>> i only have -- my time is expired. bla :

their lives were changed and by listening, and hearing louis armstrong. and that's a running theme the book is just marvelous in expressing what louis was able to do in a radical way. and hoe how his career was just sufused with this love that was palpable, that comes jumping out at you when you hear his music. every jazz fan comes into jazz via song or an artist or an album. it's all different. but sooner or later, you do get back to louis.

i came through miles, don cherry, lester bowie, but eventually, distribution centers get to louis. i was staying in france for a little while and i heard a show, for an hour they played the same song, different versions, in chronological order, and you really got to see what jazz musicians did with a song. they always went in chronological order and the first song you heard was always the stiffest, original cast recording from broadway play that was probably in the french archives, nowhere else. and oftentimes, louis armstrong would record one of the earliest versions of a song and when you heard the difference between that original kind of plodding version and then the radical

musicality, joy, again, invent i havinventiveness, lyricism, it really brought tears to your eyes and made you understand what jazz is. terry teachout conveys this all throughout this book. i'm going to just bring him on and we're going to have two video clips, we're going to have some audio, we're going to have some music of a wards, during the signing, for the q & a, please come to the mic over there so the c-span audiences can hear your questions. and please, without further ado, please help me welcome terry teachout. [applause] >> well thank you very much.

this has been a big couple days for me. yesterday i found out -- point that right at me. yesterday i found out that pops had been nominated for an naacp image award and yesterday i found out it was going on the "new york times" best seller list. i had to brag about that. it's a wonderful thing to be here, i'm delighted to be here and i am delighted to be talking about a man who was, well, delightful. you can say a lot things about louis armstrong, which obviously is why i wrote a book about him, but if if you have the good fortune to speak to anyone who now him personally, be it cablely or intimately, you can get that they'll all tell you the same thing. he was a truly loveable man. now i spent most of my life in the company of artists and one thing i can tell you is that the greatest ones tend not to be

especially loveable. likeable, yes, sometimes. chrismatic, yes, sometimes. and not infrequently irresistible, for its part of human nature for us ordinary people to want to warm our hands at the fire of a great creator, but those fires are very hot indeed, and i've known any number of people who got badly burned as a result of keeping company with greatness. now, louis armstrong was different. he was a great man who was also a good man, kind and generous and considerate, and unlike many good men, he wasn't even slightly boring. he was utterly unpretentious, he didn't talk in pompous cliches. he knew how to laugh and make our people laugh and on top of all of that, he was the greatest jazz musician who ever lived. armstrong was one of the cultural giants of the 20t 20th century. america has never produced a more significant artist.

i rank him right alongside aaron copeland and robert frost and frank lloyd wright, but unlike those men, he was also a great entertainer, whose music is and was loved by ordinary people all over the world. in 1964, he actually knocked the beatles off the top of the pop charts with his recording of "hello dolly." aaron copeland never did that. you can see why i was drawn to the idea writing a biography of writing "pops." needless to say i'm not the person who have done so, but i am the first biographer to have had access to 650 reel to real tapes that armstrong made during the last quarter century of his life. many of which contain astonishly candid recordings of his private, o after hours

conversations. armstrong switched on hess tape recorder, whenever the spirit moved him, so you can hear him chatting with friends over didn't are, getting high with an old pal in his dressing room after a show, even trying to coax his wife into bed at few a.m. for a little -- 5:00 a.m. for a little hangy panky. not only did these tapes shine a light on his bright personality, which was far more complex than most people realized but they also make it possible for us to know the full stories of such key moments in his life as his 1930 marijuana arrest. that was a big reason why i wanted to write "pops." most people know me as a drama contract particular of the the "wall street journal," but i'm also a trained musician, the first one to write a fully sourced armstrong biography. i started off as a professional jazz musician, a bass player before becoming a full time writer. that experience i believe helped me to understand armstrong's music and the world in which he

