Do You Know What It Means…?
Continuing The Entroporium’s series touching on some of its favorite New Orleans music…
I’m out of my depth when it comes to writing about Louis Armstrong and his importance to modern music, except to say that he’s somewhere up there with — oh, I don’t know — Beethoven, John Cage, The Beatles, Elvis Presley… Artists that shattered paradigms and then built their own. When we listen to jazz played by a smalll combo, you’re on Armstrong’s turf.
Here are two recordings, one by his groundbreaking Hot Band from the 1920s and a 1946 version of a song that a lot of people are going to find themselves singing in months to come.
[Soundtrack]
Louis Armstrong – St. Louis Blues.mp3
Louis Armstrong – Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans.mp3
Before rap so overtly became “the black CNN” (as Chuck D memorably put it), African-American music was often full of heavily coded messages about African-American life. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but when I see the title “Do You What It Means To Miss New Orleans” on a record from 1946, I can’t help but think of the massive nation-changing diaspora that took place during & after World War II when Southern Blacks moved into the North to take better-paying manufacturing jobs that had previously not been available to them. The area where I grew up, San Francisco’s East Bay, is chock full of unexpected Southern touches and cuisine because of the great migration of Southerners that came in the 1940s. Armstrong had traced much this same route through his career; born in Nola, he achieved his greatest successes when he burst national out of the Chicago, LA and New York jazz scenes. I don’t know if Armstrong performed this song to speak upon his own experience or whether he was playing to a sentimental crowd, but I like to imagine it was the latter.
Jazz Profiles from NPR – Louis Armstrong: The Trumpeter
Louis Armstrong biographical information at PBS
Hey Shawn, just a note: that “St. Louis Blues” is actually Louis Armstrong’s Big Band of 1933.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to say: when you’re listening to any jazz that’s not Dixieland, you’re on Louis’s turf. (For starters.)
As for “Do You Know What It Means,” I think it really was sentimental. Armstrong was nostalgic about New Orleans (at least old New Orleans) for most of his life outside of it, told story after story of life and music there when he was growing up, and worked tirelessly to promote its elder jazz statesmen–the people who were his idols when he was growing up. I suspect he would have told you that the New Orleans of his youth was the greatest place and time of his life.