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LOUIS "SATCHMO" ARMSTRONG WORLD'S GREATEST TRUMPETER [[picture of Louis Armstrong]] LOUIS ARMSTRONG Louis Armstrong was born on July 4th, 1900, in a New Orleans tenement, and until he was 13, his story was that of the average poor colored boy. When he was five, his mother and father separated, and his mother took Louis and his baby sister to live with their grandmother in a pretty little house at Liberty and Perdido Streets, right in the heart of the third ward of New Orleans. It was a struggle for her to keep Louis in school, but she managed, until that dramatic New Year's Eve of 1913, told about best in Louis' own words in his autobiography, "Swing That Music." "When I fired off my daddy's old .38 it made the other kid's little six-shooter sound pretty sick. It banged out above the scatting of the fire-crackers and the hot jazz music coming from the honky tonks down the street. It made a whole gang of sound, for sure. "It was New Year's Eve of 1913 and New Orleans was high, celebrating the way it always did—with bang and big time. "Merry-makers were going along the street and when that old cannon let loose in my hand, and sang out so loud, they stopped short and looked back. There was one pretty big party of them. They stood still a minute, then they all burst out laughing. They laughed a lot and then they called, 'Happy New Year', and went on. I must have looked funny to them; a little kid with such a big gun in my hand, standing there scared half to death at all the noise it made. "But the really funny part of it was something very different. It was the way it all turned out, because that shot, I do believe started my career. It changed my life and brought me my big chance. In the twenty and more years that have passed [[next column]]since, I guess I have played almost all over the world. I played before the Prince of Wales, the new King Edward, and his brother, the Duke of York, and the Crown Princess of Italy and for many other famous people: and I have swung my bad in Paris and Copenhagen and Brussels and Geneva and Vienna and New York and Chicago and Hollywood and many other places. But whenever I have had a few minutes to myself out of all this running around, so I could stop stock-still and ask myself 'Louis, how come this to happen to you? I have always thought back to that one New Year's Eve before the big war, and of what followed. For I was sent to jail." It wasn't exactly a jail—it was the Waif's Home for boys in New Orleans. But you couldn't leave until they were sure you were going to be a good boy from then on, and it took Louis one year and seven months to prove that he was to everyone else's satisfaction. In the meantime, he acquired his nickname "Satchelmouth", now shortened to Satchmo, because of his big mouth—big in size, not in talk. And he learned to play the cornet. All the keepers at the Waif's Home were colored men, and one of them, Peter Davis, was also musical instructor. Taking an interest in Louis, he first made him the official school bugler, then taught him to play the cornet preparatory to placing him in the Boys' Band. Armstrong was a good student, and learned fast. He had a keen ear for music, and he began to develop the deep chest and strong lips which enabled him years later to blow more high C's in succession than any other trumpet player in the history of music, popular or classical—280 consecutive high C's.
