Louis Armstrong

Louis Daniel Armstrong was probably born on 4 August 1901 in New Orleans. He himself long gave 4 July 1900 as his birth date; the accuracy of the date has been much debated. His mother Mary 'Mayann' Albert was about sixteen when she gave birth and his father William left the family shortly afterwards. Until the age of five he was raised by his grandmother.

He grew up in poverty in a rough neighbourhood, 'the Battlefield', and attended the Fisk School for Boys. As a boy he worked for the Lithuanian Jewish Karnoffsky family, who helped him buy a cornet. His later recollections contain stories that are not always consistent; biographers therefore treat his autobiographical statements with caution.

In 1922 he moved to Chicago at the invitation of his mentor King Oliver, playing second cornet in Oliver's Creole Jazz Band. In April 1923 he made his first recordings for Gennett Records. In 1924 he married the pianist Lil Hardin, who urged him to develop a style of his own. That year he went to New York to play in Fletcher Henderson's orchestra.

In 1925 he returned to Chicago and formed Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five, later expanded into the Hot Seven. Their recordings appeared from November 1925 and include 'Potato Head Blues' and 'Cornet Chop Suey'. In 1928 followed, among others, 'West End Blues' and the duet 'Weather Bird' with pianist Earl Hines. The trumpeter's solo playing became the centre of jazz.

Armstrong began scat singing, improvising with nonsense syllables instead of words, and was one of the first to record it, on 'Heebie Jeebies' (1926). The record made the group very famous in the United States, although it seldom performed live. From the 1930s he also became a singer and film actor, and from 1947 he performed with a small group, the All Stars.

Armstrong grew up in the segregated American South, in a city where jazz emerged from Black musical traditions. In the 1920s many Black Americans moved to northern cities such as Chicago and New York, where work and nightlife offered a large audience. In Chicago he first played at Lincoln Gardens, a venue for a Black audience.

In the 1920s recording technology, radio and film spread the music; from 1926 electrical recording allowed better sound. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, he was deployed in the Cold War as an 'ambassador' on tours sponsored by the State Department, while the civil rights movement intensified the debate about segregation.

With his solos Armstrong shifted the emphasis in jazz from collective improvisation to solo playing. Young trumpeters bought his records and memorised his solos, and the saxophonist Coleman Hawkins was also influenced by him in Henderson's orchestra. His gravelly voice and rhythmic freedom became a model for jazz and pop singers, including Bing Crosby.

He was one of the first African American entertainers to reach a broad audience, white and international. In 1937 he became the first African American to host a sponsored national radio broadcast. In 1964 he reached number one on the US Hot 100 with 'Hello, Dolly!', displacing The Beatles from the top; he was 62 at the time.

In 1957, in an interview in Grand Forks, North Dakota, he criticised Governor Faubus and President Eisenhower after the school integration crisis in Little Rock and announced that he would cancel a tour of the Soviet Union for the State Department. Jackie Robinson and Lena Horne supported him; a Mississippi radio station banned his records.

Armstrong died of a heart attack in his sleep on 6 July 1971 at his home in Corona, Queens, where he had lived since 1943. He was buried at Flushing Cemetery. Since 2003 his house has been a museum. His recording 'Melancholy Blues' is included on the Voyager Golden Record.

'What a Wonderful World', written by Bob Thiele and George David Weiss and recorded by him on 16 August 1967, reached number one in the United Kingdom in April 1968. In the US the song at first did poorly because the head of ABC Records would not promote it; after its use in the film 'Good Morning, Vietnam' it reached number 32 in 1988.

His stage persona is a subject of debate. Many musicians of the postwar bebop generation saw his vaudeville-like style as outmoded and sometimes as a form of 'Uncle Tom' behaviour; younger Black musicians also criticised him for playing before segregated audiences and for saying little about civil rights. Others point to his innovations and his 1957 statements as evidence of a more complex picture.