Last night (March 21) at about 9:50 my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube post (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkKNWrmAoSc) of a quite intriguing instant documentary produced by CBS News on the life of Louis Armstrong, Louis Armstrong: 1900-1971, shown on July 9, 1971 – just three days after Armstrong’s death. It opened with a scene of one of Louis Armstrong’s last live appearances – him singing “Hello, Dolly!” (the 1964 Broadway show tune Armstrong recorded and had the biggest hit of his career on; amazingly, it was the biggest hit by anybody in 1964; the Beatles placed numbers two through six) in one of his last live shows on July 3, 1970. (Armstrong spent most of the last year of his life in various hospital beds, though he rallied long enough to record one more album, Louis Armstring and His Friends, on which he recorded the civil-rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” and John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.”) The show was narrated by Walter Cronkite and Charles Kuralt, with archival footage of Edward R. Murrow interviewing Armstrong for the 1955 film Satchmo the Great. The footage of Armstrong’s funeral, shot that very morning at a church in Corona, Queens, New York (the neighborhood where Armstrong settled on the rare occasions when he wasn’t on tour), included Peggy Lee singing Albert Hay Mallotte’s setting of the Lord’s Prayer (usually one of hte dullest pieces of music ever written, though Mahalia Jacksin’s amazing recording for once made Mallotte’s music seem worthy of the words, and though she wasn’t in Mahalia’s league Lee did a surprisingly ood job) and Al Hiubbler singing “When the Saints Go Marching In” (slowly nad mournfully, as befit the occasion).
The second part of the program was a capsule biography of Armstrong, repeating the myth that he was born on July 4, 1900. That’s what Armstrong believed his birth date was and it’s what everyone else thought, too, until an Armstrong biographer discovered his birth certificate after Armstorng’s death and it turned out he’d actually been born on August 4, 1901. (He would be a Leo.) It featured a nicely eclectic batch of film clips, including “The Skeleton in the Closet” from the 1936 film Pennies from Heaven, the title song of the 1952 film Glory Alley (a quite interesting melodrama with Ralph Meeker as a boxer who’s born dirt poor on Glory Alley in New Orleans, rises to fame and then loses it all nd ends up back on the alley where he was born), “High Society Rag” and his duet with Bing Crosby from the 1956 MGM musical High Society (a remake of The Philadelphia Story with Crosby at least serviceable and often more than that in Cary Grant’s role, and Grace Kelly hopelessly glacial in Katharine Hepburn’s part – how was Alfred Hitchcock able to make Kelly sensual and alluring in their three films together, while in all her other movies she’s so icy she could have sunk the Titanic?) and his duet with Barbra Streisand on the title song of the 1969 film Hello, Dolly!, a wretched, ponderous musical of which one critic said that the Armstrong-Streisand duet was “the only thing in the movie that ended too soon.” (It’s interesting that Armstrong was able to get Bing Crosby to swing – though Crosby was a superb jazz singer in his own right – but he couldn’t do the same with Streisand.)
For the third part of the film the CBS production crew brought together an all-swtar lineup of musicians, mostly people who’d played with Armstrong: trumpeters John “Dizzy” Gillespie and Bobby Hackett (who had just made a Grammy Award-winning jazz album called Giants with pianist Mary Lou Williams), trombonist Tyree Glenn, tenor saxophonist Budd Johnson, pianist Earl “Fatha” Hines,” bassist Milt Hinton and drummer Buddy Rich. Charles Kuralt did interviews with the musicians, most of whom had played and/or recorded with Armstrong, and the most interesting comment was from Hines. He said he and Armstrong first met at a pool table at the American Federation of Musicians local in Chicago (that would have been the Black local because at the time the musicians’ union was segregated and in the largest cities maintained separate white and Black locals). They played pool against each other and only later realized that they had much in common musically; Armstrong and Hines made a dazzling series of records together in 1928. Hines demonstrated what became known as his “trumpet-style piano,” which basically meant playing octaves instead of just single-note lines (he said he started doing that to make sure he could be heard instead of being drowned out by the rest of the band). Then the band played two songs identified with Armstrong, “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” (Armstrong’s first pop record, made in 1929) with a vocal by Peggy Lee, and an instrumental version of Armstrong’s theme song, “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” featuring lovely trumpet counterpoint by Gillespie and Hackett. Kuralt had asked Dizzy just what he had in common with Armstrong when they represented two different styles and eras n jazz history, and Dizzy pointed out that when he was first starting out his model had beey Roy Eldridge – and Eldridge;s main influence had been Armstrong. Early in the show Cronkite had quoted Miles Davis’s comment from a 1957 interview, “You know, you can’t play anything on a horn that Louis hasn’t played – I mean, even modern.” All in all, this documentary was a real treasure, a look back at a time when TV was still at least sometimes a class act and the major commercial networks respected America’s cultural history enough to do this sort of program.
