'I Had Found This Wonderful Music for Myself'

A reader with perfect timing asks for “happy music” suggestions, “music that will cheer me up during such an unhappy time.” No soul-searching required: Louis Armstrong, born on this date, August 4, in 1901. When Philip Larkin appeared as the guest on BBC’s “Desert Island Discs” in 1976, his first pick was Armstrong’s recording of “Dallas Blues.” The poet gives the show’s host, Roy Plomley, this explanation for his choice:

“I suppose any jazz lover has to decide which Louis Armstrong record he is taking, because there are so many and Louis is such a combined Chaucer and Shakespeare of jazz. I’ve chosen ‘Dallas Blues’ from 1929 because I’ve been playing it for about forty years and never got tired of it. It is a blues, and Armstrong plays it in a beautiful warm and relaxed way that he doesn’t always achieve on his later more showmanship sides.”

Those who think a blues must be unhappy music are mistaken. Consider Armstrong’s recording of W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues,” also from 1929. In a March 1968 review collected in All What Jazz (1985), Larkin calls it “the hottest record ever made,” and goes on: “Starting in media res, with eight bars of the lolloping tangana release, it soon resolves into a genial up-tempo polyphony, with [J.C.] Higginbotham, [Red] Allen and Charlie Holmes observable behind the trumpet lead.” Barry Ulanov in A History of Jazz in America (1952) helps us with tangana: “In 1914 Handy published his ‘St. Louis Blues’ with its provocative Tangana rhythm, which is a kind of habanera or tango beat consisting of a dotted quarter, an eighth-note, and two quarter-notes.” In other words, listen and try to sit still. Larkin adds: “By the third chorus the whole building seems to be shaking.”

For supplemental happiness infusions, try "West End Blues" and “Learnin’ the Blues,” the latter performed with Ella Fitzgerald. The most personal words Larkin ever wrote about Armstrong, suggesting a deep affinity, were not published during his lifetime. They were written shortly after Armstrong’s death on July 6, 1971, and collected in Jazz Writings: Essays and Reviews, 1940-1984 (2001):

“I was born the day after Louis received that telegram from King Oliver summoning him to Chicago, and as soon as I was old enough to wind up a gramophone I was sold on his music. West End Blues, Dallas Blues, St. Louis Blues, all of them took hold of my mind like poems, or better than poems, for you were taught those in school, and I had found this wonderful music for myself.”

My reader also asks for “happy” book suggestions. That’s easy: P.G. Wodehouse. And go here for more Larkin-related happiness.