Louis listened to all of the Negro jazz pioneers: men like Clarinetists Alphonse Picou and Sidney Bechet, Trombonist Kid Ory, Pianist jelly Roll Morton and Cornetist Bunk Johnson. But Cornetist Joe ("King") Oliver was his favorite: "Soon as I heard him I said 'there's mah man!'" At first, Louis just listened. He ran errands, hawked bananas, ground up old brick and sold it to prostitutes for scouring their front steps on Saturday mornings. When he was eleven, he also started a street quartet in which he sang tenor, picked up loose change by serenading through the red-light district. Says Armstrong, "A drunk come along, and maybe he'd give us a dollar. The grown folks were workin' for a dollar a day then." Only his mother was still calling him Little Louie. To everyone else he was Dippermouth or Satchelmouth. Satchelmouth was soon shortened to Satchmo, and it stuck. (Armstrong still favors the name, has emblazed it on his stationery. His specially blended cologne is Satchmo.)
In the quartet Little Louis was a tenor, but his ambition in 1913 was to sing bass. His change of mind began one New Year's Eve, when he was twelve. To celebrate, he had hauled his father's old .38 revolver out to the street and fired it off. He was picked up and taken to juvenile court where, he remembers, the magistrate told him that while he wasn't a bad boy he might get to be one if he kept playing around Perdido Street at night. Louis was packed off to the Colored Waif's Home for Boys, a New Orleans reform school.
Whatever he felt about the place then, he now remembers the Waif's Home with great affection. "I could do just about what I wanted and we ate regular. I feel at home there even now. I might end up there an old man some day, seein' over, those boys like Professor Davis did. Best of all for Louis, "Professor" Davis taught him to read music a bit, and play, first the tambourine and drums, then the bugle, finally a battered pawn-shop cornet. Unable to keep the small, smooth mouthpiece on his big lips at first, Louis filed grooves in it and mastered Home, Sweet Home Mahogany Exodus. Louis was a natural. He could blow clear and true, hitting the notes hard and clean. He never had to squeeze for a high one. But for three years after he got out of the Waif's Home (his mother got "a big white man" to spring him), he was too busy driving a coal wagon to blow a note. Then one night Bunk Johnson didn't turn up, and Louis sat in for him (for $1.25 a night) at Matranga's joint on Perdido Street; even the great Joe ("there's mah man") Oliver came around to listen.
In November 1917, with. the U.S. at war, Storyville and jazz were handed a stunning jolt. At the Navy's request, New Orleans clamped down on the disease ridden "District," put it permanently out of business. New Orleans witnessed an exodus unique in U.S. history. Hundreds of prostitutes streamed from their cribs carrying their belongings, establishments like Lulu White's renowned Mahogany Hall (one of Louis' most prized recordings is Mahogany Hall Stomp) closed for good, and so did scores of gin mills and honky tonks that had provided a home for jazz music and jobs for its musicians.
In the dispersal that followed, some Storyville musicians put away their instruments for factory work and many moved away. A few, like Joe Oliver, headed north for Chicago. But Satchmo Armstrong stayed on in New Orleans for a while. With Oliver gone, Louis began to get his due as the finest cornet in town. At 18 he married a girl named Daisy Parker and bought himself a membership in the Zulus.
Life with Daisy had its ups & downs, and on a Mardi Gras day just 30 years' ago, Daisy threatened Satchmo with a razor as he stood at the corner of Liberty and Perdido Streets in full Zulu court regalia. Louis had had enough. He took a job playing with Fate Marable's band on the Mississippi River excursion boats Dixie Bell and Sidney. The pay was the unheard of (for Satchmo) sum of $55 a week. Says he: "I had so much money I just plain didn't know what to do with it." They played such old Storyville favorites as Sugar Foot Stomp, Willie the Weeper and Coal Cart Blues, and Louis held the gay crowds spellbound when he sang the relatively new Basin Street Blues:
