If you had been asked in the early days of jazz to pick the least likely singing voice to reach the top levels of popularity and stardom, you might well have picked almost anyone not named Louis Armstrong. But as things turned out, Armstrong made it happen. It was not enough that he became a ground-breaking trumpet player who influenced almost every jazz instrumentalist who came after him. Armstrong also took a voice that most would have considered a curse and turned it into something that would keep the fans coming to him for five decades.

Some time back, Louis Armstrong the trumpet player was featured here. At that time, I recognized that Louis Armstrong the vocalist was an entirely different thing which needed to be considered on its own. Well, today is that day.

To briefly review, Armstrong was born into a life of grinding poverty by a mother who was a New Orleans prostitute. He was taken in by another family but found himself consigned to the “colored waifs home” after he was caught firing a gun. His growing abilities on the cornet saved him, and soon he was playing for the band of New Orleans musician Joe “King” Oliver. Louis followed the Oliver band to Chicago, and then struck out on his own.

Many of us heard Armstrong singing as an old man – his 1967 recording of What A Wonderful World has become a worldwide favorite. And for we younger boomers, it was hard to escape hearing his version of “Hello Dolly”. But I wondered – did he always sound like that? That question can be answered by our first sample – which is the very first time Louis Armstrong sang on a record.

In February of 1926, Armstrong was in a Chicago recording studio with his original Hot Five. The other members were fellow New Orleans alums Kid Ory (trombone), Johnny St. Cyr (banjo), and Johnny Dodds (clarinet) as well as Louis’ then-wife Lil Armstrong (piano). This was only the group’s third recording session, and Louis was talked into singing duties on a new novelty tune called “The Heebie Jeebies”.

Several sources have claimed that during that session, the sheet with the song’s lyrics fell to the floor and that Armstrong was forced to improvise. That story may or may not be true. What is clear is that from the very beginning, Armstrong’s vocals were unlike those of anyone else. First was that voice – even at age 25 or 26 he sounded like a frog in the process of swallowing gravel. And it was marvelous. Then there was his ability to change or complement the melody note by note as he sang, much in the way he constructed solos on his horn. And from this point on, a song’s published lyrics were no more than suggestions for any song Armstrong chose to sing.

Within a very few years, Armstrong had accomplished something remarkable: He was able to take a voice that had an extremely limited range of pitches and tones and make it one of the most emotive in the history of jazz or pop music, as the following two cuts will show.

In 1929, Armstrong found himself in the ensemble of an off-Broadway all-black musical review called “Hot Chocolates”. Fats Waller and lyricist Andy Razaf were responsible for the music, and one of the songs was “Black And Blue”. According to a Razaf biographer (1), it was demanded that Razaf write a comedic song about how hard life was for a black person. Razaf (and Waller) wrote the song, but it was anything but comedic.

Armstrong did not sing the song in the show, but did record it in 1929. This record is an early example of the way Armstrong could infuse a song with emotion – in this case, great sadness and melancholy. Really, the lyrics to this song conjure a kind of raw pain, and Armstrong’s treatment makes it real, even after nearly a hundred years.

A second example of the emotional impact of Armstrong’s singing comes from a record that has become problematic for modern sensibilities. This 1931 recording of “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” was Armstrong’s first recording of a song that would become something of a theme song for him over the course of many years. Louis was a child of the deep south from the turn of the twentieth century, and he certainly experienced the worse that time and place had to offer. But where “Black and Blue” aimed a harsh light at those realities, this song ignores them.

Later recordings made much-needed changes to the lyrics , and it would be easy to not feature this record at all – except for the fact that it is one of the most beautiful and lyrical performances Armstrong ever committed to wax.

This performance is also interesting because the entire first chorus of the song has the band in the background as Louis and his piano man, Charley Alexander, carry on a conversation about “goin’ back home”. Then the tempo slows and Louis sings as sweetly as ever he did. The final time through is Armstrong back on his trumpet, playing at his loveliest. Perhaps this song affected Armstrong so deeply because it made him sentimental for a kind of southern life that he never knew in his own gritty surroundings.

The final selection shows Louis Armstrong at his most joyous. This clip is from a filmed 1933 performance in Denmark during a multi-year tour of Europe that was reportedly made necessary to avoid repercussions from breaking a contract with a mob-controlled club in New York. This film was the first time Armstrong was captured in that medium, and this performance of “Dinah” shows Armstrong’s legendary stage presence.

This up-tempo version starts off with a band that sounds like it is straight out of 1927 instead of right on the cusp of the swing era. But once Louis steps up to the mic, everything changes. Armstrong never completely abandons the song lyrics, but neither does he follow them for this song that was well-known in its day. Or the melody, for that matter. The song didn’t really matter, because Louis had the ability to just sing Louis. And that vocal method was all about constructing a vocal solo much as he would with his horn, with some lyrics and some of his trademark “scat” singing where nonsense syllables took the place of words. This is one of the rare performances where I much prefer his vocal work to his horn playing. The trumpet solo is not bad, but it is nothing compared to the animated vocal that simply bursts from the singer’s one-of-a-kind personality.

It has been said by many a jazz critic that everything in jazz traces back to Louis Armstrong, and this was just as true for his unique singing abilities as for his mastery over his horn. It is safe to assume that nobody in 1926 ever suspected that the kid with the terrible voice would soon move from doing novelty tunes to becoming a geniune singing sensation. That he kept delivering the goods through those rocky vocal cords for generation after generation would have surprised those folks even more.

(1) Barry Singer, author of “Black and Blue: The Life and Lyrics of Andy Razaf, as quoted in a February 8, 1989 article in the New York Times by Stephen Holden.