“Singing Was More into My Blood, Than the Trumpet”

Abstract

This chapter explores the reception history of Louis Armstrong’s singing and playing by musicians, writers, and critics. The present-day view of Armstrong whose singing and playing can be appreciated in equal measure, assumes that the two practices are not related and that Armstrong’s singing did not relate to the development of the jazz solo. This was not how Armstrong explained it. He explained in an interview that he knowingly interpreted the lines he sang in a quartet as lines he played on his instrument, using the example of “Sweet Adeline” (1903) This explains why Armstrong thought singing to be the nexus of his musicianship.