Cultural critic Terry Teachout first heard jazz legend Louis Armstrong around 1964 when, as a boy in rural Sikeston, Mo., he was summoned by his mother to watch Armstrong sing “Hello, Dolly” on The Ed Sullivan Show. Most kids would have balked. Not Teachout.

“I was thrilled,” Teachout says, relaxing in a padded chair in his compact, art-lined Upper West Side Manhattan apartment. “He, from that moment on, became an important part of my life.”

Teachout went on to become a jazz musician himself, playing bass in different combos before shifting careers to writing. Best-known as the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal, Teachout is also the author of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (HarperCollins, 2002), among other works. And come December 2, he'll add Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Teachout recalls, while on tour promoting The Skeptic, returning to his hotel and flopping, exhausted, onto the bed. “I'm lying there looking at the ceiling,” he says, “and it was really just like a bolt of lightning hit me on the forehead—Armstrong!”

The bolt wasn't quite out of the blue. Michael Cogswell, director of the Louis Armstrong House and Archives in Queens, had planted the seed earlier when he told Teachout about a remarkable and newly available treasure trove. Armstrong, it turned out, had been an avid home tape-recording buff. And the archives had recently converted his collection of some 650 fragile tapes into listenable CDs.

“I am the first biographer ever to have had access to them,” Teachout says. “And they were invaluable.”

Armstrong was part of the early wave of people to buy a recreational reel-to-reel recorder in 1947. He initially used it to record, analyze and improve his performances. But, says Teachout, Armstrong started making “audio-verité tapes of chunks of his life: dinner parties, getting high in the dressing room after a gig, trying to get his wife into bed.

“To people who know about Armstrong in the general way that most of us know about Armstrong, I think they're going to be surprised by a lot of this book,” Teachout says, pointing to Armstrong's own underappreciated skills as a writer (he wrote two memoirs), his dealings with the Chicago mob, his pot smoking, or that his “career was short-circuited because of lip damage that caused him to withdraw from performing for years before he became famous.”

And while Armstrong's growl of a voice on such songs as “Hello, Dolly” and “What a Wonderful World” echo through the culture, Armstrong broke through the color barrier not with music but with acting—albeit mostly in limited, race-restricted roles marked by his ever-present smile. But he was also a regular on radio programs and, in the 1960s, he made the move to TV, appearing on such top-rated programs as The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

“Most people don't know that it wasn't so much his music making as his film career that made him a real star,” Teachout says.

Armstrong, the son of a New Orleans hooker, was a more robust and complicated man than the popular image, given to sharp outbursts of anger over transgressions he quickly forgot about. He was married four times “and had numerous dalliances in between and during these marriages. For the average reader, the Armstrong that emerges from the pages of this book is going to be a much more complex figure and I think a much more interesting one.”

But what makes the book stand out, Teachout says, is the nuance he was able to introduce because the newly released tapes let him eavesdrop on moments of Armstrong's life that were unavailable to previous biographers.

“Armstrong, although he was a very self-aware man, was also a very un-self-conscious man,” Teachout says. “The tape recorder became a part of his life.... He is the only major jazz musician who has left behind a very large body of documents of this kind.”

Author Information
Veteran journalist Scott Martelle is the author of Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West (Rutgers, 2007).