lived and worked from the inside out. in "pops" i've tried to translate that knowledge into plain english, and weave it into the incredible story of armstrong's life. as duke ellington said, he was born poor, died rich and never hurt anyone on the way. but how did he work that miracle? in the course of writing "pops" i came to feel that armstrong's triumph was as much a function of his personality as of his musical genius. if you don't understand the one, you won't understand the other, and it is armstrong's personality to which i want to introduce you now. so let us start in the best possible way, by watching him at work. what you're about to see, if all goes well, is an excerpt from the earliest surviving film of armstrong on stage. it was shot in copenhagen in 1933. he is singing and playing "dina" with a band of musicians from

europe. would you play the video please. ♪ ♪ dina ♪ oh, dina, dina ♪

♪ ♪

>> you know, i've been playing that clip from coast to coast ander time i do, everybody collapse. that is the louis armstrong that took the world by storm in the 1920's and 1930's, the public armstrong. in "pops" i take you back stage to meet the private armstrong. for there is more to louis armstrong, much more, than most people know. though he was known the world over for his million volt smile, armstrong was a tough-minded, realistic man who always knew the score, whether it was about

race relations or the music business or anything else. he loved to tell tales about his life and he told them very, very well. for he was not just a gifted musician, but a gifted writer. to lulu bankhead, one of his biggest fans said that he uses word like he strings notes together, artistically and vividly. armstrong strung his words together very neatly indeed, when he told the story of his encounter with a gun toting chicago gangster in 1931. he was working at a mobbed up night club called the show boat when he described as what he called a big bad [beep] hood named frankie foster came back stage after the show and told him he would be playing in new york city the next night. armstrong said he already had a gig in chicago. foster pulled his gun and cocked it. jesus, it looked like a cannon

and sounded like death so i looked down at that steel and say, well, maybe i do open in new york tomorrow. i tried to get that side of armstrong into "pops" too, because it's as much a part of his genius as anything else. joe blazer, his manager, once said that armstrong was a real, real man. he reminds me of something that my name sake, the roman playwright terrance, wrote 2,000 years ago. i am a man and nothing is alien to me. louis armstrong was a real man hand nothing was alien to him, and he turned it all, good and bad, into music. now, i'm going to read you part of the prologue to pops, in which i try to convey armstrong armies personality in words -- armstrong's personality in words. so now an excerpt from "pops," the life of louis armstrong. it goes without saying or should that louis armstrong's music was

the most important thing about him, yet his personal story in addition to shedding light on the well springs his art is important in its own right and no less in need of historically aware interpretation. he was a child of his time, not ours, and some of the things he did and said as an adult are barely intelligible to those who know little of the world of his youth. even in his own time, he was widely misunderstood, often by people who should have known better. to understand him now, we must see him arms he was, a black man, born at the turn of the century, in the poorest quarter of new orleans, who by the end of his life, was known and loved in every corner of the earth. what manner of man succeeded in making so amazing a journey. how did he rise above the unforgiving circumstances of his birth, to become a culture shaping giant, and what marks did those circumstances leave on him?

everyone who knew armstrong agreed that he was, what he seemed to be. what you saw was what you got, said joe, who played clarinet in his band, the all stars. jack bradley, a photographer whom armstrong befriended in the 1960's, described him as down to earth, natural, completely unpretentious, simple in the best sense of the word. it was his genuineness, as much as his genius, to which his fans responded. he once reacted to a radio interviewer's pronouncement that he was a living american legend, by dropping his pants and giggling. i don't care what company i'm in, what environment you know, he said, on another occasion. i just want to be there, and enjoy it. just as good as the average cat. whether on stage or off, he was the embodiment johnny mercer's admonition in requesting accent wait the positive ," you've got

to spread joy to the maximum, keep gloom down to the minimum. danny barker, a guitarist, saw him in his dressing room after a show and remembered the side ever after. barker wrote, he be sitting down in his underwear with a towel around his lap, one around his shoulders and the white handkerchief on his head and he put that grease around his lips, looked like a minstrel man, you know, and laughing, you know, natural, the way he is and in the room you sew maybe two nuns, you see a streetwalker, dressed all up inflaming clothes, you see maybe a guy come out of the pen 10ry, you sew a rabbi, a priest, line to see two policemen or detectives, you see a judge, all of them different levels of society in the dressing room and he's talking to all of them and there be some kids there, white and colored, all the diverse people different social levels and everybody's looking, got their eyes dead on him, just like they was looking at a diamond.

