By Donald True Van Deusen

Jazz, America’s musical gift to the world, was born in the 20th Century. Appropriately, its most significant creative artist, Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, was born Aug. 4, 1901 (not July 4 as often claimed) in New Orleans, where this music first coalesced. He was born "back of town" and honed his skills dancing and singing on the streets and playing a beat-up horn in a home for boys. Louis played trumpet and sang which is like saying Einstein worked on math problems.

Louis composed, led bands, made recordings, played in films, stage shows, concerts, night clubs, television and radio, toured the world for the State Department as America’s "ambassador of jazz", made millions, lived modestly in Queens, N.Y., was loved and admired by musicians and the world at large. He died in 1971.

In the early twenties, Louis "backed up" many of the female blues singers of the day, most notably Bessie Smith, whose work on blues and jazz vocals added a new dimension to the music. If jazz and blues are America’s only indigenous musical creation, Louis and Bessie are it’s father and mother. Louis worked with the giants of jazz; King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, Fletcher Henderson, Fats Waller, et al. He also worked with major pop entertainers such as The Mills Brothers, Louis Jordan, Bing Crosby and, yes, Barbara Streisand.

I first heard Louis when I was ten watching a 1939 movie called "Going Places" with Louis singing Johnny Mercer’s song, "Jeepers Creepers" to a horse. I was enchanted! As a teenager listening to jazz radio in my room, I first heard his "Hot 5" and "Hot 7" 1925-27 recordings of Gut Bucket Blues, Cornet Chop Suey, Skit Dat De Dat and I’m Not Rough. Louis later said, they were "just a gig to us," but to jazz historians he created new pathways in jazz playing. His sidemen included such greats as Johnny Dodds on clarinet and Kid Ory on trombone. Jazz authority Gunther Schuller wrote in "Early Jazz," that Louis’ 1928 recording of West End Blues, "established the general stylistic direction of jazz for several decades to come."

I was at Louis Armstrong’s epic Town Hall concert with his "all stars" on April 24, 1947 that truly brought Louis back into national acclaim after the grim thirties when he even recorded novelty Hawaiian songs to get by. He toured for years with the "all stars," Earl Hines, piano; Barney Bigard, clarinet; Cozy Cole, drums; Jack Teagarden, trombone and a very young Arvell Shaw, bass . That night, he sang and played St. James Infirmary and Rockin’ Chair in a delightfully playful duet with master trombonist-blues singer, Teagarden. The crowd went wild! Louis could sing jazz, pop, novelty, R&B, but few could touch his gut-wrenching blues singing as with his early 30’s recording of Black and Blue-- "cold, empty bed, pains in my head, feel like old Ned, wish I were dead, what did I do to be so black and blue." If anyone could equal Louis masterful blues treatments, it would surely be the singer he backed up when they were both still getting started, Bessie Smith. Appropriately nicknamed, "Empress of the Blues," she was a truly majestic looking, ebony-skinned, 5 foot nine, full bodied black woman, who sang with a glorious, powerful voice that cut through you to your very soul. She is unarguably the greatest blues singer who ever lived!

Bessie was born in crushing poverty in Chattanooga, Tennessee sometime in April 1898, went with Ma Rainey’s Rabbit Foot Minstrels at just 11, and eventually became one of the highest paid singers in the United States. Ma Rainey, a fabulous, rough- voiced country blues singer, was her mentor, but Bessie soon eclipsed her bringing these vocals into a new classic blues dimension. She also recorded songs that were just foot-stomping fun such as "Black Mountain Blues" where she sang, "Back In Black Mountain, I sure would smack your face, children cryin’ for liquor and all the birds sing bass." Bessie drank, ate, lived and spent freely, ending in comparative obscurity married to Jack Gee, a cop in Philadelphia where she is buried. Of the some 160 records she made, few are most famous than one she lived, "Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out," recorded in 1929.

John Hammond, the record impresario considered her "the greatest artist American jazz ever produced." In 1933, he put together a stellar recording group of Benny Goodman, Chu Berry, Jack Teagarden, Frankie Newton, Buck Washington and Billy Taylor for what was her last record session. They recorded such gems as "Gimme A Pigfoot, A Reefer and A Bottle of Beer." Bessie died "on the road" in an auto accident in Clarksville, Mississippi on September 26, 1937 which became the basis of a famous play by Edward Albee called "The Death of Bessie Smith." It restated the false legend that she died because a white hospital refused to treat a black woman. I brought Louis and Bessie’s recordings to Korea with me in 1951. It’s depressing that few kids today can even hear these great recordings on today’s radio wasteland. If you buy some of their recordings and let your kids hear them, it’s just possible you may help bring this great American art form into the 21st Century.