By Anna Gustafson
When Louis Armstrong first saw his home in Corona in 1943, he told his cab driver to stop joking with him and bring him to the correct address — the house before him was just too grand.
“One look at that big fine house, and right away I said to the driver, ‘Aw, man, quit kidding and take me to the address that I’m looking for,’” author Terry Teachout describes Armstrong as saying in his recently released biography of the jazz legend.
Teachout sat in Armstrong’s much loved Queens home where he lived out his days for a party Saturday in honor of Teachout’s 475-page tome, “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong,” published in December by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
“There are many books about Louis Armstrong, but oddly no one until now has written the definitive chronological Louis Armstrong biography,” said Michael Cogswell, director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum.
Teachout, the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal and a former jazz bassist, first thought of penning the book on Armstrong five years ago after Cogswell suggested he do so. As part of his research, the author had access to 650 reel to reel tapes Armstrong recorded in the last 25 years of his life which are now kept in the Corona house.
“Louis Armstrong was a great man who was also a good man,” Teachout said. “He was utterly unpretentious. He know how to laugh and how to make others laugh.”
Teachout read portions of his book, which has received numerous glowing reviews, to the Corona audience that included Armstrong’s longtime next door neighbor Selma Heraldo, world-renowned jazz trumpet player Jon Faddis and Melba Joyce, a jazz musician who sang alongside Armstrong in Dallas in 1961.
“To understand him now, we must see him as he was, a black man born at the turn of the century in the poorest quarter of New Orleans who by the end of his life was known and loved in every corner of the earth,” Teachout read.
Teachout spoke in Queens of a man who forever altered the history of music and went on to become what he called the “first great jazz soloist.”
Heraldo, 86, who still lives in the Corona house next to Armstrong’s, said she was thrilled to listen to Cogswell. She knew the Armstrongs well and had been the traveling companion of Lucille, Armstrong’s wife, who purchased their Queens home for $16,000.
“He was exceedingly generous,” Heraldo said of Armstrong. “He made money, but he gave it all away. He would put $20 in an envelope, and when he went into a town and found some musician who was down and out, he’d send a valet with the money in it.”
Faddis grew up listening to Armstrong, who became a strong influence on him. Cogswell called Faddis one of the world’s greatest trumpet players and he has received high praise from countless musicians, including his mentor, Dizzy Gillespie.
“In the mid- to late-50s there were not too many positive images of people of color on television,” Faddis said. “We’d be butlers or maids. Then you’d see Louis or Ella [Fitzgerald], and for me, as a young person of color, that was important.”
Joyce, whose daughter Carmen Bradford was the featured vocalist in the Count Basie Orchestra, told the audience Saturday that Armstrong’s music has inspired her throughout her life.
“Whenever I’m in a crisis, I listen to him,” Joyce said.
It is not difficult for individuals to have their spirits lifted by Armstrong, who Teachout said told people “you’ve got to spread joy to the maximum.”
The Wall Street Journal critic tells of a letter Armstrong wrote to a friend just before his death in 1971.
“‘My whole life has been happiness,’” Teachout said Saturday, reading from the musician’s letter. “‘Through all of the misfortunes %u2026. Life was there for me and I accepted it. And life, whatever came out, has been beautiful to me, and I love everybody.’”
Reach reporter Anna Gustafson by e-mail at agustafson@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 174.
