Switched on Pop - How Louis Armstrong invented the modern pop star

Episode Date: July 18, 2023

In 1964, Louis Armstrong knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts with his recording of “Hello, Dolly!” becoming, at age 62, the oldest artist to ever hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Sixty years later, Louis Armstrong remains a beloved cultural figure, his oft-imitated voice still instantly recognizable. But Armstrong is more than a source of levity — his artistry and innovations when he made his first recordings a century ago in 1923 set the template for the modern pop star. On this centennial episode, hear Armstrong as you’ve never heard him: a defiant, pathbreaking musician whose voice resonates in every hit record.  Songs Discussed Louis Armstrong - Hello, Dolly! King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band - Dippermouth Blues Fletcher Henderson & His Orchestra - Sugar Foot Stomp Louis Armstrong & His Hot Seven - Potato Head Blues, West End Blues, Big Butter And Egg Man, Heebie Jeebies Louis Armstrong - Ain't Misbehavin', Dinah, I'm a Ding Dong Daddy (From Dumas), Black And Blue, Swing That Music Bing Crosby, The Mills Brothers - Dinah The Boswell Sisters - Heebie Jeebies Ella Fitzgerald - Mack The Knife - Live At The Deutschlandhalle, Berlin, 1960 Joey Ramone - What a Wonderful World Ghostface Killah - The Forest Jon Batiste - What A Wonderful World More Read Terry Teachout’s brilliant biography of Armstrong, Pops Visit the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, NY Listen to Lil Hardin Armstrong’s 1968 interview with Chris Albertson for Riverside Records Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm a songwriter Charlie Harding. Charlie, I have some Billboard chart trivia for you. You ready? Okay. Yeah.

Here's the question. Who was the oldest artist to ever hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100? Okay, I'm talking about the oldest artist when they recorded the song and that song then went to number one. Who is that? Ooh. I'm first of all interested in what even that age range is. I'm guessing it's in the like the 50s to 60s range, potentially. I'll give you a hint.

The second oldest artist is Cher with her song Believe. Ooh, yeah. She was 53 when that was recorded. Right, right. Okay. So the number one oldest artist is going to be older than that. Okay. I'm going to throw out Frank Sinatra.

That's a great guess and you're warm. Oh, okay. But that's not quite right. This artist hit number one in 1964, knocking, the Beatles off the charts, okay? The young, the young hot group of the 60s. And they did it with this song. Okay, we got some banjo.

No, you're a banjo player. Hello, darling. This is Louis Armstrong. Yes, you got it immediately, Charlie. Lewis Armstrong. But I have to correct. you, okay? Not Louis. Common misperception. Really? Oh. Yes. I mean, you hear him say it at the very beginning of this song, actually. He prefers his name to be pronounced Lewis.

Oh, I'm an idiot. You're not alone. Everyone calls him Louis Armstrong, except Lewis Armstrong, who called himself Lewis. So that's our first lesson of this episode. Setting the record. Yeah, okay. And how old was he? He was 62 years. Oh, this is great. So I still have like 25 years to get a number one hit on the Hot 100. This is good to know. Okay. Yeah, no, the window has not closed. Great. Okay. So this is kind of a cool anniversary, I think. It's been 60 years since Armstrong recorded this number one hit, Hello Dolly. And it's 100 years since Armstrong made his first ever recordings. That was back in 1923. Wow. So I thought the centennial year might be the perfect. time to talk about the sound and the legacy of this artist who has shaped the sound of popular music in profound ways. This is a nice little detour to go down. I like this. Okay. Tell me about Louis Armstrong. First of all, great pronunciation. Love to hear that. Thank you. I'm working on it.

And secondly, I don't know what your perception of Armstrong is. I could talk about my own prior to researching and learning more about him. I thought of him as kind of a comic figure, kind of larger than life, someone to impersonate, someone whose songs like, what a wonderful world, are popular,

but almost so commonplace that they've kind of lost some of their edge, I think. Yeah, definitely that. Nearly cliche. What I have since learned about Armstrong, repudiates that reputation. He was, in fact, a radical figure, someone who recreated the very formula of popular music

and someone who every single pop singer in 2023 is indebted to whether they know it or not. You're going to have to tie some threads together for me to get from 1923 to 2023. Well, then let's start unspooling those threads at the very beginning of armstrong. Armstrong's career. Okay.

