DISGRACELAND - Louis Armstrong: Gangsters, the CIA, and Hot Music

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

You know Louis Armstrong, right? Jazz icon? Satchmo? Nice guy from the movies with the trumpet? Did you know he was part of a CIA coup in Africa? Did you know he compelled a President into civil rights action? Did you know Louis Armstrong was controlled by gangsters? There’s a lot to learn about this one-of-a-kind musician in DISGRACELAND.Louis Armstrong famously served as a "jazz ambassador" for the United States. If you could choose one musical artist to represent America overseas, who would it be? Let Jake know at 617-906-6638, [e-mail], or on socials @disgracelandpod.To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at disgracelandpod.com/membership.Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - GET THE NEWSLETTERFollow Jake and DISGRACELAND:InstagramYouTubeX (formerly Twitter) Facebook Fan GroupTikTok To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. This is the story of one of music history's giants. An artist is so big and so influential that the word icon doesn't do the man justice. It's a story about a trumpet player, an accidental jazz innovator and reluctant jazz ambassador. It's a story about a drug bust, a pissed-off president, racist southern lawmakers, a CIA coup. and it's a story about gangsters, lots and lots of gangsters,

because this is a story about the great jazz man, Louis Armstrong, which of course means it's a story about great music. Unlike that music, I played for you at the top of the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Roll Em, If You Got Em, MK One. I played you that loop because, I can't afford the rights to Tammy by Debbie Reynolds. And why would I play you that specific slice of Princess Leia's mom's cheese?

Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on September 17, 1957. And that was the day that Louis Armstrong gave an interview that instantly changed how the public thought of him. It may have been the catalyst for the President of the United States to suddenly become involved in the civil rights movement. On this episode, a drug bust, racist politicians, a CIA coup, stone cold gangsters, and one of the greatest to ever do it, Louis Armstrong.

I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgraceland. There are two ways to say Lewis Armstrong's name. The first way is how I've just said it. Lewis. The second way is Louis. Watch any footage then or now of someone talking about Lewis Armstrong. Armstrong or Louis Armstrong. And you'll hear different people say it different ways.

And even in the 1969, Barbara Streisand musical Hello Dolly, in which he made a memorable cameo as a band leader, he introduces himself as Lewis. But still, I'm going to call him Louis, just because that's what I've always done. And I tried doing it the other way, and frankly, it just sounds weird. So here we go. Anyhow, I bring this up because,

just like there are two ways to say Louis Armstrong, there are two ways to see Louis Armstrong. In fact, there are two Louis Armstrongs. Let me explain. The first one you're familiar with, that's the larger-than-life icon you call Satchmo or Pops, the lifelong ambassador of jazz. The American art form born right there in his hometown, New Orleans,

an art form that in many ways he invented, or at least was its most important early innovator. He was the giant on whose shoulders every jazz great to come in the 20th century stood. Impossible high seas on the trumpet. That gravelly scat singing voice. What a wonderful world and all that. This is the same guy who, as the years went by and the culture shifted, and so-called traditional jazz took a back seat to bebop,

modal jazz and hard bop. With new strains of the art form, he helped shape, now soundtracking the civil rights movement. he stayed the same. In the minds of jazz cats such as Dizzy Gillespie, Louis became an artifact of the past, still catering to the white man at a moment when a famous black musician should be using his platform not to cater, but to dissent.

I don't get involved in politics, Louis Armstrong once said. I just blow my horn. What Dizzy Gillespie didn't know at the time, though we'd learn much later, was that I just blow my horn, was Louis Armstrong's code for I Survive. Louis was taught early on how to survive as a black man in a white man's world.

He did this by heeding the advice of his mentors, including Joe Oliver, aka King Oliver, the famous bandleader who told Louis, you're crying in your horn all right, but it's the audience that should cry, not you. You have to learn to never wear the trouble in your face. So, Louis hid that trouble in his horn. which was exactly what he was doing on a particular night in 1947,

the year he seriously leveled up, going from getting paid a respectable $350 a night to commanding a staggering $2,500 every show. That's like $35 grand in today's dollars, by the way. Tonight, Louis found himself in a familiar spot, outside the club, in between sets, puffing on a joint, getting high as hell, actually, and also getting paranoid, worried that a couple of cops would step out of the shadows to pinch him for communing with one of his greatest loves, marijuana. This is where the other Louis Armstrong comes in.

