Music: Last Trumpet for the First Trumpeter

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Satchmo managed to survive both adulation and wealth without losing his head. On the whole, his minstrel-show appearance and jolly-fat personality made him more popular with whites than with his own race; but if he was loved for the wrong reasons, that never bothered Armstrong. "It's all in fun," he said. "They know I'm there in the cause of happiness." Toward the end of his career, blacks began to accuse him of playing Uncle Tom, forgetting that his style derived from vaudeville, a genre in which both blacks and whites often cultivated an exaggerated Deep South dialect and a toothy, ingratiating grin.

That Note. But Satchmo felt a strong tie with his own. A wealthy man, he lived in a modest (but expensively appointed) house in a deteriorating black neighborhood "to be with my people." He was with them at the end, dying in his sleep at home in Corona, Queens. He lay in state for one day in Manhattan, visited by 25,000 mourners, then was taken back to his own neighborhood for burial. Black and white celebrities —Mayor Lindsay and Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman and Dick Cavett—sat in the sweltering heat of his local church along with musicians and friends who merely loved him. Peggy Lee sang the Lord's Prayer, and Singer Al Hibbler sang Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen. It was reverent, dignified, respectful. But somehow, one felt that Louis would have been more delighted if—after the last encomiums and ritual blessing—a trumpet had blazed and a proud, strutting, joyous band had marched down the aisle belting out

Oh, when the Saints go marching in, Oh, when the Saints go marching in, I want to be in that number . . .

For Louis's legacy was not a message of reverence but of joy. "A note's a note in any language," he used to say. "And if you hit it—beautiful!" Louis hit it.