Terry Teachout’s Pops: Culture-Changing Genius
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Terry Teachout‘s fine reconsideration of the man called “Pops” solidifies Louis Armstrong’s standing as not just the greatest horn player since the angel Gabriel, but an all-transforming artist at the level of James Joyce or even Shakespeare, and a black American freedom fighter of character and conscience, too.
Louis Armstrong’s power to astonish was never in doubt. Hoagy Carmichael, the songwriter of “Stardust” and “Georgia,” dropped his cigarette and gulped his drink the first time he heard Louis, barely out of his teens, in 1921. “Why,” Hoagy moaned, “isn’t everybody in the world listening to that?” Over the next 50 years the whole world heard Louis, and marveled, but there were always questions, too: Could honky-tonk music from red-light New Orleans get standing, really, with Schubert and Bach? Was Louis in artistic decline after the Twenties? Was he an Uncle Tom in all that Satchelmouth clowning?
All the modern answers as Terry Teachout documents them are over the top now in favor of Louis Armstrong. Listen to the testimonies his fellow horn players Ruby Braff and Wynton Marsalis gave me on Louis’s legendary centennial, July 4, 1900: that if Louis wasn’t actually God, he was at least proof of God. His grandeur, complexity and consistency as man and artist seem now beyond question. Harold Bloom, keeper of the cultural canon and an astute jazz listener, too, pairs Armstrong with Walt Whitman as the greatest American contributor to the world’s art, the genius of this nation at its best. It turns out we could believe our ears after all.
download an mp3CL: You refer to him at one point as a middlebrow genius, which I think is awfully good, but spell it out.
TT: I used that phrase because Armstrong is a guy whose favorite band leader was Guy Lombardo, a guy who just liked a good tune, who happened to be a culture-changing genius. And he didn’t see why you couldn’t like Guy Lombardo and Caruso and the Beatles and Barbra Streisand, and Joe Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton — he just thought it was all music.
The picture on the cover of my book was taken by Philippe Halsman in 1965. It is an outtake from a session that was photographed for the cover of LIFE, this very famous photo that everybody’s seen of Armstrong with his eyes popping and the horn pointing outward and he’s dressed in this tux. He looks wonderful and he looks like the Armstrong we all know.
In this photograph, Armstrong’s just standing there with a very enigmatic half-smile on his face, holding his horn, dressed beautifully, looking like a man who knows something that maybe we don’t know, a man who knows his complexity, the complications of his own personality, who has seen the world as it is and in a very deep sense has accepted the world as it is.
Armstrong is a man who is at peace with himself. At the very end of his life he sent a letter to a friend that I quote at the end of my book, where he says that ‘my whole life has been happiness and I love everybody.’ And he wasn’t kidding, he really wasn’t kidding.
That kind of acceptance of the fundamental realities of life, not meaning that you don’t want life to be changed, but that you accept the world as it is, and decide that you’re going to make the best of it, that’s really at the heart of his character, and I think of his genius too. It allows him to take in all things in his music and his art, the sadness, the beauty, the joy, the comedy, and make them one.
Terry Teachout in conversation with Chris Lydon, January 8, 2009
January 12th, 2010 at 5:26 pm
This may be one of the most perfect hours I have ever listened to. I forwarded the link to everyone on my email list, confident that I had just delivered a swell gift. Thanks so much to Terry Teachout, Chris Lydon – and the the true source, Louis Armstrong. His story humbles and inspires me, and gives me hope.
January 13th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
Well it seems Chris that you and I are in the same orbit if you notice my blog reply to the Robin Kelly interview I’m surprised and pleased with the interview. Now about ‘tomming’ as Billie Holiday said he did tom from the heart but it is no doubt that he was an uncle tom, Dizzy was also a tom. Armstrong’s passivity is ‘tomming’ but it was and continues to be a survival mechanism for many less educated individuals interfacing with individuals with power. It is clear that death is sometimes better than success and that only a member of a group can discern the dividing line, and that reality is not apocryphal.Great interview Lydon.
January 14th, 2010 at 2:43 am
Braunze, my question to you is, what is the opposite of “passivity?” What specific characteristic would you change in Louie Armstrong, so he would not have to be judged an “uncle tom” by you in 2010? I ask sincerely. And if you don’t mind, although you might not even read this, and I’m nobody, could you please give us your definition of an uncle tom? If you go so far as to judge Louie and Dizzy “uncle toms” then I assume you have a good definition. Because I’m not sure exactly what it is, Is it like an athlete selling out to a sponsor? Or is it like everyday people – even educated people – who in their careers sell out to corporate America? Louie Armstrong wasn’t trying to survive during all those later years, he was flourishing.
January 14th, 2010 at 3:46 am
“Mayann told me that the night I was born there was a great big shooting scrape in the Alley and the two guys killed each other. It was the Fourth of July, a big holiday in New Orleans, when almost anything can happen.”
Personally, I see Mr. Monk through the prism of race relations, and I see Mr. Armstrong through the prism of The Big Easy…New Orleans.
Of course Louis had his own genius but it was the meshing of his with the genius of that adolescent city by the bayou that forged his icon. In the same way the genius of Helen Keller needed the genius of Anne Sullivan to create an alchemy of transcendence.
In Jamaica I made a nine mile pilgrimage up a mountain to view the vista from Bob Marley’s birthplace, then to his home in the mercurial streets of Kingston, and finally I stood in the waveless serene shores of the island’s sea…only then did I sense the roots of the Mr. Marley’s genius.
Satchmo’s genius percolated in the Petri dish of Storyville, a red-light district whose motto was “Order of the Garter: Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense (Shame to Him Who Evil Thinks.)”
“There were all kinds of thrills for me in Storyville. On every corner I could hear music. And such good music! The music I wanted to hear. It was worth my salary – the little I did get [delivering hard coal] – just to go into Storyville. It seemed as though the bands were shooting at each other with those riffs.”
Besides Storyville from what I can tell, there are at least two other important influences in his life, one is the Second Line, and the other is strong women. The Second Line developed his chops, the women his empathy and fortitude.
After one particular Second Line funeral: “They patted us on the back and just wouldn’t let us alone. They hired us several times afterward. After all, we proved to them that any learned musician can read music, but they can’t all swing.”
The strong women were his wife, sister, grandmother, greatgrandmother, and his mother Mayann: “She was glad to say hello to everybody and she always held her head up. She never envied anybody. I guess I must have inherited this trait from Mayann.”
You mentioned in this hour that Armstrong’s mother was a prostitute. I don’t think that can be understated. And for a time, Louie was a reluctant pimp. Louis was from such a poor part of town, Liberty and Perdido, that he was looked down on at the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys. Later on when he was sent as a boy – to be the man – and take care of his sick mother, he rode his first bus and found out he had to sit in the back because he was black. Only years later when he arrived in Chicago did he know that as a musician he had finally arrived…and that’s only because King Oliver told him he would have a room with “a private bath.”
This is the man who took nothing for granted in life, not a meal, not a bath, not a breath…It’s all a blessing to Pops. And that makes Pops a blessing to all of us. The lesson of Louie Armstrong that I take with me through life is to take nothing for granted, not even joy.
May 10th, 2010 at 4:12 am
Teachout has once spoken of “atomized culture”, but i am a little confused about it. Can anybody explain the term for me? If any word should replace the “atomized”, what would it be?