LOUIS ARMSTRONG: A DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH, part two

As our centennial celebration of Louis Armstrong’s arrival in Chicago ramps up this summer, we offer you a three part series on jazz starting pre-Louis through his profound impact on the art. No story on the Louis in Chicago could be complete without discussing the role of Lil Hardin Armstrong. A gifted and talented pianist and writer, she married Louis in Chicago and helped him develop into an international superstar.

By Kent Richmond & Howard Mandel

The progenitors of New Orleans cornet playing, who established the brass instrument as the lead voice in what we now know as jazz, start with legendary Buddy Bolden and include well-documented Bunk Johnson, Emmanuel Perez and Freddie Keppard. They were all con- temporaries and influences on Joseph Nathan Oliver, born in 1881. Oliver used what he had learned from those fathers of the music to jumpstart his career as an instrumentalist with a band, just as Louis Armstrong would launch himself a few years later in Chicago based on the mentorship of King Oliver.

Armstrong, born August 4, 1901, had lived with his grandmother, mother and sister in the hardscrabble New Orleans neighborhood called The Battlefield. He was only six when he found work collecting rags and bones and delivering coal while playing a tin horn off the back of a wagon for the Karnofsky family, Lithuanian Jews who treated him well, even advancing him funds to buy a $5 pawn shop cornet. That purchase, and the infamous New

Year’s Even shooting-into-the air incident of 1914 which landed him in the Colored Waif’s Home where he came to play horn in band and parades, were pivotal events precipitating Louis Armstrong’s subsequent artistry, career and fame.

The Streckfus Steamboat Line was the first to hire a band to popular music during its pleasure trips on the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis and occasionally as far north as St. Paul. That band was directed by Fate Marable, a taskmaster who hired New Orleans musicians such as Pops Foster, Johnny Dodds, Herman “Baby” Dodds, Johnny St. Cyr and, eventually, Louis Armstrong. Musicians were paid $50 a week plus room and board, and a $5 a week bonus if they stayed on for the whole excursion.

Captain John Streckfus, owner of the Line’s S.S. Sydney and S.S. Capitol, was a fiddler who would occasionally sit in. At rehearsals he would take out his watch and time the beats per minute to make certain that the music was danceable.

The Black players were instructed not to speak to the white passengers unless spoken to first. This job is among Armstrong’s earliest experiences with a white “high society.” It has been claimed that both Bix Beiderbecke and Jack Teagarden first heard Armstrong’s clarion horn lofting over the Mississippi waters from the passing steamboat.

Back home, teenage Louis had caught the attention of trombonist Kid Ory – with whom Joe Oliver played. When Oliver had left the Crescent City for Chicago in 1918, Armstrong took his place in Ory’s band, and maintained correspondence with the man he referred to as “Papa Joe.”

Oliver had done well in Chicago – his appearance with the White Sox Booster Band in 1920, after the team disgrace of the Black Sox scandal, was certainly intended to give a positive charge to the baseballers’ image. But he was professionally restless. He took his Creole Jazz Band, including pianist Lil Hardin, to San Francisco in 1920. The players were un- easy with local attitudes towards Blacks there, and drifted back to Chicago. Oliver went down to Los Angeles, but Hardin was among the defectors, quitting, going home, resuming her gig as house pianist at the Dreamland Ballroom.

On January 17, 1920, the 18th Amendment banning sales of alcoholic beverages -passed by the U.S. Congress over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto -- went into effect. Much has been made of Chicago’s fervent rebuke of Prohibition, for instance through its establishment and patronage of speakeasies. Gambling and prostitution as well as booze were featured attraction in these joints, with police and officials paid to look the other way.

However, it was unpractical for large clubs featuring dynamic music which could be heard by any passersby to operate “underground.” So venues like the Royal Gardens, Sunset Cafe and Burt Kelly’s Stables were set-up bars (also known as bottle clubs, perhaps giving rise to the term BYOB).

A patron would buy a soft drink to discretely spike from a flask carried in their coat jacket or purse, so if police raided a club would not be criminally liable or closed.

Of course, Chicago’s Roaring ‘20s was the era of Al Capone and competing gangs. Mob-owned clubs were commonplace, and Capone himself was a primary sponsor of the growth and popularity of jazz. Many of his places were “Black and Tan” clubs, where integrated audiences were welcomed. As long as money could be made from cover charges and drink sales, the bosses were happy.

Musicians from New Orleans were no strangers from dealing with gangsters, and many actually liked working for the mob. The gigs were steady, the pay was good and they were treated with relative respect. In early 1922 Oliver returned to Chicago from out west to take up residency with his ensemble -- the Dodds brothers on clarinet and drums, respectively; banjoist St. Cyr; Honoré Dutrey, trombone; Bill Johnson, bass; Bertha Gonzales, piano – at the Royal Gardens, rechristened as Lincoln Gardens.

Oliver was not a smoker or a drinker, but he enjoyed sugar sandwiches chased with sugar water - which exacerbated a gum condition, making it painful for him to play his cornet. As his condition worsened, he sought to remedy the situation by calling on his protégé Louis Armstrong to join him in Chicago, to play second cornet and fill in when King was ill.