What I propose we do is spend the first half of the episode tracking Armstrong's career and hearing how he developed his iconic sound. And in the second half, consider how this sound shaped every popular musician who followed him. Okay. My bold claim, as you say. Yeah, yeah. And to do that, I think we have to go back to the very beginning. We have to go to New Orleans, where Armstrong was born in 1901 and where he learned to

play the cornet, a type of trumpet, when he was sent at the age of 12 to the colored waifes home for boys. By the time he was 17, Armstrong had become one of the most sought after trumpet players in the city, playing on riverboats up and down the Mississippi River, and his talent took him from New Orleans up to Chicago, and then to New York City in 1924, where he recorded this solo on the song, Sugarfoot Stomp. Great evidence for why everybody wants to be the trumpeter. You get to lead the whole orchestra. Totally.

The trumpet was the definitive instrument of jazz in the 1920s when this recording was made. Like if you thought of hot music, you thought of the trumpet. And that had a lot to do with Armstrong himself. When you listen to this recording, you're hearing so many hallmarks of New Orleans jazz. It's bluesy. It's got this rhythmic drive. But it has something else. that was special about Armstrong.

This solo really tells a story. It has a vocal quality. Now, Armstrong didn't come up with this himself. He actually modeled his sound after his first mentor, the legendary New Orleans trumpeter, Joe King Oliver. And I'll illustrate this for you, Charlie.

Because that solo we just heard from Louis Armstrong, here's how it starts. And here's a solo from his mentor, King Oliver. Right. It has that same opening, long, bendy note. What, wow, wow, wow. Repeat it and then kind of go, and it makes you realize that obviously jazz is an improvised form,

but it leans on a bunch of established licks and melodies and things that you've practiced and memorized. We're hearing Armstrong playing New Orleans jazz. I mean, literally, he's like playing his men's, mentor solo note for note. Yeah. But that's not why we're interested in Armstrong, ultimately. It's because how he takes that musical language and develops it.

You can hear this when he moves to New York City. In 1924, he gets hired by the biggest band in town, the Fletcher-Henderson Orchestra. And when he arrives, these sophisticated New York musicians look at him a little askance. They're like, who's this country boy coming into our high-toned New York City? And he doesn't make the best impression. In fact, shortly after his arrival, the band is reading a chart, and they get to a section marked P.P. for volume. So that means, like, pianissimo, like, very quiet, right? Yeah, yeah.

And when they get to that section, the whole band gets really quiet, except Armstrong, who just blares his trumpet and plays it as loud as he can. And Henderson, the leader, stop. Whoa, whoa, whoa, stop. What's going on? Don't you know how to read music? And Armstrong goes, yeah, yeah, I know how to read music. P.P. That stands for pound plenty, which was his way of saying, you know, play as loud as you can.

And they're like, oh my God, this kid. But it turned out that Armstrong would become the most influential member of that band. And he would change the way the whole orchestra played because he brought this bluesy driving New Orleans sound to the group. So Armstrong takes the New York music scene by Storm. But it's what happens now. that really cements his stardom, makes him the biggest jazz artists and arguably the biggest pop artists of the 1920s. Okay.

In 1925, he leaves New York for Chicago. Ooh. And in Chicago, he leads his own band for the first time. And he does so with the assistance of his second wife, an outstanding musician in her own right, someone named Lil Hardin. Armstrong and Hardin start a group called The Hot Five and make a series of recordings. in the 1920s that flip the script of what jazz and pop music might sound like. Let's listen to Armstrong's solo on the song Potato Head Blues to hear him develop a new melodic language.

I'm not a jazz scholar like yourself, but this feels like almost proto-bop where it's become much more syncopated. It's much more staccato. We're jumping all around these scales. It's swirling all around your head. It doesn't have these long, kind of bends. You don't know what's going to happen. No, I love that analysis, Charlie. This is probably one of the most famous solos in jazz history because I think it takes that bluesiness and that rhythmic drive that we heard him bring

from his upbringing in New Orleans, and it gives it that sort of rhythmic and harmonic sophistication that you were just talking about. This solo and others that he recorded in the mid-1920s set a new template. for jazz musicians. They impelled them to tell a story the same way Armstrong does. And they raised Armstrong to the level of something like a god in music.

