Louis Armstrong's New Orleans

In the early twentieth century, New Orleans was a place of colliding identities and histories. Louis Armstrong was a gifted young man of psychological nimbleness; a dark-skinned, impoverished child, he grew up in an atmosphere of low expectations, Jim Crow legislation and vigilante terrorism. He also grew up with African American vernacular traditions, the ecstatic music of the Sanctified Church, blues played by street musicians and the plantation tradition of ragging a tune. Drawing on a stunning body of first-person accounts, "Louis Armstrong's New Orleans" tells the rags-to-riches tale of Armstrong's early life and the social and musical forces that shaped him. An evocative tale of a musician, his city and the origins of jazz, it interweaves an account of early twentieth-century New Orleans with a narrative of the first twenty-one years of Armstrong's life. The city and the musician were both extraordinary and their impact on American culture incalculable.