'Strikingly Extroverted Throughout'

On May 10, 1927, Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five, expanded to Seven with the addition of tuba and drums, entered the OKeh Records studio in Chicago and recorded “Potato Head Blues.” 

“Not only is [Armstrong’s] playing strikingly extroverted throughout the Hot Seven’s four sessions,” the late Terry Teachout writes in Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (2009), “but the second of them yielded up a masterpiece.”

 

That is, “Potato Head Blues,” a performance that gives the lie to the notion that a blues must be despairing. Terry identifies the quality in Armstrong’s playing that distinguishes it from almost every other player’s: joyous, elegant extroversion. That’s Armstrong’s personality speaking but it also reflects the country’s exuberance on the cusp of the Great Depression. Nineteen twenty-seven was the year of Lindbergh, the Ford Model A, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Babe Ruth and The Jazz Singer.

 

Terry goes on to describe “Potato Head Blues” as “one of the greatest solos recorded by a jazzman, a landmark of modern music that long ago achieved iconic status, both musical and cultural.” Ralph Ellison called the recording “a classic demonstration of African-American elegance.” It reminds me of what Tom Wolfe called “this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping, Baroque country of ours.”

 

In 2003, Terry wrote “The Return of Beauty” for U.S. Society & Values, an electronic journal published by the U.S. Department of State. It’s a celebration of American modernism and Armstrong leads the rollcall:

 

“[T]oday no one needs to be persuaded of the significance of those modernists who spoke in the crisply empirical, immediately accessible tone of voice now acknowledged by the whole world as all-American. Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire, Willa Cather, Aaron Copland, Stuart Davis, Duke Ellington, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, John Ford, George Gershwin, Howard Hawks, Edward Hopper, Flannery O'Connor, Jerome Robbins, Frank Lloyd Wright: Surely these and others like them rank high among our exemplary figures, the ones whose work is indelibly stamped ‘Made in U.S.A.’”