The playing is getting virtuosic here, it feels. There's a technical proficiency that comes out in a recording like West End Blues from 1928, which begins with an unaccompanied Armstrong trumpet cadenza. I mean, if you were listening to that on your Victrola in 1928, you would have just been blown away. That was unlike anything you'd ever heard coming out of a 78 rvm Shalak record before. And it wasn't just his trumpet playing Charlie, though that was impressive. He actually brags about it a little bit on a recording called Big Butter and Eggman. Great titles. Did a big personality. I love that. He sings, if it's necessary, I'll even hit high sea.

that's both a kind of romantic or quasi-sexual gesture and it's a little bit of bragging like I'm so good at the trumpet I can reach these notes that no one else can't right right that's so funny but this recording also tunes us into another key aspect of Armstrong sound which is he's not just a trumpeter

he's a vocalist as well and during this period in Chicago he also records his first vocal tracks including one where he introduces a style that would become incredibly influential called scat singing. What's scat singing, Charlie? Uh, water, bububy, but, uh, something I can't do. Something I should never do.

We'll never do again. I'm sorry. I know, and that was me because I only asked you that because I knew you would produce something, um, deeply embarrassing as embarrassing as that. So, so thank, so thank you for, for rising to the occasion. You're welcome. It's an earned skill is what it is that I do not have. Armstrong created his own legend around the development of scat singing.

He said he was recording a. song called Hebi-Geebies and he dropped the lyric sheet on the floor and he had to scramble to make up these nonsense syllables on the spot. That's probably not true, but nonetheless, the result was undeniable. This scat singing is kind of like the hybrid between his actual singing and his trumpet playing. You get the two of them. You get him doing the scat thing, though I doubt he's going to hit a high C on that voice.

Just on the Trump. No. No high seas, but I like your analysis, Chuck. It does retain the same rhythmic drive and bluesiness of his trumpet playing, but now it's got this added dimension of the beep, bop, boop, and that, I mean, that's still like, certainly every jazz singer sings scat to some degree. Yeah. But this is something you hear constantly in pop music as well. What? Skat singing? I mean, since the scat man, I'm a scat man. Charlie, do I need to remind you of Robert Plant's Scatting at the end of Led Zeppelin's what is and what never should be? I hadn't thought of it.

Not bad. Not bad. Okay. I didn't realize that Scott singing extended into the world of 60s and 70s rock. I'll be curious if we can draw a more contemporary connection. But maybe the place that we hear Scott singing and popular music is more like the vocal adlibs that happen in the final chorus, the places of over-the-top musical expressions. that feel maybe tied both the scat singing as well as sort of the spontaneous improvisation of of musical callouts in the gospel choir okay how about harry styles with music for a sushi restaurant no excuse me green tea music for sushi restaurant all rise scuba dooby dooby doo bo bo now scat is still alive for armstrong's wife and collaborator lil hard

And this moment in Hebi-Geebies when Armstrong started scatting was so effective because it represented his effervescent, spontaneous personality. Lloyd was always so full of fun. You never knew what he was going to do. Because he had a way of saying funny things. He had two, three words that he had made up himself. And he used to say two of them was boninibble. And per hyponuity. So I'm just. If he dropped the music, he just felt like not saying the real words, just saying something else. That's really what I think happened.

That was an interview from much later in her life, but I love how she shines light on Armstrong's personality, you know, making up words, pro-hypid tenuity. He clearly just had this such an active mind and such a creative spirit. And you can hear that when he scats. Yeah. From the release of Hebe-Geebies in 1926, Armstrong's arc just continues to ascend. He moves back to New York, but this time he's not part of any orchestra. He's a solo star in his own right, and he's the featured soloist in a Broadway show called

Hot Chocolates, which opened in 1929 and had as its centerpiece, Armstrong's performance of the song Ain't Misbehavin. Throwing in a little quotation of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue during that Trump it solo. Yeah. Oh, that's great. This is a musician at the top of his game, but he's not just singing pop hits. He's singing some songs that have a more trenchant message, a message about the frayed state of race relations in Jim Crow America. Songs like Black and Blue, which are not the kind of fluffy pop songs that we've heard from him so far, but cut right to the core of his experience as a black man in America.