he was of course, the least average of cats. though his place in the history of jazz is harder to explain than is commonly understood. armstrong did not invent jazz, nor was he its first significant figure and it's not even right to call him the first great jazz soloist, as many critics and scholars have done. sydney bow cheat, the new orleans clarinetist preceded him a decade. while bix started winning national recognition at the same time as armstrong, almost to the month. what then made louis armstrong stand out? and why is his name still known to those who know nothing else about jazz. the simplest explanation, and up to a point, the best one. is that he was the first great influence in jazz. no sooner did he burst upon the scene, than other musicians, trumpeters, saxophonists, singers, started imitating hill.

i tried to walk like hum, talk like him, eat like him, sleep like him, said rex stewart, who replaced armstrong in fletcher henderson's band. coleman hawkins heard him for the first time in 1924, and was stunned into speechlessness. he remembered i stood silent, feeling almost bashful, asking myself if i would ever be able to attain a small part of louis armstrong's greatness. the trumpeter max kaminski told of the combination of louis's dazzling brillance of tone so overwhelmed me i felt as if i had stared into the sun's eye. such imagery came easily to those who heard armstrong in his house in days. the poet larkin, a part-time jazz critic and lifelong fan, praised him in similar terms, calling him something inexhaust i object and unchanging like the

sun. even miles davis, who loathed armstrong's clowning, knew that the history of jazz radiated outward from the bell of his form. he said, you can't play nothing on trumpet that doesn't come from him. i can't even remember a time when he sounded bad playing the trumpet. never. what spoke to these artists, as it speaks to all those hearing armstrong for the first time, is the combination of hurt he willing momentum and expansive lyricism, that propelled his playing and singing alike. the four staccato notes that he wraps out, his most celebrated performance, proclaims the coming of anigcoming of new wayg about rhythm. it catapulted his fellow jazzmen into a musical world into which even the simplest of phrases were charged with an irresistible forward thrust much to be sure, his internal metro

noam was exact enough to impress the most i if a national -- fanatical rhythmatical of musicians. imagine, he said, two hours of music and never once will it slow down or speed up by mistake. but armstrong could also toy with time, stretching it this way and that, as he does in the serene trumpet solo that ends his 1933 recording of harold arlens, i've got a right to single blues, sounding for all the world like a lordly turn of the century grand opera ten or. the comparison is apt, for armstrong liked, listened to and learned from opera. i lake that dope stuff also, it gases me to no end, he told orson welles. later in life, he remembered buying his first record player,

a windup victorola in new orleans. he said most of my records were the original dixieland jazz band but i had caruso too, they were all my favorites, and then there was the irish tenor, john mccormick, beautiful phrasing, but his style was also permeated with the you've beauty of the blues, and if it watts his way to sing them and play them with a smile, he knew as well as anyone that the world of which he sang could be a hurtful place. he said, like when i play maybe back a town blues, i'm thinking about one of the old low down moments like when maybe your woman didn't treat you right. that's a hell of a moment when a woman tell you i've got another mule in my stall. even the classical melodies he loved, took on a new tint, when passed through the prism of his vast experience. i seen everything from a child coming up, he said, nothing

happened, i ain't never seen before. he was forever reflecting on the things he had seen, sometimes on paper, but more often, with his horn. he wrote, when i blow, i think of times and things from out of the past that gives me an image of the tune, like moving pictures, passing in front of my eyes, a town, a chick somewhere back down the line, an old man with no name, you've seen once in a place you don't remember. that was why he never used musical terminology when speaking of his music. it was all about life. these are but a few of the myriad facets of armstrong's art, an one can go a long way toward understanding him, without mentioning anything else. but it is not enough to declare him a phenomenally gifted and imagine at this artist and let it go at that. the other reason why he casts so long a shadow is that his personality was as compelling as his artistry.

