"St. Louis Blues" and Louis Armstrong on the Fourth of July

“St. Louis Blues” is my happy birthday song to our great-and-terrible nation.

Composed by music teacher and bandmaster W.C. Handy, the song reflects both Handy’s devotion to John Phillip Sousa and the new music being heard on the streets of Memphis and Atlanta, while the habanera bridge (or intro) is pure Afro-Cuban concert music a la Louis Moreau Gottschalk.

Named after the Midwestern city where Miles Davis came of age, “St. Louis Blues” is a perfectly American smorgasbord of influences, contexts, and viewpoints.

Louis Armstrong was born— as far as he and his family knew!— on July 4th, probably in 1901. Producer George Avakian, born in 1919 in Russia, was an Armstrong true believer from way back, collecting all of Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Sevens while a student at Yale, parlaying this passion into a long career in the music business.

During his too-brief time at Columbia, Avakian signed Miles Davis, initiated the label’s modern jazz series (with releases by the Jazz Messengers, J.J. Johnson, and Gigi Gryce with Donald Byrd) and oversaw Armstrong’s most fully-realized studio LP, Louis Armstrong Play W.C. Handy, the perfect album for my Fourth of July.

Recorded in 1954, just a few weeks after the Miles Davis/Sonny Rollins/Horace Silver/Percy Heath/Kenny Clarke session that gave us “Doxy”, “Airegin”, and “Oleo”, Play W.C. Handy is just right: Armstrong is front and center, in perfect simpatico with a great version of the All-Stars, on a program of songs to which they are ideally suited.

The album opens, as it must, with “St. Louis Blues”. Armstrong floats, declaims, and exclaims over drummer Barrett Deems’s supple 4/4 swing and backbeat (Deems in particular shines on this record). The seamless transitions that Deems, bassist Arvell Shaw, and pianist Billy Kyle make from Pops’s lead, to the ensemble, to Velma Middleton’s vocal, tells the story; this is deep musicianship.

After a few minutes of swinging, heartfelt music— of being given the exact version of “St. Louis Blues” we expect from Louis Armstrong and the All-Stars— Armstrong takes over the vocal from Middleton, and it’s a different world. Pops completely discards Handy’s tune, and starts singing risqué comic blues verses, egging on Barney Bigard, trading choruses with Velma Middleton, calling for Trummy Young, blowing a chorus. This could go on all night.

It’s just the best. I love the way Armstrong beautifully shatters the reverent, by-the-book, tasteful atmosphere of the first four minutes and replaces it with jokes, riffs, solos, backbeats and swing. That’s what this music is all about.

The first time I heard the track, I barely noticed, just took it as Louis being Louis. Which is precisely the point— we live so completely in his world that we take Armstrong’s wild re-imagining of “St. Louis Blues” as a matter of course.

When Armstrong died in 1971, the cutting edge of the culture had little use for him. Sad as that must have been for Armstrong and his supporters, this seems fitting, for nothing is harder than appreciating what we have, while we have it.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Ricky Riccardi, Dan Morgenstern, Stanley Crouch, Albert Murray, Wynton Marsalis, and so many more, we can now understand Armstrong’s complete contribution, as both an icon of progressivism and a beloved entertainer. To speak of one without the other is to miss the point of both, is to reduce Louis Armstrong.

So on this Fourth of July, an odd, quarter-of-a-millenium 250th birthday of the United States, a time when the United States, as a political organization, could not be further from our highest aspirations, I continue to find all I need in jazz, both the music and the community, and the wider world of music and ideas of which jazz is an integral part.

The more I play, write, and travel, the more certain I am that everything I need is right here. I listen to Armstrong and the All-Stars toss off a version of “St. Louis Blues” seventy years ago and I know what to do.

Happy Fourth of July and Louis Armstrong’s Birthday! Thank you, from the absolute bottom of my heart, for reading. I am doing this for you. Let’s keep it going.