I'm white inside, but that don't help my face. You don't encounter a lot of songs in the 1920s with that kind of direct confrontation. of racial identity. I will it end. Ain't got a friend. My only sin is in my skin. What did I do to be so black can't do? From the heights of Broadway showbiz in New York, where's left to go, Charlie?

He's conquered New Orleans, Chicago, New York. Where are you going to go next at this point? Hollywood. movies. Hollywood, exactly. He moves out to Hollywood, California. He stars in movies. He forms his own orchestra for the first time. And he really cements his case for being the star performer of this generation. Remember earlier we heard him bragging about hitting high seas on his trumpet? Yeah. Check out what he does in the 1930s in his recording of swing that music. I want to count the high seas that he hits at the end of this song.

Great. Okay. Okay. Here we go. Chuck. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 15, 15, 15, 17, 15, 17, 21, 23, 8, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 38, 30, 40, 41. Oh, and he goes up. And then he ends with a high F.

So 41, actually 42, because I didn't count the very first one, 42 high Cs at the end of that recording. That is someone who has complete command and control of his instrument, who knows how to excite an audience and who is being celebrated for being the most visionary trumpeter and vocalist of the 20s and 30s. He's flexing. It is a flex, as the kids would say. Hello, fellow kids. And from here, Armstrong soars.

He's conquered all the major cities in the U.S. And now he starts touring the world. He actually becomes an ambassador for the U.S. State Department, one of the few artists to pierce the iron curtain later in the 1950s. He travels to Africa and performs in Zimbabwe. He travels to Egypt and performs in front of the pyramids. This is a global superstar, someone who has come along. long way from his roots in the colored waifs home for boys in New Orleans, where he first learned

how to play the trumpet. Pretty incredible story. Globetrotting trumpeter, singer, scatter, movie star, Broadway, knocking the Beatles off the charts in 1964. All right? But Charlie, I promised you even more, right? I promised you someone who had changed the sound of popular music forever. Let's see if I can back that up when we come back after a quick break. More than just scouting. Promise? Pinky Swear. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of

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period. I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Charles, I think what makes Armstrong so important in the history of pop music is the quality that his collaborator, Lil Hardin, talked about in that audio clip I played in the first half.

The sense that you are hearing his personality on record whenever you listen to him, that you're not just hearing someone who is performing the notes on the page, but you're hearing someone who is bringing their voice, their interpretation, their individuality, to a song. That's something we might take as a given now in pop music, but it wasn't always the case. Armstrong broke that mold and created that template. I instantly, of course, recognized his voice when I heard it, but he's one of those instrumentalists that you can quickly point out, oh, that's Lewis Armstrong playing the trumpet. And that's a guitar player. That's the thing every guitar player is going for. Like within three notes, you know exactly who you're hearing. And he does that.

I want to illustrate this quality by comparing two recordings of the. the same song. Okay. The first is by iconic American singer Bing Crosby. Here's his recording of the song Dinah from 1932. And when we listen to Charles, I want you to focus on how eloquently and perfectly Bing enunciates each of the words of this song. Dinah, is there anyone finer in the state of Carolina? Now here's And you know her Now here's Armstrong's recording

Of the same song made one year later in 1933 Charlie, how many of the words Does Armstrong capture in his performance? Not convinced he hasn't completely forgotten the words But from the get-go, the way that he says, Dina, it's unmistakable. This is fascinating to me because you listen to the second stanza of this song. Armstrong only sings one word, basically, Dina Lee. He just goes, Dina, Dina, Dina Lee.

And I imagine for some people, you know, they're buying this record and they're like, wait, what, like, what is happening here? I paid for this song and I'm only getting like, you know, a quarter of the lyrics. Fragments, yeah, yeah. But that's exactly what Armstrong's appeal was. You didn't pick up an Armstrong record to get that perfect Bing Crosby delivery of the song. You picked up a record to hear Armstrong's version. And Charlie, you speculated, you know, maybe Armstrong kind of forgot the lyrics at this point. Let me play a recording from 1930 called I'm a ding-dong daddy from Dumas.

