Over the course of his career, he never stopped singing and performing songs about his hometown: “New Orleans Stomp,” “Where the Blues Were Born in New Orleans,” “Perdido Street Blues,” “King of the Zulus,” “The Mardi Gras March,” “Basin Street Blues,” “Mahogany Hall Stomp,” “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,” “Farewell to Storyville,” “Bourbon Street Parade,” and perhaps most famously, “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.”
He also never stopped writing about it, publishing two autobiographies in his lifetime, Swing That Music and Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans. Other autobiographical manuscripts about those years were published posthumously. Letters have surfaced in recent years, held in archives such as the one at the Louis Armstrong House Museum and the Hogan Archive at Tulane, many bearing his standard sign-off, “Red beans and ricely yours.”
Those years taught him everything he needed to know about music, about food, about race, about women, about work, about life.
And yet as soon as he left for Chicago in 1922, he never even entertained the thought of moving back. What happened?
As Armstrong himself put it during a 1970 appearance on the Dick Cavett show: “I done got Northern-fied and forgot about a whole lot of that foolishness down there, you know?”
Between the summer of 1922 and the summer of 1931, Armstrong spent almost all of his time in cities with thriving Black arts scenes: the South Side of Chicago, Harlem in the midst of its “Renaissance,” and Central Avenue in Los Angeles. He became a star, indulged in a love of fashion, made good money, even encouraged and befriended many white musicians who fell under his spell.
When he visited home for the first time in June 1931, he was reminded of that “foolishness” almost immediately. The only place that would book Armstrong was the Suburban Gardens, an establishment with a whites-only patron policy. On his first night there, a white radio announcer took one look at Armstrong, said, “I just can’t introduce that n***** on the air,” and walked off.
Armstrong wound up spending three months in New Orleans that summer, which was probably enough time for him to make the decision that he would never live there again.
He did continue to perform in his hometown regularly throughout the late 1930s and 1940s, most famously serving as Zulu King at the 1949 Mardi Gras. “There’s a thing I’ve dreamed of all my life,” he said to Time magazine just before that year’s Carnival festivities began, “and I’ll be damned if it don’t look like it’s about to come true—to be King of the Zulus’ Parade. After that I’ll be ready to die.”