Looking So Lonesome

“What we play is life.”

            Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong was music—a larger than life figure so full of joy, rhythm, and melody his recordings seem barely able to contain his personality.

            Armstrong must have been born happy and strong, because his childhood would have broken anyone else. All his life he believed he was born on July 4, 1900, perhaps thinking he was a symbol of America and a new era. (After his death, scholars learned that August 4, 1901, was his birth date.)

An illegitimate child, he grew up in the aptly named Battlefield district of New Orleans. He barely attended school. He made money singing in the streets, working for a junk-hauling company, strolling along its wagon tooting a tin horn to attract customers.

When he was 11, he fired a gun in the air as part of a celebration. A judge sentenced him to a term of indefinite length at the New Orleans Home for Colored Waifs. During his three years there, he played in its orchestra. “Am always proud to tell the world of the place [that] started me out as a first-class musician,” Armstrong later said.

Returning to a rough life in the streets, he hauled coal in a wagon, while also playing gigs at night until he was able to break into performing full time.

Loose yet tight

It’s fair to say that Armstrong personally created jazz or at least transformed it into a whole new thing. Before he came along, a New Orleans Dixieland band would play as a group. Lively, yes, but restrained, even conventional to the modern ear. Armstrong used the group setting as a launching pad for his solos. They were loose yet tight, wild yet tasteful, and always fresh and always tasty. When other musicians heard his recordings, he became the man to imitate. Everyone wanted to be as free as the free-spirited Armstrong.

It’s no surprise that a man as fearless as Louis Armstrong wanted to record his sound. Many jazz musicians in the early 1920s saw no point in doing so. The technology was so primitive it couldn’t capture their sound, and they were only be paid a pittance compared to what the record company might earn. Plus, musicians were afraid competitors hearing their discs would steal their stuff.

Armstrong sensed that being on records would bring new ears to his music. He didn’t care where he recorded—even if it meant going into a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan.

In April 1923, Armstrong played in King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. Oliver told his musicians they were going to Richmond, Indiana, a five-hour train ride from Chicago, to cut tracks at the Gennett Record Division of the Starr Piano Company. At that time it was the world’s largest manufacturer of pianos, making about 15,000 a year.

Its recording business brought the company extra revenue. The studio was ramshackle—a one-room wooden shack. Soundproofing? Sawdust on the floor and heavy drapes blanketing the walls.

The studio needed all the muffling it could get—The Whitewater River ran beside it. It’s said that its rushing sound could sometimes be heard on recordings. Worse, train tracks were nearby....three feet away. Sessions had to be halted when freight trains blasted past.

Legendary musicians recorded there—band leader and composer Duke Ellington, pianists Jelly Roll Morton and Hoagy Carmichael, trumpet player Bix Beiderbecke, country music pioneers Gene Autry and Charlie Patton, and bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson.

(In those days, jazz records were deemed so degenerate thatstores sold them under the counter, and the four-letter word ‘jazz’ rarely, if ever, appeared on record sleeves. Gennett marketed its ‘race’ music under the heading of “Snappy Dance Hits on Gennett Records by Exclusive Gennett Colored Artists.”)

Every time Gennett recorded a group it would typically pay $15 to $50 per session. After all, the studio was gambling on whether shoppers would buy the resulting discs.

But it did have one sure thing—a local cash-paying customer…the Ku Klux Klan. More Klan members lived in Indiana than in any other state. Somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 Hoosiers belonged to the Klan. As many as half of all adult men in Richmond, including its mayor, belonged to the KKK.

Its members considered themselves patriotic Protestants. Besides terrorizing blacks, the Klan was known for its fiery opposition to Jewish 'influence' in America as well as immigration, particularly by Catholics from Europe.

Because they paid us

Although the Klan was all about hate, its members did love music. Weirdly, it recorded under its own KKK label. Some of its songs included numbers like “Daddy Swiped Our Last Clean Sheet and Joined the Ku Klux Klan” by the Logansport Ku Klux Klan Quartette, “Johnny, Join the Klan,” “Wake Up America--Kluck Kluck Kluck” and, more ominously, “There’ll Be a Hot Time.”

