1000 words about a picture of Louis Armstrong

This is a picture of Satchmo and his wife Lucille that time they went to the Sphinx in Egypt in 1961.

 If you didn’t know Satchmo had a wife, it’s probably because you had never thought about it.  It is accepted that behind any great man is a strong, hard-headed woman, and this is especially true for the slippery and successful jazz types.  A more contemporary example of this relationship is in the Blues Brothers (1980) in which Aretha Franklin sternly advises her husband, Matt ‘Guitar’ Murphy, that he had “better think about what he’s tryin’ to do” before going off with the boys to play blues, through verse and clever choreography involving an entire restaurant. 

Now by the time Louis got around to marrying Lucille, a strong, hard-headed woman, he had already married three other hard-headed ladies, if you can be’lee dat.   Lil Hardin Armstrong, the second, she was the hardest.  She made him put on suits and play his cornet in churches for classical training and on her own recordings besides, in her band under her name.  He did what he was told and she let him have a couple of bands of his own, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven, and she did not nag him about smoking marijuana.  Now after a while this woman, who saw Jelly Roll Morton shake and rattle a piano in 1918 (she was twenty) and said “well hell, I think I’m gonna do that too”, decided to get out of the piano shaking business and become a tailor.  She had decided to get out of the Louis Armstrong business sometime a couple decades earlier, but they still got on alright because in the forties Louis Armstrong was wearing whatever suit she sent him.  Now jumping ahead of this picture ten years was the main time Louis Armstrong deliberately disobeyed this hardheaded woman that wasn’t his wife no more, when he died in 1971.  She was so confounded and indignant that she fumed for a month and then she collapsed at the piano and died herself. 

The other two were hard headed like this more or less since that’s the way Satchmo liked it best.  The first one, she was so damn-harded that she tried to get Louis to settle down in Louisiana when he was 18 years old, a notion he gave a good cogitation for a long while sitting at the dinner table looking out the window at the river.  Meantime this lady Daisy was hollering about this and that and the baby was crying.  Well you sit at the window looking out on the river and after awhile so many riverboats go by, and the hollering just shakes and rattles your last nerve and that’s it! Up you go with your trumpet and catch the next riverboat.  This is just speculation of course but there’s no one saying it wasn’t good for his career and for the rest of us besides, thank heaven.

No one knows a lick about his third wife Alpha, not even the internet.  Rumors so fearsome that they’ve lasted until now say she was SUCH a formidable woman that nobody even has the guts to speak a lick about her.  I better shut my trap and move on.

So by the time Louis got around to marrying Lucille, a strong, hard-headed woman to be sure, he was kind of relieved that she was not hard-headed to beat the band.  I mean she was hard-headed the way she was supposed to be to keep Louis in line, but they had good fun too.  She was hard-headed until it was quitting time and then they watched tv together and ate pork sandwiches. 

623 words and I think I’ll finally get around to talking about the picture:  You wouldn’t know it, but here in front of the Sphinx Satchmo and Lucille just had quite the heated disagreement right before somebody took the picture.  Just to clarify, this picture is completely candid and the photographer was a very lucky fan.  The same thing happened to me in the community forest a week ago when I ran into Jenny Scheinman, world class Jazz Violinist, with her new little baby, but I thought it would be rude to take a picture.  How Lucille and Satchmo look so relentlessly and candidly photogenic has to do with meticulous self-care and I do mean administration of laxatives. Swiss Kriss – Leave it all behind ya!  (For more information check out “Lose Weight the Satchmo Way”. True.)

            They were hot and tired and a little grouchy, Satchmo, Lucille, and Sphinx, which is understandable because it is the desert and they had been running into people all day who wanted to take their picture, and they were jetlagged and their stomachs weren’t quite used to Egyptian food.  What they argued about isn’t important and even they don’t even remember.  Later Lucille would pull this picture out of a shoebox and holler at Satchmo “DAMN that day was hot.  What was we fightin’ about?” 

            What probably happened was this: Lucille, who was not a whiner, whined a little bit how hot it was.  Louis thought that was pretty funny and he whipped out his trumpet and he made kind of a whiny Lucille noise on it.  Well Lucille did not think that was funny and she made some more whiny and angry noises.  So Satchmo kept right on, of course.  Well Lucille decided that right then was a good time to start reminding Satchmo that weren’t they supposed to be getting on back to the hotel to freshen up for the dinner and how come he never got around to calling his mother when they landed?  Well?, she wanted to know.  Satchmo didn’t really have anything to say since she was right, so he just garbled an answer into his trumpet.  I didn’t get that, said Lucille.  He garbled and grumbled and she said What? You’re not speaking clearly! and Satchmo kept right on on his trumpet.  Loouu-eeee! She cried, I don’t understand a word comin’ out of your mouth! And they both thought that was pretty funny, and a lucky kid took their picture, and then they went back to the hotel.