Status
Available
Call number
DDC/MDS
| 788.1092 Ar57s |
Publication
New York : New American Library, [1955]
Description
”In all my whole career the Brick House was one of the toughest joints I ever played in. It was the honky-tonk where levee workers would congregate every Saturday night and trade with the gals who’d stroll up and down the floor and the bar. Those guys would drink and fight one another like circle saws. Bottles would come flying over the bandstand like crazy, and there was lots of just plain common shooting and cutting. But somehow all that jive didn’t faze me at all, I was so happy to have some place to blow my horn.” So says Louis Armstrong, a tough kid who just happened to be a musical genius, about one of the places where he performed and grew up. This raucous, rich tale of his early days in New Orleans concludes with his departure to Chicago at twenty-one to play with his boyhood idol King Oliver, and tells the story of a life that began, mythically, on July 4, 1900, in the city that sowed the seeds of jazz.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member keylawk
Although school systems did nothing for the man, and he grew up in appalling poverty, Armstrong became a great trumpeter and "entertainer". He became rich without hurting anyone. (His competitor, the great Duke Ellington, makes this extraordinary observation.)
As an adult, Armstrong carried a
As an adult, Armstrong carried a
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dictionary around and typed almost every day on a typewriter. This is his autobiography. Show Less
LibraryThing member -Eva-
Louis Armstrong's story of growing up in New Orleans during the early 1900s. The man is interesting and the time and place likewise so. I was much surprised when I realized what a wild place the current Central Business District was with gangsters, gamblers, and prostitutes making up most of the
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population - Armstrong himself was actually a pimp for all of 15 minutes (until his "chick" stabbed him and he ran home to his mom so that she could get rid of the girl for him). Also interesting, from a contemporary standpoint is, of course, how casually the racism of the time was accepted (sort of an "oh, well" is all it gets from Armstrong) - luckily times have changed, but not enough, obviously. Show Less
LibraryThing member Dorritt
This was fascinating, both as an autobiography and as uniquely unfiltered socio-economic essay of New Orleans circa 1900-1921, encompassing the 21 years that Louis Armstrong spent growing up in the city.
The first thing you notice is that this doesn't appear to have been edited in any way - not for
The story also provides some fascinating insights into New Orleans culture at the time, from the institutionalized vice of Storyville (deliberately maintained by the city as a profit center) to the seedy honky-tonks that serviced levee workers, pimps, and whores; from the railroad tracks where his mom harvested herbs to combat TB and lockjaw (tetanus being a constant presence in a neighborhood where no one could afford shoes), to the turpentine factories that ripped away the linings of workers' lungs; from the "Colored Waifs Home" where Louis was incarcerated (no trial, no conviction - just an indefinite sentence until such time as his family could manage to round up a white person to vouch for him), to the endless stream of funerals, picnics, balls, and street parades that gave birth to a generation of brilliant jazz musicians.
Seriously, if you're interested in learning more about the life of Louis Armstrong, I'd strongly recommend bypassing all the biographies written by others and substitute this instead. What you may miss in the way of context or research (was his mother really a working girl? who was the white man who raped his niece? who was Wila Mae, the girl that he and his wife unofficially adopted?) will be amply repaid by the chance to hear Louis tell his story the way he actually experienced it.
The first thing you notice is that this doesn't appear to have been edited in any way - not for
Show More
grammar, not for consistency, and certainly not for "political correctness." Louis tells his story in his own words, stream of conscious-style, through the lens of the morals and ethics he learned growing up in the seediest neighborhoods of New Orleans. His casual acceptance of such things as institutionalized racism (cops who would knock blacks in the head with their "licorice sticks" if they were foolish enough to talk back), domestic violence (which went both ways - in Louis's world, the women were as dangerous as the men), prostitution (his mother and his first wife were working girls; he himself "ran" a girl for a while), and abject poverty (scavenging through trash for food and things to sell) are as important a part of the story as events he is retelling. The story also provides some fascinating insights into New Orleans culture at the time, from the institutionalized vice of Storyville (deliberately maintained by the city as a profit center) to the seedy honky-tonks that serviced levee workers, pimps, and whores; from the railroad tracks where his mom harvested herbs to combat TB and lockjaw (tetanus being a constant presence in a neighborhood where no one could afford shoes), to the turpentine factories that ripped away the linings of workers' lungs; from the "Colored Waifs Home" where Louis was incarcerated (no trial, no conviction - just an indefinite sentence until such time as his family could manage to round up a white person to vouch for him), to the endless stream of funerals, picnics, balls, and street parades that gave birth to a generation of brilliant jazz musicians.
Seriously, if you're interested in learning more about the life of Louis Armstrong, I'd strongly recommend bypassing all the biographies written by others and substitute this instead. What you may miss in the way of context or research (was his mother really a working girl? who was the white man who raped his niece? who was Wila Mae, the girl that he and his wife unofficially adopted?) will be amply repaid by the chance to hear Louis tell his story the way he actually experienced it.
Show Less
Subjects
Language
Physical description
191 p.; 18 cm