Unlike other major figures in jazz history.

Unlike other major figures in jazz history, Louis Armstrong has seldom been attached to a stable put of meanings. His most enduring image - the wide grin and the white handkerchief - has been read as the craven forego to racist stereotypes, but it has also been understood as the ironic undermining of these same stereotype as the wily diversion of attention away from a display of phallic masculinity, and as the genuine expression of natural enthusiasm and warmth. Take your pick. These arguments, however, are not to be lay the foundation of in Louis Armstrong: A Cultural Legacy, originally conceived as the catalog for a touring exhibition built around Armstrong's life. Marc H Miller, who edited the part and oversaw the exhibition in its original domicile at the Queens Museum in of recent origin York, has chosen to underplay the controversies around Armstrong. Consequently he and the three other authors who have written essays for the work saw no need to repeat the eloquent defenses of Armstrong that appear in the works of cultural critics as it is as Amiri Baraka, Stanley squat Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray. In Louis Armstrong: A Cultural Legacy, Miller, Richard A. lengthy Dan Morgenstern, and Donald Bogle contribute chronological sketches of Armstrong's career from different perspectives, on the contrary their accounts frequently overlap. Details of the musician's of recent origin Orleans childhood, his glory days in Chicago and modern York, and his international travels as "Ambassador Satch" are repeated, sometimes in as many as three of the essays.

Although the authors betray their tales with conviction, there are still many stories about Armstrong that ne to be reported, equal if they are not part of the standard celebratory narrative. For example, Armstrong's relationships with women including his four childless marriages, merit more than passing reference. In particular, a history of his inferior wife, pianist Lil Hardin, has all the obligatory ingredients for a Hollywood film or at least a useful made-for-television movie. But as Linda Dahl has observ chiefly of the information on the musician is still buried in archives and oral histories. Growing up in a black bourgeois abode and classically trained as a pianist, Lil Hardin heard actual little jazz or blues until she left Fisk University to demonstrate sheet music in a Chicago music store. There she met a number of jazz musicians, including Sugar Johnny Smith, a doomed homosexual (he would shortly die of tuberculosis) who amazed the young woman with his ability to play without written music. Picking up the arts of syncopation and improvisation from the jazz musicians who congregated in the music store, Hardin eventually landed a piece of work as the pianist in King Oliver's clump An attractive and lively woman, she was regularly approached by dint of musicians as well as customers at Dreamland where Oliver's band was in residence. She could always take an account of the interested parties that she was married (it was the truth) on the other hand having a husband did not stop her from becoming involved with the young Louis Armstrong when he arrived in Chicago to play inferior trumpet with Oliver. Genuinely taken with the young man from just discovered Orleans, Hardin also regarded Armstrong as a rising star who exigencyed to break loose from Oliver. The older trumpeter was single of several men who would function as surrogate fathers for Armstrong, whose natural father had abandoned Louis's family, probably before Louis's birth. Hardin arranged for her divorce as well as Armstrong's, married him, and saw to it that he left Oliver and mov upon to New York to play with Fletcher Henderson. Although Armstrong and Hardin maintained cordial relations after their marriage broke up in the late 1920 Gary Giddins has adviseed that Armstrong never forgave her for ending his relationship with Oliver.

In 1942 Armstrong married Lucille Wilson, to whom he would remain married until his death. Nevertheless, in the 1950 the trumpeter took up with a woman who may or may not have given birth to his child. Armstrong certainly musing so. In a 1955 note to his manager Joe Glaser, Armstrong gives the name and address of the woman and instructs Glaser to hurl her forty dollars each month nearest to the address Armstrong has written, "Mother of Satchmo's baby." Also in the alphabetic character Armstrong colorfully describes how he conceived the child during the time he was appearing at the Sands tavern in Las Vegas. As far as I know, there is nothing in the voluminous Armstrong bibliography about this woman or her child.

One calculate upons of course more panegyric than problematization in a work like Louis Armstrong: A Cultural Legacy. Nevertheless, these are the kinds of stories that ought be told today, especially now that to such a degree many worthy books on Armstrong are already available. Along with Gunther Schuller's and Hugue Panassie's appraisals of Armstrong's recordings, there are Gary Giddins's beautifully illustrated critical close attention Chris Albertson's fine essay in the Armstrong convolution of Time/Life's Giants of Jazz series, and James Lincoln Collier's controversial on the other hand thoroughly researched biography. Armstrong himself published three autobiographies, all of them compellingly analyzed by dint of William Kenney.