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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for October 13, 2009

TT: “M” is for the many things she gave me

October 13, 2009 by Terry Teachout

POPS%20JACKET.jpgApropos of the fast-approaching publication of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, the new issue of Publishers Weekly contains a profile of me:

Cultural critic Terry Teachout first heard jazz legend Louis Armstrong around 1964 when, as a boy in rural Sikeston, Mo., he was summoned by his mother to watch Armstrong sing “Hello, Dolly” on The Ed Sullivan Show. Most kids would have balked. Not Teachout.
“I was thrilled,” Teachout says, relaxing in a padded chair in his compact, art-lined Upper West Side Manhattan apartment. “He, from that moment on, became an important part of my life.”
Teachout went on to become a jazz musician himself, playing bass in different combos before shifting careers to writing. Best-known as the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal, Teachout is also the author of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (HarperCollins, 2002), among other works. And come December 2, he’ll add Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
Teachout recalls, while on tour promoting The Skeptic, returning to his hotel and flopping, exhausted, onto the bed. “I’m lying there looking at the ceiling,” he says, “and it was really just like a bolt of lightning hit me on the forehead–Armstrong!”
The bolt wasn’t quite out of the blue. Michael Cogswell, director of the Louis Armstrong House and Archives in Queens, had planted the seed earlier when he told Teachout about a remarkable and newly available treasure trove. Armstrong, it turned out, had been an avid home tape-recording buff. And the archives had recently converted his collection of some 650 fragile tapes into listenable CDs.
“I am the first biographer ever to have had access to them,” Teachout says…

Read the whole thing here.
* * *
In other news, my Amazon author page now contains a list of tour dates for Pops through the end of 2009. To see it, go here.

TT: Almanac

October 13, 2009 by Terry Teachout

“The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn’t make any sense if quoted as it stands.”
Robert Benchley, “Quick Quotations”

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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