by Phyllis Logie

Created on: July 07, 2010

Nicknamed ‘Satchmo’ by fellow musicians because of his wide smile, Louis Daniel Armstrong was perhaps the greatest and most influential jazz trumpeter and musician of all time.

Born on the 4th August 1901, (in fact the same year that Queen Victoria died), in the Storyville, District, New Orleans, Louisiana in an over crowded ghetto, populated by hoodlums and thugs and locally known as the ‘battlefield’. His father, William Armstrong left home when he was five and he and his younger sister was brought up by his mother, and grandmother.  In an effort to support her children and make ends meet, Mary Ann Armstrong took the only option opened to a poorly educated and abandoned wife to care for her children and became a part-time prostitute.

Needless to say, the family was desperately poor and his only option was to steal to survive. At the age of twelve years, as a result of youthful exuberance, he borrowed a pistol and fired it into the air to celebrate the arrival of the New Year in 1913. His action was witnessed by a policeman who arrested him and eventually he was incarcerated in a home for wayward coloured boys, where he served a two year sentence.  Were it not for that incident, the world might never have known the greatness of Louis Armstrong.

It was whilst he was incarcerated that he came into contact with the musical instructor, professor Peter Davis, an employee at the home.  Davis spotted his talent and began giving him lessons in singing and playing the trumpet.  When he was released two years later he sought to change his life by choosing not returning to his former pattern of behaviour and decided to took another route.

He took odd jobs to support himself and haunted the bars and jazz clubs, which could be found everywhere in Storyville to listen to the most popular jazz artists of the day.  There he encountered the likes of Joe ‘King’ Oliver who played in the ‘Kid Ory band’ and others, some of whom befriended and mentored him, virtually taking over from where Peter Davis had left off. They allowed him to play with them and by the time he was seventeen he had played with several of the most prominent bands in his locality.

At age seventeen he married for the first time to Daisy Parker, they adopted a child called Clarence Armstrong a 3 year old relative with learning difficulties, whose mother died after giving birth to him.  Louis' marriage to Daisy was short

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