IN THE EARLY 20th century, a group of esteemed scholars gathered in a little northeastern pocket of their own making and concerned themselves with the question of finding a distinctly American music. Where was this music? How might it develop? Could there be, out there somewhere, an American Bach?
They looked far and wide in the places that they knew; they searched for faces that they might recognize; they listened deeply in the idioms with which they were familiar. And they came away disappointed.
Jazz critic Gary Giddins chortles as he recounts the tale, pointing out that if these American Brahmins had simply deigned to take a train south from Boston to New York City, and stepped into the Roseland Ballroom on a Thursday night, they would have experienced the American Bach, Dante, and Shakespeare all rolled into one: Louis Armstrong.
Born to a 15-year-old who sometimes worked as a prostitute, raised in a New Orleans neighborhood so violent it was known as “the Battlefield,” sent to a juvenile detention facility at 11 for firing a gun into the street—his early years would surely put him on the pipeline to prison today.
Had that occurred, the distinctly American music that Louis Armstrong created might never have happened. The American songbook, as we know it today, simply would not exist.
DUKE ELLINGTON said Louis Armstrong was so good he wanted him on every instrument. Legendary trumpeter Wynton Marsalis commented that the only way to describe his sound was to say there was light in it. Ken Burns writes that Armstrong is to American music what Einstein is to physics, Freud is to psychiatry, and the Wright brothers are to travel.
As for himself, Armstrong liked to say that his purpose was to blow his horn so beautifully the angel Gabriel would come out of the clouds.
It’s an apt metaphor. Discovering diamonds where other people see coal is one of the great themes of religious traditions. As the scripture says, the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.
Louis Armstrong might well have been that rejected stone rather than the foundation of American music had it not been for a Jewish immigrant family from Lithuania.
When he was 7, Armstrong went to work for the Karnofskys, who gave him the job of blowing the tin horn on their junk wagon when it approached potential customers. The Karnofskys took Armstrong into their home, making sure he had a good dinner at the end of every day. They taught him to sing Russian Jewish lullabies. Those lullabies, the tin horn, and the music around him on the streets of New Orleans turned something in Armstrong. When he saw a cornet in a corner store, the Karnofskys helped him buy it. When he put the cornet to his lips, he found he could blow out the notes of simple songs. Then, as he said, “here come the blues.”
Out of respect for the role the Karnofskys played in his life, Louis Armstrong wore a Star of David until he died.
A Lithuanian Jewish immigrant family who owned a junk wagon nurtured the genius of a teenage prostitute’s son from a New Orleans ghetto who would go on to remake American music. That’s not just the history of the American songbook. That’s the essence of the American story.
Eboo Patel (@EbooPatel), founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, writes about social justice from his perspective as a Muslim American of Indian heritage.
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