Little Louis: Louis Armstrong and the Birth of Jazz

Podcast: Groundwater: The Blues Beneath American Music · Thomas Stubbs

Opublikowano: 2026-05-07

The first jazz musician is a ghost — no recording of Buddy Bolden survives. This is the story of the music from Bolden through Storyville to the kid who became Louis Armstrong. What we know about him comes from the testimony of people who heard him play, filtered through decades of memory and myth. This episode traces the music from Bolden through the legalized vice district of Storyville to a kid from the Battlefield neighborhood who walked into a pawn shop with two dollars from a Lithuanian Jewish junk dealer and walked out with a five-dollar cornet. His name was Lou...