Great title, incidentally. And check out what happens. I'm a ding-dong daddy from Dumas and honesty to do. I'm being cut off a man on a woman. Oh, you're not a sweetened start. Oh, Davis. I was an awful. And I don't forgot the word.

No. Oh, okay. Isn't there that apocryful story of Miles Davis telling herbie Hancock that there's no mistakes? There's just an opportunity to improvise. That's not an apocry story. That's an absolutely true story. And we hear that in this. He literally says, I'm a ding-d-daddy from Dumas and I don't forgot the words.

He did it with style. And again, this is so fascinating to me because this totally defies all the logic of popular music. Where again, you're supposed to, if you're buying an album, you're expecting to hear a song, you know. And here he's like doing the opposite. You say, oh, I don't even know the word. Sorry. And not only do people not care, they're eating it up because what's less important is the integrity of the song than the integrity of the song than the integrity of. of Armstrong's performance and him being true to himself

and him communicating his spontaneity and his personality. Right. I feel like there's such a trope of contemporary records where they'll fly in some random laughter that happened to be recorded in the studio and drop it in the track to make it feel like it's not as polished as it really is. They're trying to recreate that intimacy. And that desire, I think you can trace back

to these Armstrong records from the 20s and 30s, because they crack this new code of pop music where it's not about a perfect, flawless performance. It's about the performance with the most emotion and the most direct honesty. And that's what pop singers today are striving for. And certainly the performance of identity that this is about Lewis Armstrong and how he does it. And that's what pop stars do today as well. It's all about buying into their persona. Okay, interesting.

So you're saying you're not just buying a record now to hear, someone interpret a song, you're hearing them bring their own perspective to it, right? Their unique take that they can offer. Well, isn't this one of those Pandora's box of pop music where we all know and acknowledge that there's producers and songwriters and suits behind every big song. And yet we want to believe it is just the raw and bridled emotion of the singer and their performance and that actually they're doing it right on the spot. And that's exactly how they're feeling and they're writing it exemptuously. Right. That tension that's always there. Which brings us back to that moment, Armstrong recording hebi-Geebies and he says, oh, I dropped the lyrics and I had to

make up these scat syllables on the spot. We know that's not true, but maybe we want to believe it because it creates that extra layer of authenticity. Yeah. Okay, so there's my case, Charlie, for how Lewis Armstrong invented the modern pop star as we know it. But maybe I can offer some more evidence and we can do that by listening to one final song and reflect on its incredible longevity. It's What a Wonderful World, recorded in 1967. I see trees of green, red roses, too. I see them blue for me and you. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

Even if Armstrong hadn't made all these revolutions that we've just been talking about, I feel like this song alone would earn him a place in the pop pantheon. It has been used in so many films, commercials. It's what I sing to my son before bed. Oh, that's so sweet. And it's been reworked by a surprising number of artists. Check out Joey Ramon's version of What a Wonderful World. The world is wonderful, and it contains multitudes, including any,

kind of cover you could possibly imagine of what a wonderful world. Even Ghostface Killer has taken a stab at this classic. I see the vans for me and you. And I say to myself.

Okay, so there's Ghostface Killa and Ray Kwan turning this Armstrong classic into an ode to cannabis. But the version of the song I want to end with Charlie is from 2019, 52 years. after the original recording.

It's by John Batiste, a pianist and singer, who, like Armstrong, hails from New Orleans. And his performance of, What a Wonderful World, brings out a certain darkness

that might be latent in this song that a lot of other performers don't really try to capture. To myself. And I think in doing so, he's really paying homage to Armstrong himself,

this multi-dimensional performer who had so many aspects to his playing and to his career and whose music continues to resonate for artists and listeners a hundred years after he first put his sound on record. This is illuminating for me. I feel like next time I hear really any pop song, especially all of the ad libs at the end,

I'm going to be thinking Louis Armstrong, his legacy. Switched on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz. Brandon McFarland is our engineer. Art Chung edits the show. Abby Barr does community management. Iris Gottlieb creates our incredible illustrations. And Nashakurwa is our executive producer. We're production of Vulture and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Tell us your favorite Lewis Armstrong song at Switched on Pop on Instagram and Twitter. We'll be back next Tuesday with a brand new episode. And until then, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. point is bar records