the two could scarcely be separated, for his lavish generosity of spirit was part and parcel of his prodigal way of making music, even in his old age, he held nothing back, and it seemed at times, that nothing was beyond him. he really did perform with everyone from leonard bernstein to johnny cash. he really did end his concerts, some of them anyway, by playing 250 or more high c's, capped with a high f. he wrote the finest of all jazz autobiographies, my life in new orleans, without a collaborator. the rank ofs of his admirers including kingsley amos, the composer very gill thompson called him a master of musical art. stewart davis, whose abstract paintings were full of jazz-inspired images, cited him as a model of greatness. is it any wonder then that so many musicians longed to play

the way he played, and sing the way he sang? it was no accident that they usually referred to armstrong, not as sachmo, his own favorite nickname, but as pops. he was the father figure of jazz, and what his children wanted was to be him, or at least come as close as they possibly could. why did armstrong spend so many hours scribbling on a pad, or hunched over a hype writer? partly because he was a gregarious man who enjoyed sending chatty letters to his friends and fans. we actually have a gentleman in the audience tonight who actually has a couple letters that armstrong sent him, but also because he believed that he had something of value to tell the world. having been born desperately poor, he had worked desperately hard, first as a boy, and then as a man. and this, he had much in common with ragged dick, the plucky

boat black, whose burning desire to grow up respectable, propelled him into the ranks of the middle class. self-discipline, self-improvement, self-reliance, these were armstrong's lifelong watch words and no hero could improved on his iron determination to get ahead in the world. once he did so, he felt an obligation to tell others how to do the same. i was determined to play my horn against all odds, and i had to sacrifice a whole lot of pleasure to do so, he wrote in sachmo. a few years later, he made the point more pungently, when he side the lord will help the poor, but not the poor lazy. while jazz musicians, both white and black, come from comfortable backgrounds. those who were born poor, strive

mightily to join the middle class. you need only visit his home, located seven blocks from shea stadium in a run down but respectable part of queens. it is a three-story brick covered frame house, whose interior is reminiscent of graceland, he wil elvis presleys mansion. to the silver wallpaper and golden fawcetts of the bathroom, the armstrong house looks like what it is -- the residence of a poor boy who cast down his bucket and pulled it up overflowing. unlike graceland though, the house is neither oppressive for embarrassing, and as you stand in the smallest study, whose decorations include a portrait of the artist, painted by tony bennett, it is impossible not to be touched by the aspirations visible wherever you look. this, it is clear, was the home of a working man. bursting with a pride that came not from what he had, but what

he did. i never want to be anything more than i am, what i don't have, i don't need. armstrong said in his old age. my home is good, but you don't see me in no big estates and yachts. that ain't going to play your horn for you. armstrong sometimes forgot that his success was due not solely to work and pluck, but also to the talent with which he had been born. he was a man of boundless generosity, who preached the stoney gospel of individual responsibility. a ferociously ambitious artist who preferred when he could to do as he was told. an introspective man who exploded with irrepressible vitality when he stepped into the spotlight. the joyous genius who con founded his critics, by refusing to make art and make fun. no more than any other genius, was he all of the piece. as mary tempton says, he endures

to mix in his own person all men, the pure and the cheap, god and creator, god and buffoon. yet all was resolved, each time he raised his trumpet to his lips. he knew that in his words, showmanship does not mean you're not serious. and no one who has read his writings can doubt that he was both serious and self-aware. he knew who he was, what he had done, and how far he had come, and was fiercely proud of it all. he admitted that his music mattered more to him than anything else, even his wives. when i'd pick up that horn, he said, that's all. the world is behind me, and don't concentrate on nothing but it, that my living and my life, i them them notes, that's way i try to make them right. see? the whole world saw and heard. so that's how my book starts.

