"The Jazz Classic of Them All"
DRAFT introductory chapter to a book-in-progress on Louis Armstrong, the song "St. Louis Blues," and African American modernist resistance to white supremacism
Trickster Virtuoso:
Louis Armstrong, “St. Louis Blues,” and African American Modernism
An essay by John Shaw [draft]
“We do have institutions. We have the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And we have jazz.” – Ralph Ellison [quoted by Robert O’Meally, in Living With Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings]
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Chapter 1: “The jazz classic of them all”
Edward R. Murrow introduces Louis Armstrong’s performance of “St. Louis Blues” with Leonard Bernstein and members of the New York Philharmonic (and thereby introduces this essay)
Near the end of Satchmo the Great, the hour-long 1957 television documentary on Louis Armstrong, narrator Edward R. Murrow, with his singular tone, gleaming and sharp like a stainless-steel knife, and friendly as cutlery, introduces one more performance:
On the night of July 14, 1956, another of Louie’s dreams came true. He came home from his triumphs in Europe and Africa to play with a full symphony orchestra at the distinguished Guggenheim Concert in New York’s Lewisohn Stadium. Leonard Bernstein conducted the stadium symphony, made up of 88 members of the New York Philharmonic, in an arrangement of “St. Louie Blues.” Among the 25,000 in the audience was W. C. Handy, 83 and blind, who wrote the jazz classic of them all – in a single night.
Eight and a half minutes of music follow, a fascinating arrangement of W. C. Handy’s song, blending lush Hollywood strings and stentorian brass with Armstrong’s hot hybrid swing-New Orleans-style jazz sextet. The music flows smoothly between the differing idioms while sticking to “The St. Louis Blues,” a song that had a diversity of approaches written into its original 1914 publication. Immediately after, Bernstein and Armstrong speak briefly, a historic and illuminating pair of speeches, with Louis saying about the performance, “As we cats say, ‘It gassed me, man, it gassed me!’ ”
Taking the music and the speeches together, the track is an explosion. Echoes resound from myriad American mountainsides and skeleton-infested closets. Armstrong’s arts – musical and verbal – rang those mountainsides and opened those closets. And among those mountains – among those peaks – were previous recordings of “St. Louis Blues,” including several by Armstrong himself. When Murrow extravagantly dubbed Handy’s song, “the jazz classic of them all,” it may well have been the most-often recorded song in song-dom. Quantity aside, the quality of the recordings astonishes.
Behold.
By 1956, many – maybe most – of the leading figures in jazz had recorded it: Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, Fletcher Henderson, James P. Johnson, Sidney Bechet, Bunk Johnson, Kid Ory, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, the Dorsey Brothers, Django Reinhardt, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Earl Hines, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Mildred Bailey, Glenn Miller, Mary Lou Williams, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Machito, Erskine Hawkins, Erroll Garner. Many of them had returned to the song many times, in widely, wildly different arrangements, approaches, and styles. As often as not, “St. Louis Blues” inspired artists to bring it – It – the indefinable element that made their musicianship distinctive – it – their most potent combinations and idiosyncratic techniques. Many versions of “St. Louis Blues” stand with the most audacious, most bracing, most beautiful recordings extant.
As Murrow said, a jazz classic. And yet “St. Louis Blues” has blues in its title. Murrow didn’t misspeak. Despite its standing near the beginning of the blues tradition, few eminent blues musicians had recorded it by the time Murrow made his statement. Bessie Smith, whom the jazz and blues traditions both claim, had recorded two astonishing versions, one widely hailed, the other now little known. The boogie-woogie piano titans Albert Ammons, Meade “Lux” Lewis, Pete Johnson, and Hadda Brooks had recorded it—they often get taxonomized as “blues.” Jimmy Rushing (with Count Basie), Big Bill Broonzy, Big Joe Turner, and Josh White had recorded it, among other, less prominent, blues musicians. In the years following “St. Louis Blues (Concerto Grosso)” (the shiny new title of Armstrong’s meeting with Bernstein), blues masters Alberta Hunter, Furry Lewis, Lonnie Johnson, Jimmy Witherspoon, Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker, Odetta, and Etta James all put their stamp and stomp on it. An impressive list, if not as jaw-dropping as that of jazz stars, with most of the most celebrated names in blues missing from it. Handy wrote “St. Louis Blues” in 1914, as blues was barely beginning to emerge in national consciousness as a recognizable genre or style, and before jazz had been recorded or (as far as we know) named. It stands near the source of both genres.
