Tapes Show Louis Armstrong's Anger

Aug. 21 -- Jazz great Louis Armstrong is mostly remembered as the happy, smiling entertainer he played in movies like High Society and Hello, Dolly. But his audio diary shows he was privately seething at the racism he and other black Americans faced every day.

In nightly sessions from the late 1940s until his death in 1971, Armstrong dictated his private thoughts, as well as conversations with friends, into a reel-to-reel tape recorder he carried in a steamer trunk. He recorded more than 650 reels, decorating the tape boxes with his own collages.

The tapes, which he entrusted to the archives at New York's Queens College, present the Armstrong that his closest friends and musician friends knew, says Chicago Tribune jazz critic Howard Reich, who recently listened to hours of the recordings.

"They will see that he's not this one-dimensional caricature, that he's not the smiling get-happy entertainer, that he's also a real human being. He's as torn about race as the rest of the country is…. There's so much more than the kind of minstrel-show facade that Armstrong self-consciously projected."

Anger at Being Mistreated Because of His Race

In language often laced with street talk and colorful profanity, Armstrong recalls his anger at being mistreated because of his race.

In one incident during the filming of Glory Alley, he remembers blowing up at a white stagehand for calling him "Satchmo" instead of the more appropriate Mr. Armstrong, which is how the stagehand addressed the white actors.

Referring to him as an "ofay" (a derogatory term for a white person), Armstrong recalls telling him, "You tell M-G-M to shove that picture up their ass…. Say, I ain't no movie star, so why you handing me that s--t? Because I'm colored?"

On a visit to Hawaii, he remembers a white sailor who told him to his face, "I don't like Negroes, but you're one sombitch I'm crazy about."

Armstong's conclusion: "I've said it for years. I've said, you take the majority of white people, two-thirds of them don't like n-----s, but they always got one n----r they're just crazy about, god---n it. Every white man in the world has one n----r at least that they just love his dirty drawers. Ain't that a bitch?"