and now if you don't mind, a few words of epilogue. i spent five years working on "pops," especially in the past few months, many people have asked me something like this. that's a lot of time to spend with anybody. do you still like armstrong? do you still admire him, or did you get sick and tired of him? that's an easy question to answer. i didn't get sick or tired of louis armstrong. i don't see how you could. he is that rarity of rarities, a great man who improves with exposure. the better you get to know him, the more you like him. this isn't to say that he wasn't a complicated personality, because he was so. offstage, he could be moody and profane. he had a habit of frying into red rages that he forgot about the next day and he knew how to hold a grudge. i have a simple rule about everybody he told the journalist. if you don't treat me right, shame on you. but that's merely to say that armstrong was human being, as

flawed as the next man and if there's anything that i learned in the process of writing "pops" it is that louis armstrong's flaws were few and forgivable. in return, for his unswerving dedication to his art, he knew true happiness and shared it unstintingly with his fellow man. not long before he died, he told a friend that my whole life has been happiness. through all of the misfortunes, etc., i did not plan anything. life was there for me and i accepted it and life, whatever came out, has been beautiful to me and i love everybody. can't top that. what you're about to see is a tv performance one of his favorite songs titled appropriately enough "on the sunny side of the street" originally broadcast in 1958. it is my favorite film clip of louis armstrong. the one that says the most about

who he was and what he did. take it away, sach. ♪ i'm satisfied ♪

♪ but i'm not afraid baby ♪ if i never ♪ .

[applause] >> well, now the floor is yours. i would be more than happy to answer any questions that you might have about louis armstrong or about my book, if you'll make your way to the microphone. i'll do my best. >> i have a few questions and thanks so much for doing the box. one is, in terms of his early life, there's a book called "louis armstrong's new orleans" it's sort of set in context. what did you bring new informationally about his early life that we don't have from other books, not -- that's one and second, how did he react to all the criticism that he got from other jazz musicians, sort of in the younger, newer wave in the 1960's, you and who didn't like his, you know, sort of what

they viewed as their uncle tommism of the stage act. how did he react to that? >> that's a whole bunch of questions there. thomas brothers, louis armstrong's new orleans, is the most important scholarly monograph ever written about armstrong. it is a thorough conspectus of armstrong's early years. i think beyond what "brothers" did which was to look at all the existing, on-site performances in new orleans and he was able to do this before hurricane katrina, what i bring to it is not new factual information about armstrong's younger years, because they're pretty well worked over as far as the facts go, but maybe a different perhaps a wider cultural perspective to set them in a larger frame, and particularly the frame of someone who has been a working jazz musician. that i think is one of the most important things about my book, beyond the fact that i had access to armstrong's private tapes and lots of other sources that come later in his life.

is the fact that i was in a business that i actually know what it was like, i was telling somebody what it is like to play in one of those broken bottle joins where they have chicken wire in front of the band stage. my book is transformed in this experience that previous books about armstrong have not. a major theme of my book is discussed in great detail there and i can only talk about it in a very compressed way here, but when talking about this, you have to remember that louis armstrong was born in 19 who 1. he seems contemporary to us, because he is so completely very i have had and present in his films and because this is so much film of him and for those of us over the age of 50, we remember seeing him on television. i remember seeing him on the ed you will van show one -- sullivan show one sunday night

when i was 8 years old, thank you very much. we expect him to be contemporary in a way that he is not. he wasn't. he was born in 1901 in the deep south, his whole formative experiences as a musician and stage entertainer is formed by the world of vaudeville and also the world of minstrel show and what he thought was funny, and i might add, what his contemporaries thought was funny, black and white alike, was something that the younger musicians of the post world war ii era did not find funny. theyful uncomfortable about it and they criticized him about it. dizzy gillespie, most prominently and most sharply, didn't take him in historical perspective and some of them lived long enough to change their tune, including, i'm happy to say, dizzy gillespie, who in his autobiography, written at the end of his life, apologized to him as describing him as an uncle tom. i will quote gillespie verbatim,

