Archives for April 2009

A good biographer will do just about anything to comb snippets of apocrypha out of his book. Fortunately, Louis Armstrong almost always told the truth about himself, but anyone who gets interviewed once or twice a week throughout the second half of his life is likely to streamline some of his favorite stories, and in writing Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong I did everything I could to track down the earliest possible primary sources for Armstrong’s oft-told tales.

Here’s one of the best-known ones, told in the trumpeter’s own words:

A few weeks before Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans came out, he appeared on Stage Show, a TV series hosted by Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. “We was going to play ‘Rampart Street Parade,'” he remembered, “and we’re discussing what tempo to play it, and I say, ‘Why don’t you play it not too slow, not too fast, just half fast.’ The audience finally picked it up….From then on–couldn’t nothing follow it.” That was Satchmo: he took his music seriously, but never himself.

Everyone familiar with Armstrong’s life has heard that story, and I had no particular reason to doubt its veracity. But did Satchmo really, truly toss off that double entendre on live network TV in 1954? The version of the story that I quoted in the original manuscript of Pops is the one that he told an interviewer fourteen years after the fact. Might he have been painting the lily?

While I did manage to establish that Armstrong had in fact appeared on Stage Show on August 21, 1954, I had to take his word for it that he’d really said what he said he said, and that was where I left it–until last week, when I made a discovery that made me jump up and down with glee. Not only was the audio portion of Armstrong’s 1954 appearance on Stage Show recorded, but a sound file containing his introduction to “South Rampart Street Parade” has actually been posted on the Web. (To listen to the file on your computer, stop all five of the mp3 files on the page in question, then restart the one marked “Click Here for Louis Armstrong.”)

I listened to it with my mouth hanging open. Then I rewrote the last lines of the tenth chapter of Pops accordingly:

A few weeks before Satchmo came out, he appeared on Stage Show, a TV series hosted by Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey on which the three musicians played “South Rampart Street Parade” together. “I think we should get together on the tempos there, right?” Armstrong told the brothers on camera. “I’ll tell ya whatcha do now. Not too slow, not too fast–just half-fast.” The studio audience roared with delight. That was Satchmo: he took his music seriously, but never himself.

It’s true! It’s true!

UPDATE, 2019: Alas, the site in question no longer exists, but I swear that I heard the clip in question a decade ago!

“Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation.”
René Daumal, The Lie of the Truth

Tonight Maud Newton, Lizzie Skurnick, and Kate Christensen read at Housing Works. As I know Terry and OGIC would agree, it’s a dream line-up. The event’s been well publicized, and I trust if you’re in New York and free this evening you already have plans to be there. But for the rest of us, the ardent but geographically challenged supporters, here’s an afternoon coffee break of reading by the three authors to enjoy:
• This week Narrative Magazine is offering an excerpt from Maud’s novel-in-progress, “When the Flock Changed,” as its Story of the Week. Maud’s a dear friend so I know I’ll appear biased, but I am sincere in saying it’s a must-read.
• Lizzie’s book of poems, Check-In, was recently re-issued by Caketrain in an expanded second edition. I have the first edition and it’s wonderful, and I need to order the second edition for the 14 new poems and new sexy cover. You can listen to Lizzie read her poem “Grand Central, Track 23” on PBS’s Poetry Everywhere website.
• If you’re a regular reader of About Last Night, you’ll know that we’re all three great admirers of Kate Christensen’s novels. Her new novel, Trouble, comes out in June, and it sounds amazing. This past weekend she reviewed Arthur Phillips’ new novel, The Song Is You, for The New York Times Book Review; it was (I believe) the first piece of critical writing I’ve read by her, and it was funny and enjoyable to note how directly the pleasures of reading a Kate Christensen novel (intelligence, felicity of phrase) translate into the pleasures of reading a Kate Christensen review.

Gary Burton plays an unaccompanied blues solo on vibraharp:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy’s playing blues like we play, he’s in high school. When he starts playing jazz it’s like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.”
B.B. King (quoted in the Sunday Times of London, Nov. 4, 1984)

One of my closest friends, a writer whom I admire greatly, has dedicated his latest book to me. I was one of the first people to suggest that he write it, and he claims to have profited from my counsel and encouragement. That’s nice to know–especially since the finished product turned out to be a first-rate piece of work. (I suppose it would feel uncomfortable to be the dedicatee of a piece of junk!) I received a copy of the uncorrected proofs in the mail the other day, and it was a decidedly strange experience to see “For TERRY TEACHOUT” printed on the fifth page. I’ve been written about in a couple of memoirs and mentioned in passing in a half-dozen other volumes of various kinds, but never before have I been the dedicatee of a book.

