the exhibit.  In between he toured Europe, played the Metropolitan Opera House and Carnegie Hall, appeared in numerous films, made his television debut, was featured on the cover of Time and purchased a house in Queens, N.Y., where he resided for the remainder of his life. 

Though he held his hometown near and dear (often signing letters “Red Beans and Ricely Yours”), by the mid-1950s Armstrong swore off performing here altogether due to Jim Crow laws and restrictions, which prohibited his long-integrated band from playing together.  “I’m accepted all over the world,” he told the Times-Picayune in 1959, “and when New Orleans accepts me, I will go home.” 

That did not happen until 1965—following the passage of the Civil Rights Act, his Grammy win for “Hello Dolly” and the razing of Armstrong’s childhood home to make way for a new police complex—with a sole performance at Loyola University’s Field House.  He would return only twice more before his death in 1971. 

“Armstrong knew what it meant to miss New Orleans,” wrote frequent Satchmo Fest speaker Ricky Riccardi, director of research collections at the Queens-based Louis Armstrong House Museum, in a recent essay.  “To love New Orleans, to celebrate New Orleans, to be hurt by New Orleans and to hate New Orleans—but through it all, he knew that in many ways, he was New Orleans, with all of its complexities.”

Armstrong’s relationship with the city was a fraught and fractured one, not unlike that of New Orleans musicians and expats who fled for higher ground and greener pastures following that other August anniversary in 2005.  The place that bore and raised him, his lover and muse, had also scorned and betrayed him.

During Katrina, a large section of roofing from the Old U.S. Mint, in which the Jazz Museum is housed, was torn away and mangled by the destructive winds that forever changed New Orleans.  It took some time to patch up and repair, but by the following year, modern-day jazz greats were back on the Mint’s grounds performing Armstrong classics, as they will again Aug. 3-4 during this year’s SummerFest. 

Meanwhile, indoors on the Legacy Stage, Riccardi and other Satchmo scholars will sing his praises just steps away from the new exhibit, chronicling his lasting impact on the city and the world.

More than a century after he first departed, “Little Louie” has come home.  It’s so nice to have you back where you belong.