he said hell, i had my own way of tomming. so now, we are as far beyond armstrong's life as gillespie was beyond the beginningings of it, we can see him as he was, as a figure from history, and as someone whose art and i think his personality, is of permanent interest and permanently contemporary, even if there are aspects of it that we wouldn't especially want to see at the movies today, let us say. >> thank you so much for this great work. >> gentleman now, yes, sir l. >> thank you for your talk, thanks for this lovely book. i imagine for a serious critic like yourself, it's hard to sustain focus on and produce an objective book on a subject that is so utterly loveable and who you obviously loved and you pulled it off. >> thank you. i don't pretend to be -- objectivity sounds like something that came out of the ice box and tears a sense i'm not even slightly objective about louis armstrong, he was a great man, but i tried to write

as a scholar would write, to -- what he said on more than one occasion, he would want a biographer to do, which is to tell the whole story of his life, to tell the truth. >> it book is scholarly and it is warm, so i'm going to ask you a very specific question, because it's so thoroughly agreeable, you really have to work to find disagreement about a choice of composition or something. i'll ask you that and it has to do about latter day armstrong and you can answer it and perhaps talk a little bet about louis, the last decade orbout tf him as a musician. in this book, you refer to the real ambassadors a too ernest for its own good. >> for everybody who doesn't know the album, it's a musical that was only done on record and armstrong performs in it. >> in my opinion, they say i look like god is one of the most beautiful pieces ever done. >> it is a beautiful song. >> on race relations. it's just -- he was supposedly

in tears at the end of it, and -- >> mr. swkrao: and of course one of the songs >> and of course, one of the songs is in my 30 favorite armstrong recordings, summer song. >> there's a whole bin much of jamming -- bunch of jamming songs. comment on that last decade left hand had his creativity was limited by the fact that he was working all these years by joe glaser, who may not as been tuned into tapping into armstrong's genius. >> glaser was armstrong's manager, until about a year before armstrong died. glaser was to a great extent bringing armstrong to a wider, popular audience, but as i say repeatedly in my book, people who knew armstrong, who knew glaser, who played with armstrong, who worked in glaser issue's, they all said the same thing, which was that armstrong went where delayser told them to go, but when he got there, he played what he wanted to play.

armstrong is not a man who really thinks of himself in a self-conscious way as an artist. now he knew he was an artist, on only one occasion did i ever find him talking about how jazz was art, that's in the book, but he knew what he was, burr he thought of himself as an entertainer and he didn't think there wassing in incompatible between being an artist and being an entertainer and i think he got as much pleasure out of making people laugh as he did thrilling them, and i say this somewhere in the book. we mistake great artists as they were, rather than imagining what we wish they were, and trying to take them that way instead. the music that harm strong recorded in the last -- armstrong recorded in the last 10 years of his life is spottier than the music he recorded in the 1920's or 1930's, but the high points are as high as anything he did at any time in his life. summer song, the amazing recording of black and tan

fantasy that he made with duke ellington, and let us say it, hello dolly, which is a great pop record but also a great jazz record. it really is. you know, i think -- i wouldn't want -- if it were left up to me, i wouldn't want only of to the music of the last 10 years of armstrong's life to listen to, but if that's all i had, i'd take it and be glad. who's up next? >> i just have a quick question. you spoke about the 500 or 600 tapes that he made. is louis armstrong's home in new york a library at this point or is it open to the public? >> i'm glad you asked me that. not only is it a museum, but i'm speaking there on saturday. they're throwing a back party for me and i'm going -- book party for me and i'm going to give a shorter version of this talk in harm strong's own home. it was restored it its original condition a few years ago and opened as a museum and i must tell you, if you have the