“St. Louis Blues” extends beyond the borders of blues and jazz. By 1956, ragtime bandleader James Reese Europe; Hawai’ian guitarists Sol Ho’opi’i and Sam Ku West; classical singer Paul Robeson; popular stars Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, and Les Paul and Mary Ford; country artists Elton Britt, Chet Atkins, and the Callahan Brothers; Western Swing pioneers Milton Brown and Bob Wills; harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler; and mambo king Perez Prado – among others – had recorded distinctive, lively, vital versions. In the years after the Armstrong – Bernstein summit, more jazz modernists and traditionalists, country singers, pop stars, and blues belters would record it, followed swiftly by rock ‘n’ rollers and soul singers. Before too long, “St. Louis Blues” would attract funk arrangers.
Still, though, the jazz classic of them all? What does that mean? Is it decidable? Does it matter?
Regardless, the provocation of an extravagant claim can be fruitful, and you’ll never see me objecting to a little enthusiasm around here. Jazz classic of them all? The song opens worlds, worthy of exploration. Dig it.
Genre and identity. “St. Louis Blues” and its composer W. C. Handy are uniquely positioned to illustrate the overlapping relationships between the roots of the blues – spirituals, work songs, brass bands, minstrelsy, ragtime – and its branches – jazz, boogie-woogie, rock ‘n’ roll, country, bluegrass, rock, soul, funk, metal, punk, hip hop. Moreover, by composing a tango rhythm into the middle of “St. Louis Blues,” Handy asserted the multicultural nature of North American music and culture, and invited variations, explorations, and elaborations in a multiplicity of styles. The tango in Handy’s composition raises the question of identity and the relationships between rhythm, genre, culture, and identity.
Race relations and representations. American music has been a key symbolic site of both of Black resistance to white supremacism and of white backlash through various methods – appropriation and commercial dominance, educational and institutional dominance, and the overt backlash of blackface. Recordings of “St. Louis Blues” figured vividly on most sides of that dodecahedron, with Armstrong playing a heroic role in the symbolic resistance, and an ambiguously subversive role in his negotiations and responses to the depredations of the blackface tradition. On more than one version, and elsewhere, he used the cognitively complex African American strategy of signifying to undermine the authority of mainstream cultural values, including the stereotypes imposed by or inherited from the minstrelsy tradition. These conflicts and their histories echo in "St. Louis Blues (Concerto Grosso)” and the discourse surrounding it.
Signifying is an inherently complex concept. I rely on Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s, insight that signifying in African American discourse can be double-voiced. Sometimes, as we will see, Black artists signify on white aesthetic standards and expectations, parodying them while simultaneously affirming and embodying them, in a rhetorical move that underlines, undermines, or questions the legitimacy of the standard or expectation while asserting that, if the standard is legitimate, this utterance embodies it.
Gender negotiations. Like most early blues songs, “St. Louis Blues” was written for a woman’s voice, making it part of the history of Black feminism. As with its liberatory force in the realm of race relations, though, the song also attracted the backlash of patriarchal sexism, including in at least one version by Armstrong. I rely on Angela Y. Davis’s insights here.
The pop / classical divide. The arrangement that Bernstein conducted was not the first attempt at a symphonic “St. Louis Blues,” and that history reveals more avenues of Black resistance and white backlash, and the intersections of race, class, culture, art, and business. The hierarchical assumptions of the classical establishment go back to the European Renaissance; in a North American context, the assumptions include racial biases and strategies of oppression, which in turn inspire strategies of resistance.
Competing visions of modernism. On one side, the Western tradition posits a modernism that reflects a faith in technical innovation, but technical innovation circumscribed by Eurocentrism and in service to a vision of the isolated individual. On the other side is the under-told story of how Black artists conceived of and practiced a modernism devoted to collective, collaborative Black resistance and liberation, with a similar faith in progress and devotion to technical innovation, but with a focus on different musical techniques than those favored by Eurocentric tradition. Handy’s songs, Armstrong’s recordings, and songs that Handy influenced evince a different conceptualization of time than the one exemplified in the classics of Euro-modernism. The solidarity evinced in Afro-modernism emphasizes innovation within continuity, while Euro-modernist works fantasize breaking with the past in ways that preserve the tradition of white dominance. These stories of innovation, resistance, collaboration, backlash, and liberation played out across many recordings of “St. Louis Blues.” The praxis of sampling in hip hop continues a collective Black modernist quest.
