Casual listeners think of him as a gentle giant of jazz, but critics and African Americans often saw him as a sell out or ‘Uncle Tom’. A new book aims to show how radical ‘Pops’ really was
“I cannot think of another American artist who so failed his own talent. What went wrong?” asked one biographer of Louis Armstrong. “The sheer weight of his success and its attendant commercial pressures,” answered another.
The popular opinion of the trumpeter and gravel-voiced singer of What a Wonderful World is as a genial, foundational voice in jazz. But the jazz establishment – and many African Americans – reviled him as a sellout or an “Uncle Tom”. When he died in 1971, he was seen as having peaked in the 1920s with the Hot Five and the Hot Seven, a series of inventive small-band recordings, and been in decline ever since. A new book, Ricky Riccardi’s Heart Full of Rhythm: the Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong, charts this apparent fall from grace, but shows the reality to be far more complicated.