The real Louis Armstrong. The one from the real part of New Orleans, the back of town, James Alley. Not Storyville, the Red Light District, where black men weren't allowed to pay for sales. but Black Storyville, the city's other red light district, some three blocks away, where sex workers weren't prostitutes as they were known in the white establishments, but horrors. A small distinction in descriptors that functioned solely to degrade the black citizens of New Orleans, even more than they already were by segregation and discrimination. It was in this environment of systemic racism, sex and violence that Louis Armstrong came of age,

including the years he spent in an orphanage, a fortuitous turn of events that found him joining their brass band where his self-taught God-given skills quickly rocketed him to cornet player, first chair. Now, as an adult, he continued to navigate not just a racist city but a racist world. In a little reefer went a long way. Not just in how it made Louis feel,

or how it made the music sound, all those horns winding themselves around each other in harmonious ecstasy. But, and this is in Louis's own words, it made you, quote, Forget all the bad things that happened to a Negro. Louis had his fair share of bad things to forget, and he hoped that tonight he wouldn't add another one of the lists as he toaked on the joint. His manager, Joe Glazer, told Louis he had nothing to worry about. Then an arrangement had been made with the federal agents

who'd been following Louis Armstrong's trail of skunky marijuana smoke. Joe Glazer had done this by setting up his other, famous client, Billy Holliday, who was, at this very moment, being booked for possession. It didn't matter that Billy wasn't in her hotel room when agents searched it and found the dope. I mean, yes, it did matter that she wasn't there because legally there was nothing tying her to the drugs and even the shittiest of public defenders could have fought and beat the charge easily. But it didn't matter because Joe Glazer, Billy Holliday and Louis Armstrong's manager, had advised Billy to not lawyer up and instead to please the police.

guilty. One hand washed the other. Joe gave Billy to the feds. And in return, the feds laid off Satchmo, who, no offense to Billy Holiday, was the golden goose. For Joe Glazer, it was just business. For Louis Armstrong, it was survival. Louis watched Billy take the fall, and he couldn't help but think back to a time when he'd found himself in a similar situation. It was 17 years prior in 1930. Not in Chicago where he'd been making his home and his name, but instead in Culver City, California, where he was on tour with his band.

This was long before Joe Glazer entered the picture. Louis was standing outside the Cotton Club, passing a joint back and forth with his white drummer. Weed, or Gage, as Louis called it, was not yet illegal in the United States, but it had been illegal for years in the state of California. And the two detectives who suddenly came out of nowhere made this abundant.

clear. They charged Louis with a felony punishable by up to six years behind bars. But Louis didn't wind up like Billy Holliday, who had her cabaret card revoked and could no longer find steady work. For this offense, Louis had nothing taken away and only served nine days, after which he was free to go, to keep making that money, and to keep blowing his horn. And it's all because of two men who simply made their presence and their considerable influence known. At Louis' trial, the Cotton Club's band leader Abe Lyman showed up with his brother and sat in the gallery. The judge looked out at the small crowd and locked eyes with the two men. He knew what they said about the Lyman's, that they were bootleggers,

that they were cozy with Culver City politicians, and that they were even cozier with gangsters. The judge was a sworn man of the law, but even lawmen knew to tread carefully around the mob. So, Louis Armstrong got that Cush sentence and made his way back to Chicago. all because a couple of supposed wise guys put the pressure on just by showing up. The words of King Oliver came back to him now, never wear the trouble in your face, which is what Louis did, completely unaware that this very moment was the true beginning of his private life, of the other Louis Armstrong. The one the American public was just getting to know and love,

the same Louis Armstrong, who was about to fall into the arms of organized crime. Chicago, 1931, Louis Armstrong sat backstage at the showboat club, sweating from the night's feverish set. Hot music, they called it. So hot that his heart was still pounding, his ears still ringing. He stripped down to his t-shirt with a handkerchief wrapped around his head. He was just another horn player. But of course, he wasn't. Louis didn't play like anyone else.

