In spite of all this, Armstrong’s reception has long been contested. By the 1930s and ’40s, square white jazz critics claimed that Armstrong had sold out, but the deeper wound was closer to home. During that same period, when Armstrong was a pop superstar in Black communities, columnists in African American papers would debate his performance not as a musician but as the public face of Blackness. Some found a lot to criticize, and this rift would deepen over time.
“One shudders to think that perhaps two generations of black Americans remember Louis Armstrong, perhaps one of the most remarkable musical geniuses America ever produced, not only as a silly Uncle Tom but as a pathetically vulnerable, weak old man,” the critic and historian Gerald Early wrote in 1984. “During the sixties, a time when black people most vehemently did not wish to appear weak, Armstrong seemed positively dwarfed by the patronizing white talk-show hosts on whose programs he performed, and he seemed to revel in that chilling, embarrassing spotlight.”
In this context, it’s little wonder that Louis Armstrong got ready for posterity, carefully taking his legacy into his own hands. According to Riccardi, from 1926 onward, Armstrong and his family made scrapbooks of reviews, photographs, and letters. His wife, Lucille, presented him with his first and last house in late 1943, and that building soon became an archive in waiting. Already an inveterate letter writer, Armstrong started recording home audiotapes in 1950. On the road during that decade, doing hundreds of one-nighters a year, Armstrong toted around a custom-made steamer trunk with two tape recorders and a record player. He would record anybody and everybody while goofing off in his hotel room.
While he slowed down the relentless taping for a time in the 1960s, Armstrong came back for a last act from 1969 until his death in 1971, partly because Lucille bought him two state-of-the-art Tandberg reel-to-reel machines. Armstrong spent hours and hours in his study, creating roughly 200 mix tapes on the Tandbergs and writing down annotated playlists. The reel-to-reel tapes are carefully numbered, and many have artistic covers, usually collages Armstrong crafted by hand. He used his own photos and also cut out images from magazines and “laminated” them with Scotch tape in a homegrown, colorful style. Armstrong wired the house so he could play the recordings in different rooms.