            The family-owned Gennett company held its nose while taking the Klan's money. Owner Clarence Gennett once overhead a Klan record being played in the company’s reception room and told an employee to destroy it. Ezra Wickemeyer, the recording engineer who ran the studio, was Catholic. He loathed the KKK. 

            In the company’s defense, the owner’s son later said, “We put out the [KKK] records because they paid us. That was all. We did a lot of vanity records for all kinds of people.”

The Klan’s recordings never appeared in the catalog Gennett distributed to retailers.

            When King Oliver’s group came to record, Wickemeyer wanted to get the best possible sound out of them. He instructed the musicians to position themselves in front of a giant five-foot megaphone and play directly into it. The sound would then be funneled to a steel needle which would vibrate as its tip skimmed the surface of a spinning wax disc. The resulting nearly microscopic grooved impressions would leap back to life when the resulting disc was played at 78 revolutions per minute.

            Besides the roaring, rumbling training river noises from outside, being in the studio was unpleasant. Bands couldn’t cut loose and play at length. Discs could only hold three-minutes of sound. Musicians couldn’t hear each other. And because the wax had to be soft to take impressions from the needle, the room had to be kept as hot as a sauna.

The band played a few takes, but something was wrong. Wickemeyer looked at Armstrong and told him to get away from the megaphone. 

The effect on Armstrong was visible to everyone. His wife Lil played piano in the band, and she recalled that “Louis was standing over there looking so lonesome." 
Armstrong played his horn with such power and verve that he was overwhelming the other instruments. Wickemeyer told Armstrong to stand at the far corner of the room 12 feet away. 
"He thought it was bad for him to have to be away from the band," his wife recalled. "I was convinced, he really can play good, because if his tone overshadows Joe [Oliver] that much, he’s gotta be better.”

That day the group recorded the song “Chime’s Blues.” This legendary moment marked the first occasion Armstrong recorded a solo. The jaunty tune percolates along for its first two minutes. It’s a toe-tapper, but nothing special. Then Armstrong kicks in. The effect is startling. “What is that?” one thinks.

“Suddenly [the song] fast forwards into the twentieth century,” writes Lawrence Bergreen in ‘Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life.’ “His bold, ascending, trilling, metallic notes streak over the creaky proceedings like a comet. Louis demonstrates great presence; as soon as you hear his horn—jarring, fresh, jagged, and sinuous—you know he has it.” Armstrong wasn't the first jazz artist to solo, but he did it better than anyone had ever done it before.

After recording, the band trooped back to the train station where they rode five-hours back to Chicago. Because of the Klan’s dominance of Richmond, they couldn’t safely spend the night there.

The next morning, they caught the train back and laid down more tracks, including “Dippermouth Blues.” (‘Dipper’ was one of Armstrong’s nicknames, referring to the size of his mouth. ‘Satchmo’ is a shortened version of ‘Satchel Mouth.”)

Of that song, Bergreen writes, “He tickles the phrases, then wails and stomps, and sends them." Scholars say these renowned recordings perfectly capture the sound of New Orleans music in the 1920s. But it's Armstrong’s playing that stands as a signpost to the future.

The band boldly returned to Richmond for another recording session on October 5, 1923. One disc came of the session—“Alligator Hop” and “Krooked Blues.” They took a chance being there. The Klan often held parades in in the city. By coincidence, the one that day was a record breaker.

 “The largest Ku Klux Klan demonstration ever given in Wayne County was viewed last night by approximately 30,000 people,” reported 'The Richmond Item’ newspaper. “Fully 6,000 members of the Klan participated in the monster parade, which in magnitude and impressiveness has had few equals in the city.”

How Armstrong and his band got in and out of town that day is lost to history. It is sweet and fitting that the powerful band that ruled the streets that day has withered to nearly nothing, while a small band of men in a shack changed the course of music, gladdening the hearts of millions of people.

MORAL: Play your solo, but also be a team player.

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