A FACE OF ARMSTRONG, BUT NOT THE IMAGE

The face, according to an old Latin tag, is the index of the soul. If that
is true, then Louis Armstrong must have been the happiest of men, for
everyone who met him was promptly and permanently disarmed by the warmth of
his yard-wide smile; he was born a century ago this Saturday, and in all
that time he appears to have made no enemies.

The feeling was not necessarily mutual, though; Benny Goodman once made the
mistake of high-hatting him at the start of a joint concert tour and was
soon reduced to feigning a heart attack to escape the trumpeter's wrath.

Nor did Armstrong hesitate to speak his mind, loudly and publicly, whenever
he thought it appropriate. In the most celebrated of his outbursts,
triggered by Dwight Eisenhower's initial unwillingness to force Gov. Orval
Faubus of Arkansas to desegregate the public schools of Little Rock, he
informed an astonished reporter that the President of the United States had
"no guts" and that "the government can go to hell." Popular entertainers,
especially black ones, didn't make a habit of saying things like that in 1957.

All this is part of the Armstrong legend, and thus fairly well known.

But there was more to Louis Armstrong than the legend.

The same man who told off Eisenhower, for example, scrawled another set of
fighting words onto a grade-school note pad as he lay in a Manhattan
hospital room in 1969. As always with Armstrong, the syntax was homemade,
but the meaning was as clear as a high note: "Negroes never did stick
together and they never will. They hold too much malice -- Jealousy deep
down in their heart for the few Negroes who tries . . . they know within
themselves that they're doing the wrong things, but expects everybody just
because he is a Negro to give up everything he has struggled for in life
such as a decent family -- a living, a plain life -- the respect . . . And
the Negro who can't see these foolish moves from some over Educated fools'
moves -- then right away he is called a White Folks Nigger. Believe it --
the White Folks did everything that's decent for me. I wish that I can
boast these same words for Niggers."

You will not find this scorching jeremiad in "Louis Armstrong: An
Extravagant Life," Laurence Bergreen's 1997 biography.

Instead it is it is paraphrased gingerly.

Gary Giddins' invaluable "Satchmo," published in 1988, mentioned it only in
passing, though Mr. Giddins quoted extensively from the remainder of the
document in which it appears, a 77-page autobiographical manuscript now in
the possession of the Louis Armstrong House and Archives at Queens College.
Not until 1999 did it finally see print, first in Joshua Berrett's "Louis
Armstrong Companion" (Schirmer), then in Thomas Brothers' "Louis Armstrong,
in His Own Words: Selected Writings" (Oxford).

Mr. Brothers' volume, amazingly enough, was the first book devoted solely
to Armstrong's own writings. (And it was far from complete; the uncollected
letters could easily fill another volume.) Most jazz fans are at least
vaguely aware that Armstrong did quite a bit of writing, including dozens
of magazine and newspaper articles, hundreds of letters and a pungent 1954
memoir, "Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans," which he wrote without
assistance. Few, though, seem to grasp their unique significance.

Many jazz musicians have published autobiographies, but nearly all of them
were actually written by collaborators; Armstrong is one of a handful of
jazz musicians, and the only major one, to have left behind a substantial
body of writing in which his thoughts are presented in wholly or
essentially unmediated form.

Granted that serious jazz scholarship is a comparatively young field, it is
still decidedly odd that so many scholars and critics have been so slow --
if not positively reluctant -- to grapple with the sometimes uncomfortable
implications of what Armstrong wrote about his life and work, which does
not always mesh neatly with his good-humored public image.

One who has done so is Dan Morgenstern, who wrote the introduction to the
1986 paperback reissue of "Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans." In it he
shrewdly observed that while Armstrong "doesn't pass judgment on the
'gamblers, hustlers, cheap pimps, thieves [and] prostitutes' among whom he
was raised, it is clear throughout this book that his values, from a very
early age on, differ from theirs."

"He was different from most of them, and the key difference was character,"
Mr. Morgenstern wrote.

Again, most people know in a general way that Armstrong grew up poor, but
the devil is in the details.

He was the illegitimate son of a 15-year-old part-time prostitute from the
poorest quarter of New Orleans, abandoned at birth by his natural father
and sentenced at the age of 11 to the Colored Waif's Home, an
orphanage-like reform school, for the crime of firing a revolver into the
air to celebrate the Fourth of July. It was the first time his name
appeared in print, and by all rights it should have been the last, save
perhaps for a final entry on a police blotter; instead, he wrote himself
indelibly into the history of Western music.

Yet his genius alone was not powerful enough to pull him out of the gutter.

That took something more, and he knew it.

