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Letters, Arts & Sciences · Music

Louis Armstrong

1901 – 1971

Trumpeter, singer, and bandleader whose 1920s Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings made the improvising soloist the center of jazz.

Louis Armstrong, portrait photograph by William P. Gottlieb taken between 1938 and 1948
William P. Gottlieb, between 1938 and 1948. Library of Congress Music Division, William P. Gottlieb Collection, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain

Louis Armstrong grew up poor in New Orleans, learned the cornet in a juvenile home, and by the late 1920s had changed the course of American music. His Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings turned jazz from an ensemble music into a showcase for the improvising soloist, and his singing reshaped American popular vocal style. For five decades he toured the world as its best-known jazz musician, and in 1957 he publicly rebuked the federal government over Little Rock.

At a Glance

Born
4 August 1901 (per baptismal record; Armstrong gave 4 July 1900), New Orleans, Louisiana
Died
6 July 1971, Corona, Queens, New York
Birth name
Louis Daniel Armstrong
Known for
Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings (1925–28), including “West End Blues” (1928); Louis Armstrong and His All Stars (from 1947); “Hello, Dolly!” (1964)
Fields
Music
Era
Letters, Arts & Sciences

Early Life

Armstrong always said he was born on 4 July 1900, and that date appears on his grave and in many reference works. In the 1980s the researcher Tad Jones located his baptismal record at the Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in New Orleans, which gives his birth date as 4 August 1901; most historians now accept the later date. He grew up in poverty in a rough New Orleans neighborhood known as the Battlefield, largely raised by his mother and his grandmother, and worked from childhood selling coal and newspapers.

On New Year’s Eve 1912, he fired a pistol into the air during street celebrations and was arrested. A judge committed him to the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys, where he remained from January 1913 to June 1914. There the instructor Peter Davis taught him bugle and cornet, and he played in the home’s brass band. The episode, a punishment for a child’s prank, gave him his first formal musical training.

After his release he worked odd jobs by day and played cornet in the honky-tonks and parade bands of New Orleans at night. The cornetist Joe “King” Oliver became his mentor, and when Oliver left for Chicago, Armstrong inherited some of his work in the city, including the riverboat bands that carried New Orleans music up the Mississippi.

Life and Work

In the summer of 1922 Oliver summoned Armstrong to Chicago to play second cornet in King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band at the Lincoln Gardens, and the band’s 1923 recordings captured the two cornets in tandem. The band’s pianist, Lil Hardin, whom Armstrong married in 1924, urged him to step out on his own. In September 1924 he moved to New York to join Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra, then one of the leading Black dance bands, where his rhythmic drive and solo invention startled musicians who had not heard the New Orleans style at full strength.

Returning to Chicago, he made the records that established his reputation. On 12 November 1925 Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five — with Johnny Dodds on clarinet, Kid Ory on trombone, Lil Hardin Armstrong on piano, and Johnny St. Cyr on banjo — held its first session for the OKeh label. Over the next three years the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings shifted the weight of jazz from collective improvisation to the extended individual solo. His vocal on “Heebie Jeebies” (1926) helped popularize scat singing, and “West End Blues,” recorded on 28 June 1928, opens with an unaccompanied trumpet cadenza that critics have long cited as a turning point in the music’s ambitions.

Through the 1930s and early 1940s Armstrong led big bands, appeared in films and on radio, and became a popular singer whose phrasing influenced generations of vocalists. He married Lucille Wilson on 12 October 1942, and in March 1943 the couple bought a modest house in Corona, Queens, where they lived for the rest of his life. After a triumphant small-group concert at New York’s Town Hall on 17 May 1947, he disbanded his big band that August and formed Louis Armstrong and His All Stars, the six-piece group he led until the end of his career.

The All Stars toured almost constantly, often performing some 300 concerts a year across Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America; the 1956 album Ambassador Satch gave him a lasting nickname. His goodwill tours made him an unofficial emblem of American culture during the Cold War. In September 1957, as Arkansas officials blocked Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School, Armstrong told a reporter that President Dwight D. Eisenhower had no guts and that the government could go to hell over its treatment of Black Southerners, and he cancelled a planned State Department tour of the Soviet Union. The outburst drew angry criticism; days later Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock.

Armstrong published a memoir of his youth, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, in 1954. His recording of “Hello, Dolly!” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on 9 May 1964, displacing the Beatles and making him, at 62, the oldest artist to top that chart.

Legacy

Armstrong died at his home in Corona on 6 July 1971. Lucille Armstrong kept the house as it was; it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1977 and opened to the public as the Louis Armstrong House Museum in 2003, alongside the archive of recordings, scrapbooks, and home tapes he had assembled.

His reputation has passed through stages. In the 1950s and 1960s some younger Black musicians and critics saw his broad grin and stage comedy as a relic of minstrelsy; the Little Rock episode, and later scholarship drawing on his letters and private recordings, have complicated that view and shown a man who was outspoken about race in private and, at key moments, in public. Musicians and historians regard him as the figure who defined jazz as a soloist’s art, and his influence runs through nearly every later style of American popular music.

For Educators

Armstrong transformed jazz into a soloist’s art and, as an international celebrity, used his fame at key moments to challenge the nation’s treatment of Black citizens. Open the classroom lesson →

Key Dates

  1. 4 August 1901 Born in New Orleans (date per baptismal record; he gave 4 July 1900).
  2. January 1913 Committed to the Colored Waif’s Home, where he learns the cornet.
  3. Summer 1922 Joins King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in Chicago.
  4. September 1924 Joins Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra in New York.
  5. 12 November 1925 Hot Five holds its first recording session for OKeh in Chicago.
  6. 28 June 1928 Records “West End Blues.”
  7. August 1947 Forms Louis Armstrong and His All Stars.
  8. September 1957 Denounces federal inaction at Little Rock and cancels a Soviet tour.
  9. 9 May 1964 “Hello, Dolly!” reaches number one on the Billboard Hot 100.
  10. 6 July 1971 Dies at home in Corona, Queens.

Sources and Further Reading

  1. Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1954).
  2. Gary Giddins, Satchmo (New York: Doubleday, 1988).
  3. Ricky Riccardi, What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years (New York: Pantheon, 2011).
  4. Louis Armstrong House Museum, “When Is Louis Armstrong’s Birthday?” Link
  5. Louis Armstrong House Museum, “Louis Armstrong.” Link
  6. Library of Congress, National Recording Registry, “Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings — Louis Armstrong (1925–1928).” Link

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Editorial Note

By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.

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