Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life
“Writing about music is like talking about fucking,” John Lennon told Playboy in 1980, and few writers have proven him wrong: to capture something as visceral as music, words seem not just inadequate but downright crude. Some writers skirt the challenge with dry theory, some indulge in flights of hyperbole, and some just throw in the towel and churn out industry PR. But in my book, biography is the sort of music writing with the greatest potential to enrich those indescribable sounds. By learning what a musician’s days were like, feeling the forces that molded and motivated him, the reader stands the greatest chance of comprehending where the music came from or what it might have meant to its maker.
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As the latest in a long line of Armstrong bios, Laurence Bergreen’s Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life, reminds us, the first person to take on Armstrong’s life story was Armstrong himself–in fact, he fancied himself something of a writer. In 1922, after leaving his native New Orleans to join his mentor King Oliver in Chicago, Armstrong bought himself a typewriter, and for the rest of his life, when he wasn’t playing music, he would often be smoking a joint and banging out letters to fans, friends, and family. Working with an amanuensis, he published his first memoir, Swing That Music, in 1936. A decade later he sent a great many written reminiscences to Robert Goffin, a Belgian emigre and adoring fan who incorporated them into Horn of Plenty: The Story of Louis Armstrong. But both collaborators took great liberties with Armstrong’s prose and the facts, and both books were discredited. Armstrong decided to work alone next time, and his 1954 memoir, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, is an unvarnished account of his impoverished childhood among the whores and hustlers of Storyville.
Despite its obvious shortcomings and vehement critics, An American Genius has held its ground; even Down Beat grudgingly acknowledged as much when it reviewed Bergreen’s book. Collier provides the cultural and historical context lacking in Max Jones and John Chilton’s Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story, 1900-1971, published the year Armstrong died. In his beautifully written Satchmo, from 1988, Village Voice critic Gary Giddins attacks Collier for his narrow appraisal of Armstrong’s career, but his text amounts to no more than 90 pages in a book obviously meant for the coffee table. Now Bergreen has weighed in with his 564-page An Extravagant Life; unlike Collier, he had access to the mountain of tapes, photos, scrapbooks, and autobiographical writings that Armstrong’s widow Lucille, who died in October 1983, left to Queens College, and armed with these resources, he clearly aspires to knock Collier from his throne.
Both Bergreen and Collier fail their subject when covering his autumn years, from the late 1940s to his death in 1971. Unlike his childhood and teenage years in New Orleans, Armstrong’s late career was amply recorded by a variety of media, and there are still plenty of surviving witnesses to provide firsthand accounts. But Collier considers Armstrong’s music during that period to be so negligible that he breezes through the last 24 years in as many pages. Bergreen presents the same period in much greater detail, but like Collier he seems to have taken to heart F. Scott Fitzgerald’s edict that there are no second acts in American lives. During the 20s Armstrong almost single-handedly elevated New Orleans polyphony to an expressionistic art form, then spent the Depression and war years redefining himself as a swing-era bandleader, popular singer, and all-around entertainer. In 1947, with the decline of big bands, he formed Louis Armstrong’s All Stars, returning to the small-group format in which he’d made his name. His career took off again, but he never returned to the vanguard; he grew nostalgic in his middle age, revisiting the same old tunes year after year. His playing and singing gained in richness and subtlety, and he made some fine recordings for Verve and Columbia in the mid and late 50s. But in 1959 he suffered a massive heart attack and his health steadily declined afterward. By the late 60s doctors forbade him even to play his horn, fearing he’d drop dead onstage.
