Louis Armstrong: Born on the Fourth of July
If there’s a silver lining to the cloud of confusion surrounding Louis Armstrong’s birth, it’s that jazz enthusiasts got to celebrate it for a full year, says Bruce Boyd Raeburn, curator of Tulane University’s William Ranson Hogan Jazz Archive.
“And Pops deserves it anyway,” he says.
Armstrong said he was born on the Fourth of July, 1900. Jazz scholars suggest that he chose that date. Armstrong was born into extreme poverty and thus born at home instead of at a hospital. No hospital or official birth certificate exists. But scholars have unearthed a priest’s baptism record. The baptism was performed in early August of 1901 and states that Armstrong was born recently. Many scholars accept the document as valid.
This reflects the birth of jazz itself, which, for all that we do know, still leaves some of the particulars to debate. Because jazz has become so important to so many, people want to know who created it and how. Looking for easy answers has led to many misleading accounts.
Many factors complicate the study of early jazz. Since it coalesced in music halls in poor black neighborhoods in New Orleans, the newspapers of the times had little to say about it. The clubs only made the news if there was a fire or a murder. As the music became more popular in the early 1900s, precursors of The Times-Picayune editorialized that the new music was vulgar and a blight on the city’s otherwise upstanding culture. Eventually it retracted those comments. In fact, it did so prominently when the New Orleans Jazz Museum opened in 1961.
By then the early days were long gone and many of the early musicians had passed on. New Orleans had in many ways taken the music for granted. It wasn’t until the 1930s, when people outside of the city declared jazz an important art form, that professional historians started to piece together the story and collect its artifacts. Clues led in every direction.
Since jazz evolved out of a mix of many influences, it’s difficult to say how far back the evolution goes. Ragtime of the 1880s is very important. But the blues and gospel also came into play among musicians and in the communities that housed the early dance halls where jazz developed. African rhythm is also essential, so many scholars trace the roots back to Congo Square, where slaves in colonial Louisiana were allowed to gather on Sundays to make their own music and hold their own customary dances. That was a freedom denied slaves elsewhere in the new world. Many say that’s a key reason why jazz could develop in New Orleans and not elsewhere.
Researching jazz also requires an understanding of the culture of New Orleans, says Raeburn. Particularly with regards to race, New Orleans was and is culturally unique. So historians who aren’t familiar with the city’s Creole population, and how socially mixed New Orleans was prior to the turn of the century, can’t really understand the way jazz came together. New Orleans had long had populations of free people of color and mixed race Creoles. Some had been affluent slave owners before the Civil War. While the rest of the country polarized into black and white following the Civil War and during segregation in the 1890s, New Orleans was more about exceptions than rules. For example, Buddy Bolden, whose heyday was as a cornetist in bands playing the African-American music halls along South Rampart Street in the 1890s, lived two doors down from Larry Shields, the clarinetist who would later play on the first commercial jazz recording, says Raeburn. The all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band, led by Dominic La Rocca, made that record in New York in 1917. There was considerable change in the music between those years, Raeburn says, but it leaves open questions of association and influences. With music, talent tended to trump race in local bands, he adds. And that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of other ethnic factors, particularly Latin and Caribbean ones.
Jazz’s development was also affected by other social changes. Storyville, the official prostitution district created just north of the French Quarter, opened in 1898. Because there was money to be made at the pianos in bordello parlors and in the bands in Storyville saloons, many early jazz musicians played there. Jelly Roll Morton was a famous Storyville piano “professor.” Some places allowed musicians to play the new music, others didn’t. But in the end it had a strong influence on jazz because of the musicians who met there and the music they played together.
There is no single creator of jazz, but there are key musicians who made great break throughs. Currently Buddy Bolden’s role is seen as most important, says Jack Stewart, a writer, musician and jazz afficionado researching the history of jazz. “He was the first to bring cult of personality into the process,” Stewart says. “He did an awful lot. But did he do the whole thing? No.” Bolden’s importance doesn’t come at the expense of others like Jelly Roll Morton, or Emile “Stalebread” Lacoume or Dominic LaRocca, Stewart adds.
Jazz has changed greatly over the years. And some traditionalists and purists say that later forms of music shouldn’t be called jazz at all. They should have thought up their own names. So whether Duke Ellington played jazz or some sort of symphonic derivative is a debate based on different presumptions.
For those who want to enter the fray, there is ample ammunition to get behind an argument. New Orleans has two major archives of jazz materials. One is Tulane’s Hogan Jazz Archive, which holds a huge collection of phonograph records and recorded interviews. The Louisiana State Museum has the other large collection, which was created as a private project by a group of jazz enthusiasts in the 1960s. They opened a jazz museum in the French Quarter. Eventually they decided that the project was much bigger than they had imagined or could keep up with and gave their collection to the state museum.
The Hogan Archive was created in 1958. It holds 2000 reels of audiotape interviews with early legends, musicians who played in their bands, their children, friends and historians. From all of these spoken histories, researchers have been able to compare accounts and create time-lines and sequences of influences. The archive also has holdings on newer music. “Hogan is interested in other music because it’s rooted in how people live here,” Raeburn says.
The Louisiana State Museum has both an archive and a jazz museum, located at the U.S. Mint at one corner of the French Quarter. The museum displays the largest collection of instruments used by early musicians, including the first cornet Armstrong learned to play, and instruments played by everyone from Dizzie Gillespie to Pete Fountain. The exhibition breaks down jazz by time period, by contributing influences, and by the make-up of the bands. Pictures and storyboards help put the puzzle of influences together. The archive holds more than 10,000 photographs.
The basis of the state museum collection are the holdings of the individual collectors who came together in 1961 to create the New Orleans Jazz Museum. Their museum was a scholarly endeavor from the beginning. But they eventually realized that the project required more space, maintenance and administration then they could keep up with. So they donated the holdings to the State Museum. Many of them had become acquainted with the music as young fans, who bought each new record as they were issued, says Steve Teeter, curator of jazz at the museum.
The New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park added to the collection by conducting videotaped interviews with elder musicians and family and friends of musicians no longer with us. They have been able to corroborate stories and piece together more about the culture that created jazz.
The exhibit also begins the process of documenting the current music scene. Photos show both young brass bands in street parades, and senior players at the revival-oriented Preservation Hall. And musicians of all ages at Jazz Fest. While these events will become history too, they will also be incredibly well recorded for future generations.
The Hogan Archive is located in Tulane’s Jones Hall 504-865-5688. The State Museum exhibition is located in the Old U.S. Mint (400 Esplanade Ave., 568-6968). The New Orleans Jazz National Historic Park is located at 916 N. Peters St. 504-589-2636.