Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash. Forty years after Armstrong first recorded this song with Jimmie Rogers, the father of country music. Via Marginal Revolution.
This is a clip from the Johnny Cash show in 1970, less than a year before Armstrong died. It’s great to see these two performers together, but Armstrong’s playing is pretty restrained. Here he is with Dizzie Gillespie, doing “Umbrella Man.”
I presume there is no video recording of Armstrong back in the 1930’s with the Hot Fives or Hot Sevens?
I’ve never found any live footage from back then. Here’s a fascinating bit of video that captures the contradictions of Satchmo (music starts about 3 minutes in)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3CcAD_seww
Now on the one hand that is some straight-up minstrel-show shine right there. Satch was willing to play to the hideous conventions of racist America in order to get his art across. On the other hand, his performance is staggeringly awesome, as was usually the case. So he succeeded in getting his art across. Did he reinforce the racist stereotypes or destroy them? It’s an old argument and not settled, but the fact is that I love Satch & so do most people that take the time to listen, he had that rare combination of technical virtuosity and soul….
But I have to admit the minstrel aspect is mighty strange. It reminds me of the famous time Duke Ellington, a refined and elegant gentleman and one of the most harmonically sophisticated composers of the 20th century, was introduced as “the greatest living master of jungle music.”
The Hot Fives and Hot Sevens were never working bands. These were ad hoc groups that existed only in the recording studio. In any case, the time line is off — these bands recorded in 1928-29, before sound film became the norm. (Hmm… is there any anaglyphic 3D footage of Charlie Parker? And if not, why not?)
In any case, Armstrong’s orchestra of the 1930s was — much to the chagrin of music purists ever since — a sweet band rather than a jazz band, having more in common with Guy Lombardo than Duke Ellington. Everything I’ve read on the subject indicates that this was Armstrong’s decision, and the record companies were very unhappy about it. After all, Armstrong’s “hot” records were some of the best-selling recordings at the time. Black musicians were routinely pressured to record only “hot” music, because this is what the A&R men thought they could sell. Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, for example, was widely acknowledged at the time as the finest waltz orchestra in the country. But you won’t find any recordings of Henderson playing waltzes, because the record companies refused to record them. So the racism cuts both ways. Or as Dizzy Gillespie once put it, “Never say that only blacks can play jazz, because that’s the same as saying blacks can only play jazz.”
Regarding the aspects of minstrelsy, I’m of two minds about it: On the one hand, up until the mid-1930s or so, all entertainment was ethnically marked in America. All of it. There was no such thing as “regular” entertainment as opposed to ethnic entertainment. It was what the kid’s call “hegemonic,” I suppose — so ubiquitous as to be invisible. No alternatives existed. But the other issue is how people today can be so naive as to think we’ve somehow done away with racially marked entertainment. Mr. Bones, Mr. Interlocutor, and Jim Crow haven’t gone anywhere — they just scowl a lot more and use curse words a lot. The legacy of minstrelsy on American entertainment is just as strong today as it was in the 1930s, and just as it was in the ’30s, it’s so thoroughly ingrained in our society that most of the time we just don’t see it.
Excuse the longish post, but I live and breathe this era of music.
Great comment, HP.
Nice recording!
Cash is king. In my opinion, here is his best song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W08MS3ndUX0
HP beat me to it. Hat’s off, sir.The Hot Fives and Sevens never performed on stage never mind on film. I have however seen a film of Louis Armstrong with a big band around 1930 on which he mugs outrageously, but sings and plays like an angel.
The post-war schism between “modern” and “traditional” Jazz has always confused me. Looking back on Jazz history it seems quite obvious that King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Freddie Hubbard and the rest fit into a single glorious tradition, and one of the highest points of that tradition must be the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens. If Potato Head Blues doesn’t induce a sense of complete euphoria then I really think there must be something wrong with you!
I remember my father telling me that when Louis Armstrong made his famous first tour of Britain in the 1950s that the jazz fans who flocked to see him were quite confused by what they saw. Having been brought up on a diet of fantastic records, most expected Satchmo to be rather serious on stage. Instead he charged about laughing and joking all through the concert and playing a lot of popular tunes rather than Jazz numbers. He clearly had a whale of a time playing, but it wasn’t quite what his rather reserved audience expected.
I think Louis Armstrong never saw any conflict between his music as art and as entertainment. If you remember that he grew up in an orphanage in New Orleans with every possible social and racial barrier in front of him, it’s amazing not only that he achieved so much, but that his personality remained so exuberant throughout his life. Maybe his apparent acceptance of the racial stereotyping was just his way of refusing to let anyone take this joy away.
Or maybe I’m just a sentimental old fool.
Well said HP, but no, the legacy of minstrelry is NOT “just as strong today” as it was then. That’s quite a bizarre statement, perhaps from someone who is only familiar with mainstream modern entertainment? As you quite accurately point out, in the 20s and 30s as an African American entertainer there was no other avenue of expression, thus the morally ambiguous compromises made by Louis and many others. And certainly the minstrel show does live on in many shameful modern forms.
But now there are alternatives. For every idiotic Lil Wayne there’s a Mos Def. I dare you to tell Mos Def he’s part of a minstrel show. I *dare* you. The Coup, Dead Prez, Talib Kweli, and dozens of others are out there making great modern art and funky-ass tunes at the same time. In fact for a number of these artists, commenting on and deconstructing the minstrel show is a central artistic theme, for example see Mos Def’s masterpiece “Black on Both Sides” (he is actually in blackface on the cover, a profoundly unsettling image).
And that’s only in hiphop; never mind the rest of jazz history after the minstrel era, Trane, Miles, Monk and the rest. Right, they played along with the racial stereotypes as well ::eye roll::
I would never dispute that racial stereotypes and the minstrel show paradigm are still at play in modern society, or even that they are sadly ubiquitous. But it may have escaped you that there is no central core to American/Western popular culture anymore. There’s the appearance of hegemony but in the last ten years (especially the last five, since the advent of ubiquitous bandwidth) the mechanisms of media distribution have become so decentralized that it’s led to the fragmentation of once-monolithic media structure into a infinitity of finely graded and non-mutually-exclusive subcultures. Which is a longwinded way of saying that *any* grand, totalizing statement about modern popular culture and entertainment will be wrong…oh crap that statement applies to itself! I’ve entered a neverending spiral of performative contradiction!
My point is that in the modern era, nearly anyone in western culture can access (or be accidentally exposed to) alternative sources of entertainment which are quite definitely NOT ruled by & in many cases are in direct opposition to the ugly racial stereotypes that still live on. Certainly we haven’t won the battle against racism in culture and entertainment, but to state that it’s as strong as ever is profoundly wrong.
Read this. It’s probably too much to ask that you actually listen to it.
http://www.elyrics.net/read/m/mos-def-lyrics/mathematics-lyrics.html
If you need help with the slang try Urban Dictionary ;oP
Minor point. It’s an easy mistake to make, but the country music yodeller was Jimmy Rodgers, whereas Jimmy Rogers was a sideman in the Muddy Waters band.
This post (too) makes me feel horribly uncultured. For more reasons than one …