He was one of the most influential figures in jazz history, famous for hits such as What a Wonderful World, appearing in Hollywood movies and working with stars from Bing Crosby to Ella Fitzgerald.
Louis Armstrong’s childhood, however, was a world away from his later life – he grew up in serious poverty in a neighbourhood plagued by crime and violence. New evidence has now shed fresh light on the musician’s early life, including revelations that both his mother and sister faced arrests for prostitution.
Armstrong was born in 1901 in New Orleans. In 1912, he was arrested and sent to the Colored Waif’s Home where, under music teacher Peter Davis, he learned how to play the cornet and dreamed of becoming a professional musician. In 1922, he joined cornettist King Oliver’s band in Chicago and, by 1925, he was making records under his own name. By the 1960s, his recordings – notably his version of the title song from the musical Hello, Dolly! – were so popular that they knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts at the height of Beatlemania.
Armstrong spoke adoringly of his mother and sister, forever grateful for their encouragement. While biographers have written about his tough childhood, there has been no proof – although much speculation – that they had to turn to prostitution to make ends meet. Now police reports and interviews have come to light revealing that his mother, Mayann, and sister, Beatrice, were arrested on numerous occasions, spending days in jail.
The revelations will be published in a new book by Ricky Riccardi, director of research collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum in New York and a Grammy award-winner for his work on Armstrong’s recordings.
Stomp Off, Let’s Go: The Early Years of Louis Armstrong, which is published by Oxford University Press this month in the US, and in May in the UK, draws on unpublished tapes, manuscripts and letters, including interviews with Armstrong’s sister late in life, an unfinished autobiography by Armstrong’s second wife, Lil Hardin, and Armstrong’s unedited manuscript for his autobiography Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans.
Riccardi told the Observer: “Louis talked about the prostitution in his neighbourhood, but he never went into his mother doing it and getting arrested. Now I have the black-and-white proof. The incredible part is that all the police records were uploaded to ancestry.com [the family history website] about a year and a half ago.” They appear to have been held by the New Orleans public library.
In a police report of 1914, Armstrong’s mother faced either a $2.50 fine or 30 days in the House of Detention, with the note “occupation – prostitute”. The officer recorded: “Fine not paid.”
Riccardi said that Armstrong’s was the ultimate rags-to-riches story – a “kid who grew up eating food plucked from garbage cans”, whose father left almost immediately after his sister’s birth and who lived among violent criminals in a neighbourhood of New Orleans that was so dangerous it was known as “the battlefield”. He added: “Louis always treated people with respect and he was kind. He loved people and gave his mother all the credit for teaching him how to behave. But, at the same time, she would disappear for a month at a time.”
Riccardi said of Armstrong’s sister: “I found her arrest records for prostitution and a newspaper article that said she’d shot a man in a flat that was known for prostitution. Somehow she didn’t go away for any long period of time, but she was arrested for that.”
Riccardi was also struck by 1916 arrest papers for Armstrong himself, for “loitering”: “That vague term often gave police an excuse to round up black people for seemingly just existing, but it was sometimes applied to the world of prostitution.
“It ended with him getting stabbed in the shoulder by a prostitute. I found a tape where he talked about that and showed off his scar, and talked about his mother almost killing the prostitute when she found out.”
Armstrong said in the tape, a privately recorded conversation with his friend and record producer George Avakian in 1953 which was discovered in Avakian’s collection at the NY public library in 2023: “I don’t remember just how many times that I went to jail. It was a common thing in those days.”
Riccardi has also unearthed police reports relating to other characters from Armstrong’s childhood, showing that they were violent criminals in a “pretty scary environment”. They include “Black Benny”, who was a father figure to Armstrong, but was accused of violence against women and throwing a brick at a man, fracturing his skull.
In other previously unpublished interviews, Armstrong recalled dodging bullets: “They say the Lord takes care of fools – he’s sure looking after me. Those bullets are whizzing past and I’m just blowing the blues.
“But I never did get hurt … If somebody start shooting, I don’t see how I didn’t get hit.”
Riccardi said: “Just the fact that he survived was kind of a miracle.”
Armstrong never stopped performing until his death in 1971. Riccardi believes he was driven by his memories of poverty: “He had been hungry once, he had been poor – and he was not going to get that way again. He pushed himself to the brink, performing every night.”
