Armstrong grew up in New Orleans' fabled Storyville section and lived, by all accounts, in conditions of extreme poverty. His diet consisted primarily of red beans, rice, okra, and the occasional scrap of meat. He often went barefoot, owning few clothes. He saw, from an early age, prostitution, drunkenness, and drug addiction. In addition, Louis' father was fairly non-existent in his life, as he later wrote: "My father did not have time to teach me anything; he was too busy chasing chippies." Even a cursory examination of Louis' life and career show that he was hungry for acceptance and eager to please, and that he searched for a mentor who could substitute for his absent father. He found several in the course of his life, but none was as truly influential as Joe "King" Oliver. Oliver took an interest in Armstrong and showed him some of the basics of cornet technique. Oliver's main contribution to Louis' development, though, was his interest in Louis both as a musician and as a person. Oliver invited Louis to join his group in Chicago, thus launching one of the most fruitful periods of Armstrong's career. When the opportunity to play in Fletcher Henderson's band in New York opened up, Oliver released Louis to go play with Henderson, never standing in his way.

A mentor who was less concerned with Louis' development as a musician was Joe Glaser, who became Armstrong's manager in 1935. Glaser was concerned with getting the most out of Louis, but he also got the trumpet star into films and appearances with white stars like Bing Crosby. He steered Louis in more commercial directions, choosing what was popular over what was artistic. He worked Armstrong hard, perhaps to the detriment of the musician's health, but he also kept Armstrong's career going through the demise of the big bands and the rise of bebop. Glaser made lots of money off of Armstrong, but he helped Louis realize the full commercial potential of the name he had painstakingly built for himself. Some feel that Louis' steady journey into a career as a popular singer rather than a jazz musicians was all Glaser's fault, but Louis knew that in order to keep his career going he had to do what appealed to white audiences, and he knew that Glaser could help him do just that. Armstrong often quoted the advice of a bouncer he knew in New Orleans who told him, before he left to join Oliver in Chicago, "Always keep a white man behind you that'll put his hand on you and say 'That's my nigger'".

At least in part because of his early experience of hunger and poverty, Armstrong knew the value of his career. He was able to see what happened to other musicians who had made the trip north from New Orleans. Jelly Roll Morton, jazz music's first great composer, passed away in Los Angeles in 1941 in abject poverty, victimized by his own music publisher. Joe Oliver died in Savannah in 1938, earning a living as a pool hall janitor. Armstrong recognized that his career was only as strong as his ability to deliver performances that people wanted to hear. He viewed himself as an entertainer, just as other jazz musicians of his era did. In the words of writer James Lincoln Collier:

"The image of the artist as being apart, a personage with special, almost magical skills, descends to us from the Romantic period. It is hardly universal to human culture. As recently as the eighteenth century, writers and painters were dogs of the aristocracy, and actors and musicians classed with servants. The Southern black lacked the idea of the artist almost entirely."
(The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History, Dell Publishing, 1978).

Lacking the idea of the artists, these early jazz performers did not readily differentiate between high and low art influences in their music. Armstrong played on riverboats, while Morton cut his teeth on vaudeville and minstrel shows. As young musicians in New Orleans, both were exposed to a wide variety of music, including marching bands, show tunes, ragtime, folk music, and even opera. The influence of vaudeville provided the hokum heard on the introductions to Morton's "Dead Man Blues" and "Sidewalk Blues", and the erotic commentary of Armstrong's "Tight Like This".

It was precisely this tradition of the jazz musician as entertainer that the bop musicians were reacting against. They refused to be relegated to the role of entertainer, often behaving in temperamental or "difficult" ways, refusing to discuss their music with non-musicians, and sometimes even turning their backs on the audience. The entire attitude of bebop seemed to be "I am playing for myself and for the other musicians who are playing with me. Your listening is purely coincidental." They wanted to distance themselves from what they saw as "Tomming" by the previous generation of jazz musicians. They had developed that sense of themselves as artists that was lacking from musicians who had grown up in the entertainment business. The 50s and 60s brought about even more outspokenness by black musicians. Since jazz was no longer popular music in any sense of the word, these musicians felt they had less to lose by speaking out than did their forefathers. Also, blacks were speaking out in increasing numbers, which decreased the risk to any one person who chose to speak out. The increasingly vocal jazz community found it hard to understand why a musician like Louis Armstrong, who was by far the most visible representative of jazz music in the world, didn't speak out on the subjects of racism and discrimination.

The 1957 Little Rock school integration incident polarized the United States on the subject of race. The Supreme Court had decreed that nine black students were to be allowed to attend Central High School in Little Rock. On September 2, 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus called in the National Guard, ostensibly because he had heard that white supremacists were going to descend on the town. He declared that Central was off limits to black students, and the town's black high school was off limits to whites. More disturbing still was his statement that "blood would run in the streets" if the black students attempted to attend Central. He told a reporter that President Eisenhower was a hypocrite and that he was sick to be a goodwill ambassador for a country that was in conflict with its own people. There was a great deal of controversy, but Louis stood by his statement. He also didn't make the trip to the Soviet Union that had been planned for him as a "goodwill ambassador." Charles Mingus, one of the new breed of jazz musicians who suffered mightily in his career because he refused to bow to predominantly white audiences, record labels, and club owners, commemorated the Little Rock event in his composition "Fables of Faubus." But Armstrong's statements to the press stood out as a defining moment in his life and career.

The Armstrong reel-to-reel tapes have been stored at Queens College in Flushing, NY, a short trip from the home that Armstrong lived in with his fourth wife, Lucille, from 1943 until his death in 1971. On them, he openly criticizes black civil rights pioneers like Josephine Baker and Marcus Garvey, who he saw as exploiters of America's racial problems for their own gain. He expresses the belief that blacks simply had to endure the injustices regularly meted out to them, though many personal stories he recounts demonstrate just how difficult it could be to follow that advice, and he clearly harbored a great deal of rage over the way black Americans were treated on a daily basis. Certainly it must have been difficult to avoid answering his critics in a direct and satisfying way for the sake of maintaining his broad, diverse fan base. "Showmanship does not mean you're not serious," he merely said.

Armstrong would likely be honored to think that the occasion of the centennial of his birth might make people think about race relations in America and that a those who have criticized him in the past might take another look at his words and actions on this subject. Fellow New Orleans native and trumpeter Nicholas Payton has the last word on Armstrong: "The way Armstrong acted was part of his genius, that he could bring such a high level of art into his performances, yet do it in a way that would appeal to the common, ordinary person…Plus, it's because of a Louis Armstrong that the doors of the music industry were opened to later people who then could take on certain attitudes, like Miles Davis."