slightest interest in louis armstrong, you must go to this place, because the walls breathe his essence. it is one of the most amazing house museums in the world. thank god that it was preserved, and is the way it is. so i'll be thinking of you all on saturday afternoon, when i go there and speak there. oh, the tapes. ok. there are 650 reel to real tapes. armstrong -- i'll tell you the whole story. armstrong bought one the first commercial tape recorders ever told in the united states in 1947. and binge crosby bought one of the others, by the way, and at first, he bought it to record his shows, so that he could listen to them, and perfect them, a reminder that armstrong is in fact a true hartist and a self-aware artist, but like everybody else who first got their hands on a tape recorder, when tape recorders were new, he

startrd playing with it and pretty soon he figured out he could just turn it on back stage in the dressing room or in his hotel room or wherever and let it run and he saved the tapes. they were stored in the attic of the house, they made their way into the armstrong archives. i was the first biographer to get to listen to them and now i will tell you a story about one of them because i think it seem mifies what they -- ex mifies what they tell us. there's one tape where armstrong talks about his run-in with the mobsters in chicago and he doesn't name names, but some of the tapes are just fun. i'm mention this in the passing in the talk. i'll tell you a little more about it. there is a tape, my guess is it was recorded sometime in the 1950's, in a hotel room somewhere in the world. i have no idea where. it's 5:00 a.m., and louis armstrong is it trying to get his wife lucille to go to bed with him and she's really not interested at this in 5:00 a.m. and declines with thanks and he says, well, it's your duty to do that, it's your duty to keep the

horn percolating. well, this didn't amuse her one bit and then she looks around and you can almost hear the double take on the tape. she seeps the tape recorder is running. and she says to him, you turn that off, in fact, you erase off some of that stuff. and he says, i can't do that, this is for posterity. ok. all right. flash forward 50 years. here i am, you know, the scholar, with the headphones on sitting in the armstrong archives at queens college and i'm listening to this tape and suddenly it hits me, my god, i'm posterity. he saved it for me. and he saved it for all of us, because he knew that he was, after all, louis armstrong, and he wanted us to know what he was like. and those tapes temperature us that better than anything other than his art can possibly tell us. yes, sir? >> congratulations on your nomination for the naacp. >> i'm very proud of that.

>> to sort of piggy back on that theme, could you really share with us the truism packet of what he did for race relations in the united states? >> yes, i would very much like to talk about that. >> and my next question is how did he really grapple with the criticism, because one of his other admirers is ralph ellison, during the late 1960's when he was being criticized, along with louis armstrong, he really took it bad when the black nationals really told him he was uncle tom. >> essentially, armstrong grappled with a criticism by living his life. occasionally, he would try to set the record straight and talk about the things he had done. but he didn't lose a whole lot of sleep over what people said about him, even though he didn't like it. he wasn't the kind of elbaradei to lose a whole -- the kind of man who lose a whole lot of sleep about anything anybody said about him. as far as what he contributed to race relations, i think i can answer that question best by telling a story. i come from a town in southeastern missouri, it's

called sikeston, none of you will have heard of it. my father witnessed a lynching, it was that kind of town. louis armstrong was probabl pro- excuse me. for many people in that town, louis armstrong was probably the first black person they ever took seriously. as an artist, as a man. and i think that by reaching out through his apt and his personality, he bridged gaps that no one else of could have bridged. you see i'm a bit affected by this. i talk about this in less personal terms in the book, but i think that that is meant as

much to the public at large in the 1950's and 1960's as was as much of a contribution to racial justice and race relations as anything that anybody was doing at that time, simply by his own personal example and that's the best way i can answer that question and i saw that firsthand. have we other questions? the microphone awaits you. and so do i. somebody is rising to go to the microphone. i'll give you a minute there, while i recapture my composure. >> do you address in the book his standing as a jazz icon, with the black community, with black americans versus white, is there a difference? i mean, where is his standing is huge with white americans, i know that, but is his -- is he considered like the pinnacle? >> he is now. look, part of what my book is is

