1. Everyone is someone.

2. The opposite of passivity is steadfastness.

In the particular case of Armstrong his passivity, as discussed during the interview, was a type of ethnic appeasement and pretended simplicity. His apparently placid emotional transparency was a mask, as in the famous poem by Dunbar. Teachout says that Louis was a “complicated man” with a “strange streak of passivity which lays inexplicably astride the tremendous drive”. Let me explicate that the act of self-preservation through rendering oneself acceptable or non-threatening to an overarching and manifested power exists in all asymmetrical power relationships. Its name within the black american context between blacks is the term tomming. When Ellison says in Invisible Man that he once was inebriated on marijuana and contemplated the kinship between his own invisibility and the fact that Louis’ own invisibility paralleled his own. This was expressed in the song “What did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?” The correlation becomes plain. Ellison in Invisible Man viewed Louis Armstrong’s ability to transform his own invisibility into that aural poetry called jazz with great admiration. Louis was a famous man so his invisibility could not have been anonymity. This special invisibility is the feigned contentment required of certain individuals, a survival technique occurring in all cultures. For similar reasons it was required of individuals to become eunuchs to stand near the throne in ancient Babylon. This behavior called tomming or better yet uncle tomming crystallized the context of antebellum america with its particular race-caste system. So tomming is the particular name acquired by the american form of cultural appeasement in the unequal black/white power relationships written about in Uncle Toms’ Cabin from which the reference originates. Thats my shot at a definition.

3. I would not change Louis but I would like an accurate perception of his impact on black identity which I believe was viewed properly by blacks as tomming not as a sort of angelic figure. In contrast Miles Davis is often not viewed properly by some but he is often misperceived as having been angry. I would call him steadfast.

4.Cultural Icons such as Louis,Duke and Billie while never saints understood the wide ranging impact of their personal styles on white impressions of the wider group of blacks . By portraying an affected posture,lets call it tomming, Louis was not flourishing but only surviving as he lived behind the mask of tomming . Finally look at the photo of Louis—in its calmness and child-like harmlessness.He holds his trumpet almost like a teddy bear or security blanket.Yet in contrast listen again to the tape recording of Louis and his wife concerning bed time.How do you reconcile the image shown above with the rough-mouthed man on the tape pursuing his womans affection with a surprising grit and tenacity? It is the mask called tomming that makes explicit this apparent contradiction between the image and the tape recording smoothed over by heavy marijuana use. This is best stated in the famous Dunbar poem:

We Wear the Mask

by Paul Laurence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,–

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be overwise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask!

I say to you nother don’t dream otherwise. The lesson of Armstrong is to wear the mask. Great Blog to both Lydon and listeners.

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.