Dedications and inscriptions are serious business for most authors, serious enough that you’d think more would have been written about them. One of the few extended discussions of the practice that comes to mind can be found in The Middle of the Journey, Lionel Trilling’s 1947 novel about a left-wing intellectual who survives a near-fatal illness that leaves him full of doubt:

On the flyleaf of Laskell’s book was written, “To Nancy and Arthur with my dearest love.” When Laskell had written the inscription he had been at first troubled by the thought that it was an excessive sentiment. He had then known the Crooms only two years and he thought that perhaps “dearest love” was too much to express what he felt toward them. He even wondered whether so full an expression of feeling might not be a burden to these young people, a responsibility of emotion that should not be forced on them, it had been the Crooms themselves who had first insisted on the friendship. And Laskell had gone so far as to pick up another copy of the book to write a more measured inscription. But with his pen almost on the new flyleaf, his sense of fact asserted itself–like many men, Laskell thought that written words should be very precise in the expression of one’s feeling and he asked himself whether it was not simply and literally true that the Crooms were the people in all the world he loved best. And he had turned the flyleaf and the title page and, on the dedication page, saw the initials E.F. standing alone. He had not been able to put “to the memory of E.F.”; nor even “To E.F.”–the dedication stood only as her initials. If Elizabeth Fuess had been still alive, he would have written a most affectionate inscription in the Crooms’ copy, but not the particular one he had already written. But now there was no Elizabeth, and the simple literal fact was that he gave the best of what love he had to Nancy and Arthur.

The finicky exactitude of that passage strikes me as exceeedingly Trillingesque–especially since the imaginary book in question is a treatise called Theories of Housing!

Unless you’re Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates, you only get so many opportunities to pay tribute to loved ones, friends, and colleagues by dedicating a book to them, so I’ve called my own shots with care. A Terry Teachout Reader is dedicated to Laura Demanski, my best friend, longtime co-blogger, and (in the words of my inscription) “the sister I wanted.” The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken is dedicated to Bill Buckley and Joe Epstein, both of whom inspired me in ways too numerous to recount.All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine bears a collective dedication to thirty-one “friends in the second seat” whom I’ve taken to see Balanchine’s ballets over the years.

Pops, needless to say, will be dedicated to Mrs. T, without whom it probably wouldn’t have seen print. I met her a few weeks before I fell ill in December of 2005. I don’t know that I would have pulled through that crisis had I faced it alone. Instead I fell in love, got well, got married, and acquired in the process a part-time editor with an exceedingly sharp eye. I can’t think of anyone more deserving of a dedication, but I promise that it won’t be fulsome, much less cute. While I rather like P.G. Wodehouse’s dedication of The Heart of a Goof to his daughter Leonora, “without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time,” I cringe at such horrors of coyness as the oft-quoted dedication of J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey:

As nearly as possible in the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon companion to accept a cool lima bean, I urge my editor, mentor and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of the New Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors, to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book.

What could Salinger possibly have been thinking when he penned this wince-making paean? Far better to have kept it simple, the way Evelyn Waugh did when he dedicated Decline and Fall to “Harold Acton, in homage and affection.” That’s the stuff to give the troops, and I shall endeavor to do likewise.

“Each recriminative decade poses new riddles, how best to live, how best to write. One’s fifties, in principle less acceptable than one’s forties, at least confirm most worst suspicions about life, thereby disposing of an appreciable tract of vain expectation, standardized fantasy, obstructive to writing, as to living. The quinquagenarian may not be master of himself, he is, notwithstanding, master of a passable miscellany of experience on which to draw when forming opinions, distorted or the reverse, at least up to a point his own. After passing the half-century, one unavoidable conclusion is that many things seeming incredible on starting out, are, in fact, by no means to be located in an area beyond belief.”
Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings

I just read about a Twitter-based contest in which opera geeks are invited to “tweet” a synopsis of an opera in one hundred and forty characters or less. How could I resist? Here’s The Letter in a nutshell:

Adultery, murder, lies, blackmail, confession, trial, hallucination, acquittal, confrontation, disaster, blood, blackout.

Who could ask for anything more?