How Did Louis Armstrong Impact Society

Meghan Prchal
Younger
English 12R
1/22/14
Louis Armstrong
To millions of people he is just a great entertainer but to fellow musicians he is one of the most important figures in jazz history. Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong is the preeminent jazz artist of all time. As a musician and jazz fanatic myself, Louis Armstrong has made an impact on my life like no other. Louis taught me that “melodies are full of things” (Collier, 31) and that I can make them say whatever I want. I read about Louis to strengthen my knowledge on his impact, not only on me but on thousands of others. Louis’s iconic raspy voice and flashy cornet and trumpet playing are what made him known throughout the world and stay in people’s hearts. His inventive playing and singing
“Louis Armstrong: An American Success Story” is a biography of one of America’s most important musicians, who was born in extreme poverty and never had a real music lesson, but became world famous for his singing and trumpet playing. Armstrong’s greatest obstacle was defying his presumed fate, “He was born in the South at a time when a black boy could expect nothing but to grow up, work hard at the lowest jobs all his life, and hope that he could somehow, somewhere, manage to stay healthy and get a little something out of life for himself” (Collier, 1). Louis was born into abject poverty in a slum in New Orleans at the turn of the century. He did not own a pair of shoes, his toys were twigs and pebbles, and food was very hard to come by. Both his mother and father had left him around birth leaving him to live with his grandmother. As Collier states Louis was at the “absolute bottom of American Society-there was nobody lower but the dogs, and even many dogs in the United States lived better than he did”(Collier, 1). Shockingly, Armstrong never had a real music lesson in his life, was too poor to buy a musical instrument of his own until he was seventeen, would not learn how to read music until he was over twenty, and for the whole of his long career would play so incorrectly that he would ruin his lip. Not only
Thankfully, Louis was born in a city with one of the largest entertainment industries in America. New Orleans had thousands of tourists regularly, coming for fun and staying for music. Even though Armstrong was banned from many places because of his color, he did have the ability to listen to music. As tough as New Orleans was it had one thing in abundance: music. In Louis’s area music was everywhere. The city was filled with dance halls, bands in the “tonks”, and bands parading around in the streets. “Louis could not escape the sound of music. He heard it as he dozed off in his bed at night and he heard it coming out of the “tonks” when he woke up in the morning. He heard it in school during the day when bands marched by outside” (Collier, 9). This constant exposure and growing music sparked something in Louis leading him to his love of jazz and ragtime. Starting at age sixteen Louis would stop in at bars called “tonks” and watch the dancers and listen to the bands play. “He loved it all, and yet it was painful, too, because he yearned to be up there with the musicians, playing the blues and ragtime” (Collier, 40). In one of Armstrong’s favorite tonks, Louis eventually met his mentor Joe “King” Oliver who saw something unique in Armstrong and in 1922 invited him to join a trip to Chicago with his band. At the time Oliver’s band was the best and most influential in all of