Too la loo, Pops

Was Louis Armstrong born on Independence Day? 

Absolutely.

“Mayann told me that the night I was born there was a great big shooting scrape in the Alley and the two guys killed each other. It was the Fourth of July, a big holiday in New Orleans, when almost anything can happen. Pretty near everybody celebrates with pistols, shot guns, or any other weapon that’s handy,” wrote Armstrong in his 1954 autobiography, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans.

So how did it come to be that August 4, 1901, is now the generally accepted birthdate of the great entertainer?

In 1970, Armstrong, famous, wealthy, and one of the most recognizable people in the world, made an appearance on the Dick Cavett Show where he talked about his Fourth of July birthday.

Cavett: When were you born?

Armstrong: Nineteen hundred. Twelve o’clock at night.

Cavett: It is—it’s twelve at night? So how did they know whether your birthday was on the—what—your birthday’s on … I thought it was on the Fourth.

Armstrong: Well, I’m—no, I didn’t ask Mama all that, I’m just glad to be here, I mean—I wouldn’t interfere in her business, you know?

There, Pops said it on national television—he was born on Fourth of July, 1900, twelve o’clock at night, never mind the quibble if it was July 4 at midnight, one minute before the next day. 

Armstrong always celebrated his birthday on Independence Day, but he was coy about his birth year; jazz historians have found discrepancies in Pops’s permanent record. The first recorded instance of Armstrong himself writing down his birthdate was for the United States military draft. Possibly to appear older, he marked July 4, 1900, as his date of birth, which would have made him eighteen. Then in 1937, he recorded a July 4, 1901, DOB on his Social Security application when he was filming a movie for Paramount Pictures.

Whether Pops was born on July 4, 1900, or 1901 was rendered moot in 1988 when New Orleans researcher Tad Jones found Armstrong’s baptismal record at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, which showed that his birthday was actually August 4, 1901. The proof was in black and white.

The Times-Picayune’s September 24, 1988 edition ran an article titled “Armstrong: Give or Take a Year” with an under-researched explanation of why the musician might have chosen the Independence Day birthdate. “For a poor and ill-educated black man not to know his birthday was common in those days, and scholars figured that Armstrong simply borrowed the nation’s birthday for his own. He apparently had no birthday celebrations as a child.”

[Read this: Satchmo's First Performance in Baton Rouge]

The choice of Armstrong’s birthdate may well have been deliberate; freedmen of the nineteenth century had special reasons to honor Independence Day. Prior to the Civil War, Independence Day was, as Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts documented in their 2018 article in The Atlantic, noted as “almost the only holy-day kept in America” though the promise of the Declaration of Independence had only applied to White Society. Post-Civil War, “Independence Day … became a freedman’s holiday during Reconstruction. Whites might not work on the Fourth of July, but it was blacks who held parades, picnics, and dances,” wrote LSU historian Joe Gray Taylor in his 1974 book Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863-1877.

After the Confederacy’s defeat, Louisiana’s major newspapers reflected ambivalence toward the holiday. The July 5, 1867, Baton Rouge Tri-Weekly Advocate announced “The Fourth passed quietly away. There was a meeting of colored people under the market, but no canons were fired, no processions organized. At night some rockets went up, a few dozen Roman candles lit up the streets, the rain set in and the Fourth of July passed away.” The July 3, 1872 Daily Picayune labeled the nation’s birthday as a “political holiday.” The July 4, 1874 Picayune noted “There will be no blowing of trumpets, no rattling of drums, no fizzling of fire crackers; our bold militia have postponed their martial parade. There will be no firing of cannon; and, lastly, not a speech; no unfledged orator soaring heedlessly through the air on the American eagle."