what scholars call a reception history, which is an attempt to try to describe how armstrong was written about and how people responded to him throughout the course of his career. and like every other jazz musician, armstrong ceased to a great extent to be popular in the black community, because it lost interest in jazz as a community. this really troubled him. there's a funny story i tell in the book, which i really can't repeat here, about his going to a gig by louis jordan and his was halfway empty and he just couldn't believe what had happened. miles davis talked the same way in the 1960's, about how the racial composition of jazz audiences had changed and yes, he was troubled by it. on the other hand, again, jazz is now a historical music, an his tore cam event, rather than a popular music and i think that nowadays, pretty much everybody sees armstrong in the same way,

as the central figure in the history of jazz in the 20t 20th century. there's no racial differential there. he's as important to everybody who cares about jazz, to matter who they are. that's something that i would say has happened in the last quarter century, there are a lot of factors that have to do with it. the advocacy of wynton marsalles, but part of it is just that jazz is now itself -- the 20th century jazz, the 20th century is over and we look upon it as a closed event and we know how important armstrong was. the best way i can answer your question. >> [inaudible] >> new york is only a very small part of the audience for jazz, thank heaven's. i hear there are jazz clubs in washington as well. >> i want to ask you about your other writing, especially your writing in the "wall street journal."

which i read, i'm sure other people read your columns. and what your sense of sensibility and sensitivity writing for the journal brings not to a wider public audience but to the audience of people who read those kind of writings in the publication that is perhaps growing in influence for the kinds of things that you're bringing or whether you feel that way or not. >> i don't know how to answer that. i don't really think about it that way. i mean, how i think of myself, what i do, i am a specialist who tries to translate the knowledge of a specialist into generalist language. i mean, i can and have done so in the past written for scholarly audiences but i'm not really interested in doing that. i'm interested in taking what i know about the arts and i write about all the arts, not just jazz, not just drama, and try to

communicate this knowledge to try to be a teacher, and also, maybe above all as a critic, to try to communicate enthusiasm, because i think that is the most important thing that a critic can do. the biggest thing that a critic does is to say i saw this and you should too and to be persuasive about it and for me to be able to do that in the "wall street journal" which is the daily paper with the largest circulation in the united states, that's a big deal and a big responsibility and i feel that responsibility. some of you know that in addition to covering theater in new york, i cover theater all over the united states, including in this city and i'm very committed to that. half of my reviews are outside new york an one of the reasons why i do that is because i know i'm writing for a national newspaper that has a national audience. that part i take really seriously. whatever the character of the "wall street journal" readers is, i don't know what that is, i think they're pretty much all over the map. i guarantee you, they're not all rich. i'm not rich. but it's a paper with a big

readership and therefore it's a big pulpit, and i try to use it in the best way that i can. >> thank you the are we about ready to wrap here? i think it may be time for me to sign some books. >> yes. >> before we do, is anybody making their way to the microphone? >> no, i think we're good. i think we're ready for that special treat. >> before i sign your books and you urge you to let me do so, let us play a record. my favorite louis armstrong record. i mentioned it earlier in the evening, but it's always better to hear music than talk about it. and so without further ado, i offer you louis armstrong's 1933 recording of harold arlens, i've got a right to sing the blues, which tells his story better than anything. better even than "pops."

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>> i will see you in line. please help me think once again. [applause] >> fold up the chairs and start the line on both sides because of the wires on the other side. hold up the chair or something. we are going to get started right now. ♪ >> terry teachout is the chief culture critic and commentary magazine. he is the author of the skeptics:a life of each element in. visit kerriteachhow.com.

>> this weekend on booktv, former education secretaryill bennett examines america at the end of the 20th-century and the beginning of the 21. he is interviewed by a former managing editor at time magazine. from new york, this year's awards ceremony and throughout the weekend look for highlights from the virginia festival of the book. find the entire schedule online at booktv.org. military heritage magazine editor roy morris recalls samuel clemens's transformation from a riverboat captain to celebted writer mark twain. from book passage bookstore in california this is 35 minutes. >> thank you for coming here tonight.