Po
Boy Views
By
Phil
LaMancusa
Red
Beans and Rice-ly Yours
Or
Satchmo
Uncensored
“Of course Pops toms, but he toms from
the heart!” Billie
Holiday
I told a tourist the other day that St. Louis Street as
well as the cathedral at Jackson Square are named for Louis Armstrong: “After
all”, said I, “we have Armstrong Park, Armstrong Airport--- he is our City’s favorite son--- so, naturally
we have canonized him!”
Not really, but it’s not a stretch; we’ve literally
put Saint Satchmo on a pedestal, too bad, even though he deserves it, he never wanted it. Let’s start at the
beginning: the grandson of slaves, the
illegitimate son of a part time hooker and an absentee laborer, raised mostly
by a local Jewish family when he wasn’t being shuffled from pillar to post for
a pallet; reared in a dirt poor slum, selling buckets of coal to the Storyville
prostitutes (and listening to his musical hero, Joe “King” Oliver), picking up
scrap from the back of a drawn wagon and cacophonically blowing a tin horn—“he
played it every day, all day”-- to attract business. It was while working and
tootling “one of them long tin horns that
they celebrate Christmas with” that he spotted a beat up cornet in Jake
Fink’s Loan Office (Pawn Shop) on Perdido and South Rampart Street and Morris
Karnofsky, the rag, bone, bottle and metal (junk) collector that he worked for,
lent him the two Dollar down payment on the five dollar instrument. The rest he
paid on time from his hard earned pay.
The Karnofsky
family, Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, took little Louis in and even welcomed
him at their table, what they called ‘cupboard love’ back then; ‘Mother Tillie’
would make sure that he was fed and even taught him Russian lullabies, because
he also had a good voice. The Karnofskys were the first to encourage Louis’
playing and singing; nurturing him in his early life, this kid from a broken
family. Louis forever wore a Star of David, relished Jewish food and praised
his adopted traditions, giving full expression to this double helix of
cultures-- Jewish and African American-- all of his days. The solidarity that
he felt was well earned and given freely. It seems that New Orleans has
perpetually had an element of haves and have-nots, and like it or not Africans
and immigrants have generally had to go through periods of exclusion and
prejudice until they come into their own; the Africans, the Irish, Germans,
Sicilians and Eastern European Jews all were looked down upon and left to hard
scrabble --basically because they were poor-- until they created a prosperity
of their own making.
One of
the things that united them was music. That music is called Jazz; Jazz is the
people’s music, and at the time of Louis Armstrong’s childhood, Jazz was demanding attention.
Singing/scatting
in street skiffle bands by age ten, Louis fit into music like a hand into a
glove. A performer from an early age, he never tired of wanting, and getting,
attention, eating it up like chicken on Sunday and, as we all know, is now
called forward for his ‘prodigious virtuosity and extraordinary talent’. It is
not enough to say that he got very very good on his horn; he was, simply put, a
Musical God. A god that was treated
unfairly enough by his city from day one to the extent that he lived out his
life away from here and is buried in Queens, New York not far from where his
house that his wife bought in 1943 is and where he called ‘home’ until his death
in 1971.
The
fact is that Louis Armstrong grew up poor and powerless and he never forgot
that. The neighborhood that he grew up in was called ‘the Battlefield’ (AKA
Black Storyville) because of the gambling, drunkenness, whoring, fighting and
shootings that occurred there. He dropped out of school in the fifth grade and
started working; Louis had to hustle because he was the wage earner of his
family that included his mother and his sister. He was sent to the Waif’s Home at age eleven
for firing his step father’s pistol on New Year’s Eve and spent three years locked
up. It was there that the band director Peter Davis recognized his talent and
potential-- as did Louis-- and when he was released, his musical muse called
and he followed. He played in New Orleans bands in his early teens, riverboats
at eighteen, up to Chicago, over to New York and back, bringing Jazz and Blues
to appreciative audiences and making money before he was twenty-one. Between
1925 and 1928 Armstrong cut more than sixty records with his band The Hot Five.
It was then that Armstrong, single-handedly transformed Jazz into a soloist’s
art.
Louis
Armstrong was married four times and was reputed to have taken many lovers, he regularly
smoked marijuana and kept in good health (according to him) by taking routine
intestinal purges. He publicly boycotted New Orleans since its banning of
integrated bands in 1956. He was raised with prostitutes, pimps and prejudice
and, with his immense musical ability, he escaped that and became an
international celebrity only to find, whenever revisiting the South, not much had
changed since his childhood, even into the 1960s. Segregation of restaurants,
hotels, theaters and performing venues disgusted him; viciousness,
discrimination and violence aimed at blacks by whites scared him. Explaining a
resistance to demonstrate publically he explained: “they would beat Jesus if he
was black and marched!” He had already been the target of a bombing in
Knoxville at an integrated performance in 1957.He cancelled a trip to Russia in
the same year protesting the Alabama guardsmen anti-integration military
occupation of a Little Rock high school. “They’re going to ask me what’s wrong
with my country and what am I supposed to tell them?” He spoke out against it and President Eisenhower’s inaction and
was reviled by blacks and whites alike for his actions and words; as if
stepping out of the role of an affable, jolly, horn playing minstrel was an
affront.
In
1964 he won a Grammy in Beverly Hills, for best song (Hello Dolly!). The next year
when he returned to New Orleans it was on the heels of the killing of Malcolm X
on February 21st and Bloody Sunday (March 7th) when state
troopers armed with tear gas, bull whips and billy clubs attacked nearly six
hundred marchers in Selma who were protesting the police shooting of a voter
registration activist. He was able to see different sides of our country’s
prides and prejudices; because of his talent he was loved and revered, because
of his color he was disparaged.
If
Louis Armstrong was alive today, would he find New Orleans very much different
than the New Orleans that he knew? Sure, the streets have been paved (kinda), most
everybody has electricity and running water; there’s gentrification and the
white washing and green washing of our city infrastructure, but have we really
advanced? Why is it that the majority of successful African Americans leave
their New Orleans neighborhoods and even the city to find security and peace
for themselves and their loved ones elsewhere?
In
Louisiana teen pregnancy, infant mortality, child poverty, violent crime,
obesity, unemployment, and neglect of the environment are still among (if not)
the highest in the country. Add to this the
bleak futures for the 73% of young blacks graduating high school (the lowest in
the country), the income disparity and low paying jobs for our workforce
minorities--it can be depressing and oppressing.
It’s true that we have come a long way, but, things are far from perfect. Any
person living here needs to prove their worth, same as everywhere else; it’s
just that some segments of our population have to work harder than others to
make that point or be beaten down by the powers that be that act, in their own interests, with impunity.
It
was talent that let Louis escape and the hatred of Jim Crow that kept him away.
There can be no doubt that he knew what it meant to miss New Orleans or the
sleepy time down here in the South; and
he knew what it was like to be black and blue in America.
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