His thrilling sound was the product of a self-taught style, and the emphasis here is on self-taught. He had incorrect ambiture, which is a fancy word for the way you're supposed to press your lips to the mouthpiece. To put it plainly, Louis Armstrong had poor technique, technically speaking. This, of course, was a huge part of his individuality, and what made him stand out, like the way he would shake his head to get vibrato

instead of using his fingers, which was the norm. These things, this irregular technique, helped make him the hottest jazz man in the country. The groundbreaking records he cut with his hot five and hot seven combos just a few years earlier were hard to come by because it seemed like the music stores were always sold out. Louis' record label at the time, OK, released his music on their race records line, which was at the time the industry term for music marketed to African Americans,

as well as their regular line of records, which is to say records for white people. and yeah we know that's pretty fucked up but that's the way that it was Louis Armstrong's reach was wide and you need look no further than an up-and-coming pop singer named Bing Crosby whose style was obviously indebted to Louis Armstrong Louis on the other hand was in debt to someone else the door to the dressing room backstage at the showbow club swung open

and in-walked Frankie Foster, the notorious Chicago gangster Some said Frankie was the trigger man who took care of that Tribune reporter Jake Lingle. And despite his clean-cut image, Lingle was dirty and on the take. Real buddy-buddy with Al Capone. A little too buddy-buddy, apparently, because he went out with one bullet to the back of his head, died with his cigar clenched between his teeth and that day's paper still in his hands. Louis didn't have to know whether Frankie was the one who actually did Lingle because he was sure the guy had the stones for killing, period.

And now that guy with the stones for killing was standing between Louis Armstrong and the door. Pack your bags, Frankie said. You're going to New York to play a show there tomorrow. What, Louis thought? New York. The hell he was going to New York. Louis had shows booked right here in Chicago, and he told Frankie this. Frankie responded by reaching into his jacket pocket and producing a revolver.

He pulled the hammer back, and the sound of the pistol cocking sent to shiver down Louis Armstrong's spine. How about now? Was he getting through? New York City, tomorrow. Let me back up for a second. There are a few things you need to know in order to understand why one of Chicago's most feared trigger man was threatening Louis Armstrong in his dressing room. At this point, 1931, Louis was not yet managed by Joe Glazer, the guy who set up Billy Holiday on that phony drug bust.

But instead, by a man named Johnny Collins. Johnny Collins was a big guy with a Hitler mustache, and like many others working at the time in the music business, he was a gangster. Okay, maybe not in a literal Al Capone way, but in the way that he did his fair share of shady shit kind of way. In fact, Johnny Collins had weaseled his way into his current role by making some sort of below-the-table deal with Louis's former manager. Now that former manager, Tommy Rockwell, was making a stink. Either he wanted his old job back or he wanted to get paid. He told Johnny Collins to cough up six grand or he'd burn that fucking Hitler mustache right off his face.

Collins and Louis knew that Tommy Rockwell was serious, just like they knew that the trigger man, Frankie Foster, was serious. This was a guy with a direct line not just to Al Capone, but to the New York mobster Dutch Sheltz. And though Tommy Rockwell always denied hiring Frankie Foster to do his dirty work, the dirty work in question being forcibly removing Louis Armstrong from Chicago and shipping him to a club in New York where Rockwell was connected. Now, Rockwell did manage to get Louis kicked out of the American Federation of Musicians,

or the AFM, by complaining to them that Louis Armstrong was in violation of his previous management contract. So, on top of having a gun pointed in his face, and on top of being caught in a power struggle between warring and well-connected gangster managers, Louis Armstrong was now no longer protected by a union, which meant he was out of luck when it came to negotiating wages, working conditions, etc. Faced with this extremely messy situation, Louis Armstrong and his manager, Johnny Collins, saw only one way out. They hightailed it out of Chicago and headed south, far away from Frankie Foster and Tommy Rockwell and from Al Capone. Louis and his band holed up in a private Pullman train car, steam and smoke powering them all the way to New Orleans.

then by bus to Memphis, where a dispatcher at the depot, told them to exit the larger vehicle Johnny Collins had paid for and get on a smaller bus with fewer amenities. And they refused, so the Memphis Police Department was called. And the cops took one look at Johnny Collins' white wife on a bus with a bunch of black musicians, and being the racist pencil dicks that they were, threw all of them in jail. And Louis Armstrong had to agree to play a local benefit show in order to be released, which he did. not wearing the trouble in his face and all that.

