Book of the week: Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong by Terry Teachout

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 496 pages, $30)

It’s about time that a biographer stood up for Louis Armstrong, said Ted Gioia in The Weekly Standard. Jazz’s first superstar is still generally “lionized” by the public, but previous chroniclers of his life have treated the trumpeter shabbily. The rap on Armstrong, who died in 1971, has always been that he made himself into a grinning, clowning “plantation character” in order to win over white audiences. Finally, though, a biography has arrived “that does justice to the man and his music.” Terry Teachout’s “taut and well-paced” new work “is astute in its critical judgments and gripping in its chronicle” of Armstrong’s life.

Teachout’s “key insight” may simply be that Armstrong was “a child of his time, not ours,” said Robert Sandall in the London Sunday Times. Born in New Orleans in 1901 to a teenage single mother who occasionally worked as a prostitute, Armstrong discovered his musical talent around the time he was sent, at 11, to a local reform school, the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys. A believer in hard work from that point on, he was just 21 when “King” Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band summoned him to Chicago, where young Satchmo’s bold, brilliant improvisation more or less created the jazz solo. To make a living, though, Armstrong had to find a way to navigate the demands of white audiences who would liken him to “an untrained gorilla” as quickly as they would crown him the king of horn players.

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Teachout reasonably argues that Armstrong’s musical legacy would have been less far-reaching had he not adopted his genial stage and screen persona, said John McWhorter in The New Yorker. Such an interpretation, though, misses Armstrong’s two most essential traits. First, the real reason Armstrong confounded midcentury ideas about what an artist should be was that “he never really grew”: He was doing brilliantly at 63 what he had done brilliantly at 23, and that confused critics who worshipped experimentation. More crucially, he confounded the expectation that a black man in America must embody some variety of reaction to racism. Armstrong’s strength, however, “was that he did not react.” The joyous, exuberant performer that audiences knew was also his true self.