'Beautiful Lighthearted Perfection'

Who is the quintessential American? Who embodies E pluribus unum? Who, at the intergalactic council, might represent our nation (and species, for that matter)? I nominate Louis Armstrong. Other names come to mind: Abraham Lincoln, Jacques Barzun, Ralph Ellison, perhaps Willa Cather. None of them would shame us but Armstrong was one of nature’s natural-born democrats, a musician of genius who carried himself like a working stiff. He respected everyone until they proved themselves unworthy of respect. 

I happened on a brief essay by Jacob A. Stein, “An Evening with Louis Armstrong,” originally published in the Winter 1990 issue of The American Scholar. Stein is invited in June 1955 by Doc Pressman, owner of a pharmacy in Washington, D.C. that served as a hangout for jazz musicians, to meet the trumpeter. Pressman served as an informal health consultant to musicians and others, and kept Armstrong suppled with vitamins and laxatives. Stein met Armstrong and requested “That’s My Home,” a song he had recorded in 1932, and Armstrong obliged. Stein’s prose can be a little corny but he gets Armstrong right:

 

“Thomas Mann described those few persons with the unique power to entertain as the ‘dispensers of the joy of life.’ It is they who by displaying beautiful lighthearted perfection kindle a precious painful feeling, tinctured with envy and wonder, and who can suggest, just for the moment, that the world is filled with wonderful possibilities. For it is they who produce such stuff as dreams are made of.”

 

In 1971, shortly after the trumpeter’s death, Philip Larkin devoted a column in the Daily Telegraph to Armstrong:

 

“Armstrong was an artist of world stature, an American Negro slum child who spoke to the heart of Greenlander and Japanese alike. At the same time he was a humble, hard-working man who night after night set out to do no more than ‘please the people’, to earn his fee, to pay back the audience for coming.”

 

Sounds like us at our finest.