The story of “St. Louis Blues” arches high and wide, a gateway to far more than what the US calls “the West.”
I could write a book.
Should I be the one to write it, though?
I don’t blame anybody for wondering. With “The St. Louis Blues” having broached the question of identity, mine is relevant. I’m white, male, straight, approaching senior citizenship, and grew up in and in my thirties returned to the white-collar middle class after a detour into mostly unremunerated artistic and intellectual pursuits and a series of odd and odder jobs. I teach elementary school, have published one book on music history, and have made music all my life, sometimes for money. I receive the blues as music and as culture. As a musician, though I am not a blues musician, the blues is fundamental to my own semi-professional practice of playing guitar and harmonica and piano and of writing songs – it’s fundamental to an incalculably large percentage of American music. As culture, though, I’m an outsider to the blues, as sociologist B. Brain Foster makes clear in his illuminating 2020 book I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place & the Backbeat of Black Life. Foster, who grew up in Mississippi, interviewed many Black residents of Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, which is the center of blues tourism, because it is, according to prevailing mythology, the birthplace of the blues. The majority of African American Clarksdaleans live up to Foster’s title.
Then again, who really likes the blues? To quote the critic and novelist Albert Murray:
Who likes the blues “settling in like bad weather,” that “squat obscene and vulture like,” and that make you feel “down-hearted and uncertain . . . woebegone and anxiety-ridden”? As for the geographic and economic circumstance of the Clarksdaleans whom Foster interviewed, anybody can imagine disliking being the object of tourism. Still, though, Foster’s informants make this clear too: The blues is their music in a way that it can never be mine.
I have tried to avoid what I see as pitfalls in blues writing, especially writing by white commentators: fetishization of suffering, oppression, and poverty; unknowable speculations about authenticity; regional arguments that claim or imply a single place of origin for the blues. I have tried to be aware of the intersections between music and other arts, which, with the blues, can be thrilling and illuminating, as Black artists, writers, and filmmakers embraced “blues” as a subject matter within a decade of its emergence as a marketable genre. From near the beginning, African American artists and writers recognized in the blues a vehicle for expressions of Black identity, Black culture, Black liberation.
All of that – the music, the art, the literature, the liberatory force of the blues, as well as the ugliness of the racist white backlash – is in the interaction between Armstrong and Bernstein. Armstrong knows it, and Bernstein doesn’t; or, more demonstrably, Armstrong’s discourse evinces an understanding of these dynamics, and Bernstein’s does not. The perceptual canyon between them necessitates a revaluation of Western canonical values, a revaluation that Armstrong enacts in his discourse and his music. As James Weldon Johnson said way back in 1922, African American music is modern music, and it is American music.
I’m a fan. I’m a fan who got smacked upside the head when I heard a 1956 recording of Louis Armstrong with his sextet and with Bernstein and the New York Phil, on a song written in 1914 with deep roots in the nineteenth century and echoes into the twenty-first, and with Murrow’s introduction and the banter between Bernstein and Armstrong afterwards, I thought – this moment is bursting with American history. Race, class, art, business, virtuosity, unconscious racism, subtle and subversive resistance – the whole gamut – the modernist and the nostalgic, the grand and the goofy, the glorious and the grotesque, Black liberation and blackface backlash – it’s all here. And I could hear that in the recording because I was a fan not only of Armstrong and Handy and Bernstein, but also of James P. Johnson and Herbie Hancock and George Gershwin and Duke Ellington and Bing Crosby and James Reese Europe and Bessie Smith and Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry and James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes and Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk and Albert Murray and Angela Y. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Archibald Motley and Romare Bearden and Bob Wills and Fryderyk Chopin and . . .
Since my teenage years, I have considered my musical fandom as congruent with, as integral to, my enthusiasm for human liberation. To quote Armstrong from a different occasion, the intersection of those interests in this story is – a gasser. At least, I hope you agree, at least, to a degree.
[Image: Leonard Bernstein and Louis Armstrong shaking hands and smiling, Bernstein with his left arm around Armstrong’s shoulder, and with orchestral players sitting in the background, holding their instruments. Image owned by Louis Armstrong House Museum.]