Sunday, February 21, 2010

Remembering the great Louis Armstrong (1901 - 1971)

1933


1925 Bessie Smith, backed by Louis Armstrong on cornet and Fred Longshaw on harmonium


The Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise (NYT)
[September 1957:]….Mr. Armstrong, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, agreed to talk. Mr. Lubenow [the reporter] stuck initially to his editor’s script, asking Mr. Armstrong to name his favorite musician. (Bing Crosby, it turned out.) But soon he brought up Little Rock, and he could not believe what he heard. “It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country,” a furious Mr. Armstrong told him. President Eisenhower, he charged, was “two faced,” and had “no guts.” For Governor Faubus, he used a double-barreled hyphenated expletive, utterly unfit for print. The two settled on something safer: “uneducated plow boy.” The euphemism, Mr. Lubenow says, was far more his than Mr. Armstrong’s.

Mr. Armstrong bitterly recounted some of his experiences touring in the Jim Crow South. He then sang the opening bar of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” inserting obscenities into the lyrics and prompting Velma Middleton, the vocalist who toured with Mr. Armstrong and who had joined them in the room, to hush him up.
. . .
So the next morning Mr. Lubenow returned to the Dakota Hotel and, as Mr. Armstrong shaved, had the Herald photographer take their picture together. Then Mr. Lubenow showed Mr. Armstrong what he’d written. “Don’t take nothing out of that story,” Mr. Armstrong declared. “That’s just what I said, and still say.” He then wrote “solid” on the bottom of the yellow copy paper, and signed his name.

Mr. Armstrong was to pay a price for his outspokenness. There were calls for boycotts of his concerts. The Ford Motor Company threatened to pull out of a Bing Crosby special on which Mr. Armstrong was to appear. Van Cliburn’s manager refused to let him perform a duet with Mr. Armstrong on Steve Allen’s talk show.

But it didn’t really matter. On Sept. 24, President Eisenhower sent 1,200 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne into Little Rock, and the next day soldiers escorted the nine students into Central High School. Mr. Armstrong exulted. “If you decide to walk into the schools with the little colored kids, take me along, Daddy,” he wired the president. “God bless you.”

Songs bursting in air

Star-Spangled Controversy Pits Martial Anthem Against Pacifist College (Chronicle of Higher Ed)

Playing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at intercollegiate sporting events in the United States is as commonplace as, well, apple pie. But until now, the national anthem has never been performed at Goshen College, a small 116-year-old institution in Indiana whose ties to the pacifist Mennonite Church led it, among other things, to ban the song because of its martial lyrics. According to the Associated Press, the college has agreed to allow the anthem's performance in order to be more welcoming of visitors and students from outside the faith (only 55 percent of the enrollment is Mennonite). But the decision has split the college, with hundreds signing an anti-anthem petition and some 900 joining a Facebook page called "Against Goshen College Playing National Anthem." The college has compromised, however: The version of the song to be performed starting next month will be instrumental.

Roy's obituary in LA Times and Register: "we were lucky to have you while we did"

  This ran in the Sunday December 24, 2023 edition of the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register : July 14, 1955 - November 20, 2...