The Charlotte Jewish News - May 2021 - Page 6
Louis Armstrong and the Jewish Family Louis Armstrong, popularly known as “Satchmo,” was a towering, influential and beloved jazz musician. His career spanned five decades and different eras in the history of jazz. And for most of his adult life, the Baptist wore a Star of David necklace, the quintessential symbol of Judaism. Why? What was Louie Armstrong’s connection with the Jewish people? Louis Daniel Armstrong was born in 1901 in New Orleans, an environment that was anything but promising, long before the Civil Rights movement would irrevocably transform the social strata of the city. Segregation was strictly enforced. On the day that he was born, his father, William Armstrong, abandoned the baby’s mother, 16-year-old Mayann Albert. For the first five years of his life, Louis was brought up by his grandmother. Later, he moved into a one-room dwelling with his mother, whom he adored, and a younger sister. Segregation was rampant in New Orleans. Degrading and debasing, for most segregation effectively precluded social or
Louis Daniel Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971), nicknamed "Satchmo", "Satch", and "Pops (Wikimedia) economic self-improvement. When Louis reached the fifth grade, he had no choice but to quit school and go to work to help support his mother and sister. At age six or seven, Louis was already scouting out the neighborhood after school hours, in search of ways to make a penny or two. This was standard procedure for most of the Black children he knew. To his great good fortune, across the tracks, in a run-down,
low-class White neighborhood, he discovered a cluster of Jewish families who had arrived from Lithuania. Most of the families were related, at least by marriage. They formed a close-knit community who clung together and helped each other weather the blatant anti-Semitism they encountered in their new homeland. As Armstrong described it years later, in a short memoir “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, La, the
Year of 1907”, the Jews had suffered over the course of history even more than the Blacks. As he tells it, Jews “were having problems of their own – along with hard times from the other white folks’ nationalities who felt that they were better than the Jewish race… I was only 7 years old, but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the White Folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for.” Regardless of local anti-Semitism, the Jewish families considered themselves lucky. Compared to the pogroms they had encountered under the rule of Russia’s czar, life was now full of hope. They were free to live wherever they chose (and could afford) and to make a living however they wanted. The Karnofskys, one of these Jewish families, were determined to improve their lot in their new homeland. Each morning, at 5 a.m., one of the older boys, either Alex or Morris, set out on his daily rounds as a junk collector. He gathered bottles, bones and rags people sold to him for pennies, then sold or bartered them for more profitable goods. When Louis approached the
Karnofskys asking for work, they had no objections to hiring a Black child to help them with their “profession.” Thus, at age seven, early each weekday morning, Louis found himself perched next to either Alex or Morris on the Karnofsky’s horse wagon. Louis worked for them in the evenings, as well. They would load their wagon with coal and make the rounds, selling it for a nickel a bucket. It was Morris who gave the child what might well have been the most significant present he would ever receive. In Armstrong’s words: “Morris bought for me a Tin Horn. To blow and blow, the kind of Tin Horn they use at parties to make noises, while celebrating. The children loved it.” One of Louis’s tasks was tooting away on his horn to announce the arrival of the junk wagon, or, in the evenings, of the coal supply. For Louis, this was more an amusement than a work assignment. And even at that tender age, the future trumpeter, vocalist and song-writer, displayed his bent for improvisation. (Continued on page 7)
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