Instead, he delivered his message inside his music, dedicating one of his favorite tunes that night to the Memphis PD, a song called, I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal you. In Philadelphia, the problem wasn't racist cops. It was a couple of local goons who found their way backstage, just like Frankie Foster had done. But unlike Frankie Foster,

these goons were offering Louis their protection. Louis was once again reminded of what was at stake of the people who would be glad when he was dead, you rascal you. And this freaked him out. He went straight to the police station, fearing for his life, and asked him to lock him up for his own safety.

And there in that cell, all these things weighed on his mind, as did his other problems, like his lips, which had become bloody and shredded on account of his bad technique. And then there was his estranged wife, Lil, who was demanding thousands of

of dollars in unpaid quote-unquote maintenance money. All of which is to say, when Joe Glazer finally showed up, the man it would become Louis' manager for just about the rest of his life. It couldn't have happened at a better time. Glazer had his own direct line to guys like Al Capone, having run the gangster Southside clubs and brothels in the past. He'd managed boxers. He was tough and feared and respected in his own way.

Not that Glazer wasn't extremely problematic because he was. He nonchalantly tossed around racial slurs. He was once given a 10-year-s sentence for the rape of a 14-year-old girl, but avoided jail time by marrying her. A few years later, when he found himself in a similar situation with a 17-year-old girl, his friend Al Capone pulled some strings to make it go away, which is what Joe Glazer did. And that's what Louis Armstrong wanted right now.

To make everything go. He needed a guy like Joe Glazer, because to survive, he needed more than the ability to hide his trouble in his horn. Joe Glazer believed in Louis Armstrong, and he was ready to go to work for Louis, and those facts outweighed the very glaring moral and ethical deficiencies of his character. This was the world that Louis Armstrong came from, and the world in which he continued to live. And starting in 1935, he lived it with Joe Glazer as his manager.

Glazer paid off Louis's wife, Lil. He paid off the ex-manager Johnny Collins. and he used his connections to get organized crime off Louis' back. Then he took out a six-figure life insurance policy on his client and got to work. As Louis later said, Joe Glazer saved him from the gangsters. But Louis Armstrong would win his next battle on his own. We'll be right back after this world, word, word. In January 1957, like millions of others in America,

President Dwight D. Eisenhower was watching Elvis Presley on the, idiot box. This was the Tupelo Boys' third appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. And this time, the censors at CBS insisted that the camera only show him from the waist up. If the decision were left to Elvis, the pelvis, that camera would have gone south of his beltline to show people at home what the girls in the studio audience were losing their minds over it. But this was America, not the land of the free as advertised, but the land of the carefully crafted, damage-controlled public relations image, an image that Twyy Eisenhower was more than well aware of. But a rock and roll singer's quivering hips weren't on Ike's mind at the moment.

Neither was the upcoming inauguration in which he would be sworn in for a second term. Instead, Eisenhower was worried about how the rest of the world currently looked at America, and I'm not talking about what parts of Elvis Presley's body were being shown on TV. I'm talking about Rosa Parks, arrested, for refusing to give up her body. seat, Martin Luther King Jr. busted for doing 30 and a 25, and the KKK forcing a black truck driver to jump off a bridge to his death. And despite Brown v. Board of Education, which just three years prior had declared segregation in schools to be unconstitutional, a follow-up opinion by the Supreme Court actually made it okay for some districts to ignore desegregation, places

like Little Rock, Arkansas. But I'll get to that in a minute. My point is, Eisenhower knew that America's image wasn't as pretty as it was made out to be, because America, both on the surface and deep down, could get kind of ugly. Eisenhower needed to work on polishing that image, in part by spreading the good news about capitalism as the Cold War continued to heat up. Part of Eisenhower's plan was to send jazz ambassadors out to visit the rest of the world. Essentially, the State Department would earmark tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund overseas. tours of jazz artists with racially mixed bands. For the musicians, it was good money and an opportunity to see the world.

For Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, it was a way to control a narrative of black and white Americans living and working together in harmony for far-flung audiences in the Balkans, the Middle East, and in Russia. Russia, in particular, was where Eisenhower wanted Louis Armstrong to go on a government-funded jazz ambassador tour later that year in 1957. At this point, Louis Armstrong was 56 years old. He was an American institution, and with the help of his manager, Joe Glazer, he crossed over to white audiences, performing not just jazz tunes but pop standards.

He'd appeared in movies with Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Stewart, and Grace Kelly. He was a beloved entertainer and an ideal cultural export. But most importantly, for President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles, Louis Armstrong lived by the code of the mentor King Oliver. He never wore trouble in his face. Meaning, of course, that Eisenhower could trust Louis to hang with the Soviets and not to bitch and moan about the real troubles that black Americans faced every day back home. And this is not to say that Louis Armstrong did not stand up for civil rights.

The year prior, he famously refused to appear with his integrated band in his hometown, New Orleans, when the state of Louisiana passed a law forbidding black and white musicians from performing together. He also refused to perform at any venue where he was not allowed to stay, which is how he began staying in whites-only hotels, and how he found himself the first black guest ever at the Dakota Hotel in Grand Forks, Michigan, on the evening of September 17, 1957. Again, September 17, 1957, two weeks after the governor of Arkansas, Orville Fobbus, called in the National Guard to stop nine black students from enrolling in Little Rock City. Central High School and defiance of Brown v. Board of Education.

Also, just one week after the Civil Rights Act was passed, the first piece of civil rights legislation signed into law by President Eisenhower. These things were no doubt on Louis Armstrong's mind this particular night when a student journalist writing for the Grand Forks Herald showed up at his room at the Dakota Hotel. At first, the conversation went as expected. They talked music, and Louis went on and on about Bing Cromwell. Cosby and what a great voice he had. But then the kid mentioned Little Rock, and Louis' face twisted up.

His horn was tucked away in its case, and he had no place to hide his trouble, so, for once, Louis Armstrong let his trouble emerge in his face, and then in his voice. You know what? he said to the college reporter. It's getting almost so bad a colored man hasn't got any country. Eisenhower has got no guts. He's a two-faced politician, and I can't. governor, Fabus, he's a no good motherfucker. So is John Foster Dulles. That man's another motherfucker. And the way they are treating my people in the South, the whole government can go to

the college reporter couldn't write fast enough in his notebook. He could hardly believe what he was hearing, because the public Louis Armstrong never talked like this. Meaning that as far as the world was aware, the private Louis Armstrong never thought like this. But he clearly did. And as the kid kept writing, Louis started singing. Oh, say, can you motherfucking see? By the motherfucking dawn's early light. Obviously, this being 1957, many Louis Armstrong's actual words could not be printed. He and the reporter settled on uneducated plowboy as a replacement for a motherfucker to describe Governor Phobis.

And when the story ran not just in the Grand Forks Herald, but in the papers, over the country via the Associated Press, it was like a bomb went off. Louis Armstrong's words were strong, and his stance was even stronger. A stance that resulted in his refusal to go through with the Jazz Ambassador tour of Russia for the gutless motherfucker Dwight D. Eisenhower was immediate. White radio stations throughout all their Louis Armstrong records, Ford Motor Company prepared to pull their sponsorship from an upcoming Bing Crosby TV special in which Louis was slated to appear. Even on the other side of the divide, Sammy Davis Jr. called out Louis Armstrong for waiting so long to do the right thing.

In Louis' mind, however, doing the right thing, if it involved putting himself out there, that was dangerous. If he was on the front lines of the movement, picketing, marching, and holding a sign, if he got in a scuffle, if the cops roughed him up or he got clocked in the face, if his lips, his mouth, if they got any more fucked up than they already were, he was done. He would not survive. So saying these things to this reporter, now, in 1957, that was putting himself out there more than he ever had. And in the wake of Louis Armstrong calling out President Eisenhower in just about every newspaper in the country, something truly remarkable happened. Less than one week after the article ran, Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard. He sent the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne division to Little Rock, and he ordered Little Rock, and he ordered Little Rock

