If I Only Had a Horn: Young Louis Armstrong

by Roxane Orgill, Leonard Jenkins (Illustrator)

Overview

Roxane Orgill’s vivid words and Leonard Jenkins’s dramatic pictures combine to tell the story of a boy who grew up to be a giant of jazz—the legendary and beloved Louis Armstrong. As a poor boy in New Orleans, where music was everywhere—dancing out of doorways, singing on street corners, crying from the cornet of the great Joe Oliver for all to hear—Louis longed for a horn so that he too could sing, bring home pennies, and, most of all, tap happy-feet blues till the sun rose. It wasn’t going to be easy. Many things, not all of them good, had to happen before he got his horn. But when at last he did, he sent music spiraling up into the New Orleans night sky like a spinning top gone crazy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780618250769
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	08/25/2002
Pages:	32
Sales rank:	406,851
Product dimensions:	8.06(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.12(d)
Lexile:	860L (what's this?)
Age Range:	10 - 12 Years

About the Author

Painter Leonard Jenkins is also the illustrator of The Man Who Knew Too Much, retold by Julius Lester. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

"Orgill tells the story of a boy overcoming incredible odds to achieve his dream, without becoming too dark, maudlin or even overly hopeful, and Jenkins's dark palette looks the way jazz sounds." Publishers Weekly, Starred —

From the Publisher

Orgill, in her first book for children, culls details from biographies, autobiographies and unpublished archival writings to chronicle young Louis's love of music in words that sing. She focuses on the gritty New Orleans streets of the early 1900s, where Louis first heard his idol, Joe Oliver, play the horn he coveted, and "grabbed a piece of the music riding the air, to remember." On one fateful New Year's Eve, Armstrong shoots an old .38 in the air and lands in the Colored Waifs' Home: "There was no dream song riding the breeze that night." But there he would meet the man who gave him his first horn. Orgill tells the story of a boy overcoming incredible odds to achieve his dream, without becoming too dark, maudlin or even overly hopeful. Jenkins's (The Man Who Knew Too Much) dark palette and combination of acrylic, pastel and spray paint look the way jazz sounds, one color melting into the next, but always mindful of an overall vision. He captures both the city's eerie seediness as well as Armstrong's fragile emotions. His sharply realized characters are imposed on deep olive green, blood-red and mustard yellow backgrounds in photographic collages that call to mind the images of Romare Bearden. This vibrant portrait of the jazz great's youth is one children will return to again and again. Ages 4-8. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Orgill tells the story of a boy overcoming incredible odds to achieve his dream, without becoming too dark, maudlin or even overly hopeful, and Jenkins's dark palette looks the way jazz sounds. Ages 5-8. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Gr 2-5According to an author's note, many stories exist about the esteemed Louis Armstrong, especially in regard to his first encounters with a trumpet. To tell a story that is as "true as possible" to Armstrong's character, Orgill has sifted through his autobiographies and through various biographies to fashion this musically charged tale. Young Louis's love of song and dance is well known in the streets of New Orleans, but his exuberance gets the best of him one wild New Year's Eve, and after shooting an old .38 into the air, he finds himself in the Colored Waifs' Home. There, a Mr. Davis takes an interest; he makes the boy learn rhythm on a drum and practice "mellow tones" on an old bugle before giving him a cornetbut finally, Louis's dream comes true. As the story ends, Louis leads a band down Liberty street and, as we know, marches into musical history. A more hardened tale than Alan Schroeder and Floyd Cooper's admittedly "fictional re-creation" Satchmo's Blues (Doubleday, 1996), this account is probably closer to the truth. Using the two books together, however, could give teachers a great platform for discussing truth in biography. In tune with the text, Jenkins peoples the story with a rich array of faces and backs the characters with montages of swirling colors in acrylic, pastel, and spray paint to create a setting that pulses with the sounds of jazz.Barbara Elleman, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI

School Library Journal

Less prettified than Alan Schroeder's recent Satchmo's Blues (1996), the story of how Louis Armstrong got his first horn. As Orgill tells it in her first book for children, Armstrong himself gave conflicting accounts of how he came by his first horn; here, his first instrument was actually a bugle that he played in reform school, where he was sent after being arrested for shooting a .38 in the street on New Year's Eve. Later the school's band director entrusted him with a battered cornet, and Louis went on to lead the band in a triumphant parade through his old New Orleans neighborhood. The dark, edgy, mixed-media paintings, with lurid yellow highlights, give an almost palpable sense of the rough poverty and swirling nightlife of Armstrong's early environment. It's not a book that can stand on its own; readers will need to have this fragment of Armstrong's life put into context in order to understand where sheer talent, determination, and luck eventually brought him. Orgill's telling has immediacy, however, and it has moments (e.g., when Louis snags himself a nickname) that are electric.

Kirkus Reviews