Louis Armstrong's New Orleans

"The best book ever produced about Louis Armstrong by anyone other than the man himself."—Terry Teachout, Commentary

In the early twentieth century, New Orleans was a place of colliding identities and histories, and Louis Armstrong was a gifted young man of psychological nimbleness. A dark-skinned, impoverished child, he grew up under low expectations, Jim Crow legislation, and vigilante terrorism. Yet he also grew up at the center of African American vernacular traditions from the Deep Sout...