A Brief Biography Of Louis Armstrong

Swingin for Armstrong
In the 1920s a new kind of music rose in New Orleans. Different from the ballroom songs popular in that day, former slaves and their families created this new music called jazz, which spread like wildfire. Many artists influenced the growth of this great type of music including Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Louis Armstrong played as one of these great men. Growing up in a poor section of the “Birthplace of Jazz”, Armstrong taught himself to play the trumpet, also known as the cornet. Louis Armstrong was the most influential jazz trumpet player to walk this earth due to his own created style of jazz including many songs that are still used today.
Louis Armstrong was born in August of 1901 to Mary and William Armstrong. Armstrong’s father abandoned the family after Louis’s birth. Then Louis, his mother and sister lived in poverty. His first musical experience came when he sang with a group of boys on the streets in order to earn money. In 1912, Louis fired blanks from a pistol in a New Years Eve celebration and got arrested by a police officer and sent to the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys. At the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys, Louis received his first formal training in music from the band director there and soon turned into a leader in the band. When he got released from the home for boys, he supported his family by shoveling coal. (Louis Armstrong)
From when Louis Armstrong started his career to the time it ended at his death his career had lasted nearly six decades. At the beginning of his famed career in 1918, Armstrong took his former instructor’s spot in the Kid Ory band when Joe Oliver left for Chicago (Louis Armstrong). For the next three years, he played on a riverboat in t...

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...69, Armstrong would go to the hospital with heart problems in 1959, Just ten years before that, he would be hospitalized for a heart attack.(Louis Armstrong) Louis Armstrong would die in 1971, one source however says he died in his sleep, another of of a heart attack.
Due to his creativity and eagerness to spread music around, Louis Armstrong was the most influential trumpet to ever play jazz. As jazz unwound and people started to lose interest in the emotional music of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, the influence of the famous musicians decreased. However, traces still reign in modern day society in young people who play in jazz bands in their schools, and older jazz bands that play for a living. As the famous movie Sandlot said, “Heros get remembered, but legends never die.” I do not think that Louis Armstrong through his great memory has died yet today.