But the South’s Black population, who could now share in their country’s Independence, celebrated heartily—at least while under the protection of Reconstruction. Perhaps the day was best observed in Charleston, South Carolina where the celebration was truly a Black holiday. A parade traveled down the main streets and ended at White Point Garden where orators recited the Emancipation Proclamation, Declaration of Independence, and Thirteenth Amendment. They danced the "Too La Loo," a subversive dance that allowed the formerly enslaved “to poke fun at the elite courtship rituals of their former masters while also engaging in a raucous celebration of their own emancipation,” according to  Kytle and Roberts. The dance’s association with Independence Day celebrations was so prevalent that “Too La Loo” came to be a nickname for the Fourth. 

The tide shifted when the Spanish-American War of 1898 re-established a nationalist unity and encouraged whites to celebrate their freedom from King George once again. It was time for “one of the greatest celebrations of the sort the United States has ever witnessed.” The Picayune July 3, 1898 front page was dedicated to war news but page seven was filled with “for the first time since the civil war” stories of celebrations in Atlanta, Vicksburg, and other Southern cities.  

By 1901, white New Orleans had fully re-embraced Independence Day. A seven-column headline proclaimed, “A GREAT FOURTH IN NEW ORLEANS.” Racism and prejudicial attitudes still prevailed in the newspaper, however, as it reported that one of the most popular attractions at the party was throwing rotten eggs at a Black person’s head, at three shots for five cents. It was laughed off as the foolish antics of the “customary side show class.”

Biographer Lawrence Bergreen suggested Armstrong himself chose the date because he had a “pride in a country and a region” even though that country and region “wanted nothing to do with his kind.” By 1930, Armstrong had achieved stardom under the worst of Jim Crow. Did he remember when the Fourth of July was a “Black” holiday? Was writing down “July 4, 1900” on the government’s draft card a moment of activism that has largely gone unheard? 

Throughout his life and career, Armstrong participated in small and large protests. He relished the instances when Black New Orleanians overcrowded the segregated street cars. Though he was on occasion labeled as an “Uncle Tom” during the Civil Rights era, Armstrong made his views known in the 1957 media coverage of the Little Rock school integration crisis, saying “(with) the way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell.” He said President Eisenhower was “two-faced” with “no guts” and the Arkansas governor was an “uneducated plow boy.” 

The United States often suffers from social amnesia. In 1875, the Fourth of July was a Black holiday. By 1901, white people had made it theirs, again. Reconstruction traded in for Jim Crow. World wars, civil rights, Vietnam, Cold War, 9-11, Obama, Black Lives Matter, Trump, and George Floyd are a long way (and yet not that far at all) from the Emancipation Proclamation and the Fourteenth Amendment. Louis Armstrong would be 121 this year, and our twenty-first century society has largely forgotten what Independence Day meant to his grandparents.   

For years after his death, New Orleans kept Armstrong’s Fourth of July fire burning with Jackson Square and Armstrong Park concerts honoring Pops’ birthday. But in 2001, on the centennial of his birth, Louisiana’s Culture, Recreation and Tourism office created the Satchmo Summerfest to be held the first week in August. With state recognition, it became official: Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 2001.

The news of the birthday shift did not sit well with New Orleans music mainstay Greg Stafford, who well understood the importance of the Fourth to Black people.

“My feeling is that people tend to dwell into the social lives of Black people and sometimes don’t understand the way Black people live,” Stafford said in an interview for Offbeat magazine in 2013. 

Cherice Harrison-Nelson, better known as "Queenie Reesie" among New Orleans’ Mardi Gras Indian Nation, understands. In the same article, she said her mother celebrated the culture of Black New Orleans in the “ways that the people who birthed the culture and bore the culture celebrated it. So [Louis] celebrated his birthday on July 4th and that [was] good enough for her.”  It was trumpeter Wynton Marsalis who said that Armstrong's music represents “the sound of America and the freedom that it is supposed to represent.”

More than a hundred years after the birth of Mayann’s gifted son, we can only wonder about that storied Independence Day. Did Mayann comprehend the injustice of her parent’s slavery? Did her son? Were they protesting the social order or simply appreciating the preciousness of American citizenship?

“That’s the mystery we’ll never know,” Stafford demurred.