Louis Armstrong

The label president thought it was rubbish.

It was 16 August 1967, in a New York studio, and Louis Armstrong was recording "What a Wonderful World". Larry Newton, who ran ABC Records, had come along to see what would come out of it.

He wanted another "Hello, Dolly!": something lively, saleable, with a big band. What he heard was a slow, almost whispered ballad from a man of sixty-six.

He tried to stop the session. They ended up removing him from the studio and keeping him outside so the recording could go on.

The cheapest revenge

Newton could not stop the record coming out, but he could decline to push it.

"What a Wonderful World" was released in the United States with no promotion of any kind and sold fewer than a thousand copies.

In the United Kingdom, where nobody had that problem, it went number one and was the best-selling single of 1968.

The song became what it is today in the United States only twenty years later, when it turned up in a film and finally entered the chart, in 1988. Armstrong had been dead for seventeen years.

Sixty-six, not seventy

It is worth being precise about the age, because it is always told wrong, and because the error has a lovely cause.

Armstrong was born on 4 August 1901. But all his life he said he had been born on 4 July 1900: independence day, the first year of the century.

He believed it and everybody else believed it, and that is how it appeared in encyclopaedias for decades. The real date surfaced much later, in a baptismal record a researcher found in New Orleans in the eighties.

A desperately poor kid from the worst neighbourhood in New Orleans had given himself the country's birthday as his own. That is no small statement.

The year he beat the Beatles

In May 1964, "Hello, Dolly!" knocked the Beatles off number one, a spot they had held for fourteen straight weeks.

Armstrong was sixty-two. He is still the oldest person ever to top the Hot 100.

It is the fact that best explains his career: he had been recording for forty years when he displaced the biggest band in the world with a show tune.

Little Rock was not lukewarm

For years he was accused of being accommodating, of smiling too much, of never using his stature for anything.

So it is worth recalling exactly what he said in September 1957, when the governor of Arkansas blocked nine Black students from entering a high school in Little Rock.

He said President Eisenhower was two-faced and had no guts. He said that given the way his people were being treated in the South, the government could go to hell.

And he cancelled a tour of the Soviet Union the State Department had arranged for him, because he was not about to go and represent a country that did that at home.

It cost him contracts and it cost him friends. It was not a stray remark: it was the most famous Black musician on the planet breaking with the government on the front pages.

Nat King Cole was dealing with his own version of it in those same years, in a different way. Both paid.

What he did with the trumpet

And then there is the other thing, which is really the first: he changed how music sounds.

When he started, New Orleans jazz was a collective weave in which nobody stood out. Armstrong put the solo at the centre. He invented the idea that a musician stands up, plays something that did not exist until that second, and that is what matters.

He learned the cornet in a juvenile reformatory where he was locked up as a boy for firing a pistol into the air on New Year's Eve.

Later he did the same with his voice and popularised scat, singing improvised syllables as if the throat were one more instrument.

Almost everything that came afterwards — the whole of jazz, and much of pop, rock and soul — plays inside a frame he built.

What to remember

Armstrong is proof that whoever decides what gets promoted does not always understand what is in front of him.

Put on the Hot Five recordings from the twenties and you will hear the exact moment popular music learned to improvise. Put on "Hello, Dolly!" and you will hear a sixty-two-year-old man knocking the Beatles off the top. Put on "What a Wonderful World" and you will hear the song the head of his own label tried to prevent.

Singing that in 1967 was not naivety. It was a decision, taken by someone who had seen the worst up close and told the president what he thought of him.

Remember him this way: not as the nice old man with the gravel voice, but as the one who founded a way of playing, invented his own birthday, and recorded the most hopeful song of the century with the label boss shouting at him from the corridor.

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Sources

Louis Armstrong, born in New Orleans on 4 August 1901 and died in New York on 6 July 1971. An American trumpeter and singer, nicknamed "Satchmo" and "Pops". Throughout his life he maintained he had been born on 4 July 1900; his real date was established from a baptismal record located in New Orleans by the researcher Tad Jones in the 1980s. He learned the cornet at the Colored Waif's Home for Boys, a juvenile reformatory he entered as a child. In the twenties, with his Hot Five and Hot Seven line-ups, he established the improvised solo as the axis of jazz and popularised scat singing. "Hello, Dolly!" reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1964, displacing The Beatles after fourteen consecutive weeks in that position; Armstrong was 62 and is still the oldest person to top the chart. He recorded "What a Wonderful World" on 16 August 1967, produced by Bob Thiele and written by Thiele and George David Weiss; the president of ABC Records, Larry Newton, objected to the song and tried to interrupt the session, and was removed from the studio, after which the label did not promote it in the United States, where it sold fewer than a thousand copies. In the United Kingdom it was number one and the best-selling single of 1968, and it only made an impact in the United States in 1988, following its inclusion in the film "Good Morning, Vietnam". During the Little Rock crisis, in September 1957, Armstrong publicly declared that President Eisenhower was two-faced and lacked guts, stated that for the treatment given to Black people in the South the government could go to hell, and cancelled a tour of the Soviet Union organised by the State Department. Nat King Cole has his own profile in this series. Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Interpretations of the meaning of his work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Britannica, Wikipedia, Billboard, The Guardian, NPR and other coverage.