Central High to admit the nine black students immediately. Eisenhower's action was enough to convince Louis to embark on one of those government-funded Jazz Ambassador Tours after all, but not to Russia. Three years later, Louis Armstrong and his band took off for Africa to represent in America that, in his eyes, was perhaps beginning to listen and beginning to change, when in reality, America was just using Louis Armstrong for the one thing he didn't want to get involved with in the first place. Politics. November, 1960. Louis Armstrong, with his fourth and final wife, Lucille, by his side, was just finishing a most excellent meal at a restaurant in Leopoldville, capital of the newly independent Republic of

the Congo. And back home in the States, John F. Kennedy had narrowly defeated Richard Nixon in the presidential election. Louis's one-time nemesis, the lame duck, Dwight Eisenhower, at the end of his two-term run in sight, had finally persuaded Louis to be a jazz ambassador after all, despite their differences. Perhaps Louis believed he was the anointed president whisperer, thanks to his part in the Little Rock dust-up. Perhaps the election of JFK gave him hope for the future of his divided country.

And perhaps all of this and more made Louis now feel great pride as a representative of that country. Or maybe the money was just that good. However it went down, Louis was working for Ike, a man he once called Two-Faced, bringing a positive image of America to a country that had only recently thrown off the shackles of colonialism. Eisenhower intended to influence the Congo before the commies got to them first. Part of this strategy was why Louis was now dining in Leopold with his wife and a diplomat from the U.S. Embassy. Or at least Louis Armstrong was made to believe that believe that the man in the white shirt, black tie, black jacket, and dark shades sitting across the table from him was a diplomat. Louis did not know that this man, Larry Devlin, was in fact not a diplomat.

But instead, the CIA station chief posted to the Congo. Louis also did not know that the purpose of Larry Devlin's presence here in Leopoldville was to arrange and support the assassination of the Congo's first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, who the U.S. feared was sympathetic to Russia, and then replace him with Joseph Mobutu, a military man who was also anti-communist. Furthermore, Louis had no idea that at this very moment, as the dinner wrapped up and he and Lucille made small talk with a man they thought to be an innocuous agent of goodwill, but just a mile from where they sat in Prime Minister Lumamba's home, soldiers affiliated with Joseph Mobutu

were holding him hostage. The fix was already in. And Louis Armstrong, feeling like he was doing something good, feeling a little patriotic even, was in fact being used as a smokescreen, an elaborate cover so that the CIA and the U.S. government could meet the right people, shake the right hands, and get the wheels turning on their hit job. Fucking gangsters.

Always gangsters with Louis Armstrong. Shortly, after Louis' three-month tour of Africa ended, In January of 1961, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was tortured and executed by Congolese separatists aided in part by the Belgian government. Later, CIA station chief Larry Devlin, the man who had dinner with Louis Armstrong and his wife, the Congo's capital, told a U.S. congressional investigation, quote, The coup of Mobutu was arranged and supported and indeed managed by the CIA, unquote. Louis Armstrong would never hear this quote,

or know about this plot or about the role he unwittingly played in it, because Larry Devlin's testimony happened in 1975, four years after Louis Armstrong died of a heart attack at the age of 69. Oddly enough, this wasn't the only shocking revelation that emerged following the great trumpet player's death. In 1976, one year after Devlin's testimony, the New York Times ran a three-part investigative piece on a man named Sidney Corshack, Now, just like there were two Louis Armstrongs, there were two Sydney Corshacks. The public Sydney Corshack was a well-respected labor attorney in Beverly Hills.

But the private Sydney Corshack was known as a fixer for Chicago organized crime. As the Times revealed, in the early 1960s, Sydney Corshack went into business with Louis' longtime manager Joe Glazer. The man who had once saved Louis Armstrong from gangsters, assigned control of his majority stock in his business over to Sydney Corshack, an alleged gangster. Why? In his Louis Armstrong biography pops, the writer Terry Teachout, hypothesizes that cutting such a deal was perhaps Joe Glazer's solution to getting organized crime off his clients back for good. Regardless of the reason why, however, it still means that for the rest of his life, Louis Armstrong's survival was handled in part by the hidden world of the Chicago mob, the very same group that

it once tried to make his very life a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. All right, Discos, thanks for rolling with us in Satchmo through Chicago, Africa, and back again. Question of the week, and it's not an easy one, which musical artists would you choose from any generation to represent America as an ambassador as president? President Eisenhower chose Louis Armstrong. You can only choose one. 617-90666-6638. Leave me a voicemail, send me a text, and let me know.

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