Behind Louis Armstrong's career, success, and fame, there was tragedy.
The man nicknamed Pops and Satchmo didn't have an easy life by any stretch of the imagination,
and even as he was taking to the stage and wowing fans, he struggled.
Here's the tragic real-life story of Louis Armstrong.
Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901, and grew up in an insanely tough New Orleans
neighborhood called the Battlefield.
Abandoned by his father as a small child and raised by his single mother, Armstrong and
his family struggled to get by.
In his memoirs, Armstrong detailed abject poverty, describing how he and his sister
would have to go into the better parts of town and scavenge through dumpsters for food.
He also began working at the age of 6, scavenging for scrap metal, bones, rags, and bottles
alongside the children of a local Jewish family called the Karnofskys.
And at night, he made other rounds - through the red light district, selling buckets of
coal.
But the Karnofskys provided a rare ray of light in his young life, regularly inviting
him to dinner and treating him with kindness.
According to History, as an adult, Armstrong regularly wore a Star of David in tribute
to the Jewish family who had welcomed him into their home and their lives.
Just how and when Armstrong began playing the trumpet is a matter of some debate.
He often cited a stint in a juvenile detention center at age 11 as the start of his love
of music, as the band director took Armstrong under his wing and gave him his first cornet.
But Armstrong also wrote in his memoir that his first performances were much earlier,
blowing a tin horn to attract customers to the Karnofsky's peddler wagon.
Whatever the case, music soon proved to be his ticket to a better life - but not an easier
one.
The Mob Museum says that Prohibition, jazz, and the mob all went hand-in-hand.
The mafia owned the clubs and made sure there was booze, and jazz musicians provided the
perfect musical accompaniment to the evening's revelries.
Armstrong did his best to stay away from mob establishments, but the mob had different
ideas.
According to biographer Terry Teachout, in 1931 a mobster named Frankie Foster pulled
a gun on Armstrong in Chicago and told him to play a gig the next day - in New York.
Armstrong ultimately fled to Europe to escape problems with the mob, but when he finally
returned, he ultimately threw in with Joe Glaser, who ran nightclubs for Al Capone.
What developed was a mutually beneficial relationship: Glaser protected Armstrong, and Armstrong
packed the house.
Another reason Armstrong went to Europe may have been his trouble with the law in the
Jim Crow south.
In 1931, he was arrested for sitting next to a white woman on a bus - even though that
woman was the wife of his manager.
Armstrong and his whole band spent the night in jail, but the next night they played a
gig and dedicated the first song to the Memphis Police Department.
The song?
"I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal You."
Even though some of those police officers were in the crowd - and were actually members
of the Ku Klux Klan!
- Armstrong not only got away with it, they even thanked him for the on-stage mention!
Why?
Well, Armstrong had a trick to disarm racists: he always made sure to play a particular song
called "When It's Sleepy Time Down South," which was a romanticized anthem to the days
of the slave-owning South.
Not everyone appreciated Armstrong's outlook on things, though, and during the Civil Rights
era of the 1950's and 1960's, he was attacked by both sides, sometimes all too literally.
In February, 1957, for instance, someone drove by the venue where Armstrong was playing and
threw a stick of dynamite.
It caused an explosion so loud some people heard it five miles away, but Armstrong was
unharmed and unphased.
He later told reporters,
"The horn don't dig those race troubles."
Members of the African-American community also criticized Armstrong, though.
According to the New York Times, fellow jazz legend Miles Davis said,
"I loved the way Louis played trumpet, man, but I hated the way he had to grin to get
over with some tired white folks."
Though Armstrong strongly criticized the government over segregation, he also served as a Goodwill
Ambassador for the State Department at the same time, leading some to consider him a
sellout.
But as his very pointed words to Ebony magazine make abundantly clear, Armstrong never lost
sight of who he was - and where and when he was.
He also took a stand towards equality and integration when he refused to perform in
his birthplace of New Orleans after they passed a law in 1955 banning integrated bands.
He told Ebony,
"I can't even play in my own hometown, 'cause I've got white cats in the band.
All I'd have to do is take all colored cats down there and I could make a million bucks.
But to hell with the money.
If we can't play down there like we play everywhere else we go, we don't play...If my people don't
dig me the way I am, I'm sorry."
According to History, Armstrong played the horn with such force that he regularly split
his lips open, and had to use a special cream to protect them.
In fact, his lips were also covered with such hard calluses that he regularly used a razor
blade to remove the worst of the scar tissue.
Worst of all, though, is what is now known as Satchmo Syndrome - a potentially career-ending
injury that happens when lip muscles rupture.
Armstrong suffered just such an injury at one point in his career, and had to take a
year off from performing to recover.
There were some health issues, though, that he couldn't recover from so easily.
During a European tour in 1959, Armstrong suffered a serious heart attack.
Over the next few years he began experiencing swelling in his legs due to poor circulation
and a steadily worsening heart condition.
By 1964, his gallbladder, kidneys, and liver were failing.
He finally sought treatment in 1968, and spent the next year bedridden.
After emergency surgery, he was eventually able to perform again - but only briefly.
He suffered another heart attack and passed away in his sleep two months later, on July
6, 1971.
Armstrong left behind an unparalleled musical legacy, but he also left behind a legacy of
another kind: a daughter named Sharon Preston-Folta, whose existence was kept secret for many years
until she finally came forward with the shocking truth.
Sharon was born in 1955, but not to any of Armstrong's four wives.
Instead, her mother was a dancer by the name of Lucille Preston whom Armstrong had a long
affair with.
"He was married at that time, but he made space for us."
Preston finally ended things in 1967 after Armstrong refused to marry her, but he continued
to provide financial support for Sharon until his death.
In one of his final letters, he wrote,
"Sharon may not realize now what I mean to her & doing for her.
But I am sure as she matures she'll Dig Pops as the man who'll be loving her until the
day he dies, or she dies.
That's sincerity and from the heart stuff."
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