Why did Armstrong spend so much of his spare time hunched over a
typewriter? Partly because he was a gregarious soul who loved to send
letters to his friends, but also because he thought he had important things
to say. Armstrong's autobiographical writings "can be seen as a series of
moral lessons," Mr. Bergreen argues, and, like Mr. Morgenstern, he got it
right on the nose. Armstrong wanted to teach his fellow men a lesson, which
can be summed up in six words: You get what you work for. Having been born
desperately poor, he worked desperately hard, first as a boy and then as a
man. In this respect, he had much in common with Ragged Dick, Horatio
Alger's plucky bootblack, whose burning desire to "grow up 'spectable"
propelled him into the ranks of the middle class.

Self-discipline, self-improvement, self-reliance: these were Armstrong's
lifelong watchwords, and no Alger hero could have improved on his iron
determination to get ahead in the world.

Once he did so, he felt an obligation to tell others how to do the same thing.

"I don't want anyone to feel I'm posing as a plaster saint," he wrote in
"Satchmo." "Like everyone I have my faults, but I always have believed in
making an honest living.

I was determined to play my horn against all odds, and I had to sacrifice a
whole lot of pleasure to do so."

This aspect of Armstrong is no longer fashionable, to put it mildly, and
even in his lifetime, long before the 19th-century work ethic of individual
responsibility and deferred gratification had become politically
controversial, progressive-minded intellectuals were starting to have
trouble with it. Around the time that Armstrong was sent to the Colored
Waif's Home, George Bernard Shaw was writing "Pygmalion," in which Eliza
Doolittle's father savagely mocks the accepted distinction between the
"deserving" and "undeserving" poor:

"I don't need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don't eat less
hearty than him; and I drink a lot more . . . What is middle class
morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything."

A true child of his time, Armstrong would have found such talk absurd at
best, pernicious at worst.

He smoked marijuana every day and cheated happily on all four of his wives,
but when it came to poverty, he was a perfect Victorian, certain that work
was the only path to salvation and that those unwilling to follow it earned
their dire fate. "The Negroes always wanted pity," he recalled in his 1969
reminiscence of life in New Orleans. "They did that in place of going to
work . . . they were in an alley or in the street corner shooting dice for
nickels and dimes, etc. (mere pittances) trying to win the little money
from his Soul Brothers who might be gambling off the money [they] should
take home to feed their starving children or pay their small rents, or very
important needs, etc." The note of anger -- of contempt -- is unmistakable.

In a recent review of "Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words" and "The Louis
Armstrong Companion," Brian Harker, an assistant professor of music at
Brigham Young University, remarked that Armstrong was "a product of
turn-of-the-century African-American ideology, especially that of Booker T.
Washington."

"Like Washington," Mr. Harker added, "Armstrong was an accommodationist,
determined to play -- and win -- by the rules of the white majority." This
is true as far as it goes, but it overlooks the fact that most jazz
musicians, black and white alike, come from middle-class backgrounds, while
most of those who are born poor strive mightily -- and more often than not
successfully -- to join the ranks of the middle class.

Anyone who doubts that Armstrong filled the latter bill need only visit his
home, some seven blocks from Shea Stadium in a shabby but respectable part
of Queens. (It will open as a museum in 2003.) It is a modest three-story
frame house whose elaborate interior is uncannily reminiscent of Graceland,
Elvis Presley's gaudy Memphis mansion.

From the Jetsons-style kitchen-of-the-future to the silver wallpaper and
golden faucets of the master bathroom, the Armstrong house looks exactly
like what it is: the residence of a poor Southern boy who grew up and made
good.

Unlike Graceland, though, it is neither oppressive nor embarrassing. As one
stands in Armstrong's smallish study (whose decorations include, among
other things, a portrait of the trumpeter painted by Tony Bennett), it is
impossible not to be touched to the heart by the aspiration that is visible
wherever you look. This, you sense, was the home of a working man, one
bursting with a pride that came not from what he had but from what he did.
"I never want to be anything more than I am, what I don't have I don't
need," Armstrong wrote.

Referring to his fourth wife, he added, "My home with Lucille is good, but
you don't see me in no big estates and yachts, that ain't gonna play your
horn for you. When the guys come from taking a walk around the estate they
ain't got no breath to blow that horn." Is it any wonder that it enraged
him to be branded an Uncle Tom? As far as he was concerned, working hard
was not "acting white": it was acting human.

But Armstrong's rage, though genuine, was not typical.

That great smile was no mere game face, donned to please the paying
customers: it told the truth about the man who wore it. "I think I had a
beautiful life," he said not long before his death in 1971. "I didn't wish
for anything I couldn't get, and I got pretty near everything I wanted
because I worked for it." It would be hard to imagine a more suitable
epitaph for jazz's most eminent Victorian.