Although initially hesitant to leave New Orleans, Armstrong wrote in his autobiography Satchmo: My Life In New Orleans (published in 1954) “I made up my mind just that quick nothing could change it, Joe my idol had sent for me.” He took the Illinois Central’s City of New Orleans train north, sustained by a fish sandwich his mama had made him since Blacks weren’t served in the dining cars. He arrived at the 12th Street Station at Roosevelt Road and Michigan Avenue. He was distressed Oliver wasn’t there to meet him, but the King had arranged for a porter to put Armstrong in a cab and direct it to the Lincoln Gardens where the Creole Jazz Band was performing that night.

Arriving at the club, Louis stayed in the back to watch the band finish its set. He was impressed with the fine suits guys he’d known from his days with Fate Marable were wearing. He sat in with them during the next set, after which, King Oliver took Louis to a boarding house at 3412 S. Wabash Avenue, near his own place at 31st and State.

The next day 21-year-old Louis showed up at the Gardens wearing a patched second-hand suit that he hoped that no one would notice. After that night’s show, Oliver took Armstrong to the Dreamland, to persuade Lil Hardin to rejoin his group.

Upon their introduction, Armstrong was smitten with Hardin, who was pretty, petite, stylish, educated and confident -- everything that he was not. Her first impression was that a country bumpkin weighing over 200 pounds probably should not be called “Little Louis.”

“I was very disappointed,” she remembered years later. “I didn’t like anything about him. I didn’t like the way he dressed, I didn’t like the way he talked. I just didn’t like him. I was very disappointed.” However, she agreed to rejoin Oliver’s ensemble. Unknown to Armstrong, she got more money than he did.

Hardin was more interested in financial aspects of the music business than artistic ones. Her piano style was rhythmically-oriented rather than ambitiously virtuosic, but she wrote several songs for the group and most of its arrangements. Lil was not the soul of the band, but its brains. And King Oliver was arguably the best cornetist in the land, the Creole Jazz Band the most popular and innovative such troupe anywhere.

Oliver’s contributions to early jazz cannot be overstated. He heard his band as a single instrument, but allowed the individuals to improvise, decorating and embellishing a song’s melody. He pioneered using plumber’s plungers, derby hats and doorknobs as mute. And he introduced, at least to recording, the format of a two horn-front line (trombone then principally added “tailgate” comments, clarinet untethered obligati). “Dippermouth Blues” is a classic example of Oliver’s use of a mute and collaboration with Armstrong.

As second cornet, Louis fashioned free harmonic lines and counterpoints around over and under Papa Joe’s lead. If Joe was feeling poorly, he would signal Louis to take over.. “From Satchmo: “It was my ambition to play as he did. I still think that if it had not been for Joe Oliver, jazz would not be what it is today. He was a creator in his own right.”

In April 1923 King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band was invited to a recording session at Gennett Records’ studio in Richmond, Indiana. The eight-piece band -- cornetists Oliver and Armstrong; clarinetist

Dodds and his brother Baby on percussion; trombonist Dutrey; bassist Johnson; banjoist St. Cyr and pianist Hardin -- was apprehensive because the area was a known stronghold of the Klu Klux Klan. Fortunately, the studio was near the train station.

In a small room, positioned around the horn of a gramophone, they cut mechanical recordings, the unmediated sound in the studio moving a needle into wax from which metal plates would be cast for duplication, of 12 songs on April 5 and 6. The Gennett studio was so close to the RR tracks that the recording engineers had to pay close attention to the train schedules. Because of the powerful nature of his playing, Armstrong was asked to stand 15 feet away from the gramophone. His first recorded solo is on “Chimes Blues.” Among the other sides besides “Dippermouth” were “Alligator Hop,” “Weather Bird Blues” and “Zulu Ball.”

Later that year, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band recorded for the Okeh, Columbia and Paramount labels. Their 78 rpm discs shellac discs, priced at around 75 cents (roughly $12 in 2022) were originally sold as “race records,” meant for the presumed Black market that had asserted itself with the breakout success of “Crazy Blues,” by Mamie Smith with her Jazz Hounds in 1921. That presumption was a mistake, because from the first a significant portion of the audiences for Black music was white. The recordings survive today, in historical reissues, some with contemporary technology employed to improve the original sound quality.

Eventually King Oliver confided to Lil Hardin that Louis Armstrong was a much better cornetist than he himself was. She began to view Louis as a diamond in the rough. She coached him on his speech and mannerisms, convinced him to throw away his secondhand clothes and buy new ones. He wore bangs when he first came to Chicago, which she hated – she got him to cut them. She helped him lose weight. To the surprise of their bandmates, the pianist and cornetist were spending more time together.

Could romance be in the air?

Fate Marable’s Orchestra aboard Streckfus Steamers’ steamboat the “”S.S. Capitol””, New Orleans, Louisiana: Louis Armstrong, cornet; Johnny St. Cyr, banjo; David Jones, sax; Norman Mason, sax; Norman Brashear, trombone; Baby Dodds, drums; Boyd Atkins, violin. Circa-1920. (Louisiana State Museum)