Let’s Talk: Artist, Archives and Museums

Here’s the update: I, along with my fellow Fellow Maglyn Bertrand, have been working with the Louis Armstrong House Museum and Archives for eleven months now. We’ve almost made a year of what was originally only a ten-month-long fellowship. It has transformed into a catalyst of adventuring and exploring the life and career of one...

Fellowship Reflections

On September 25, 2020, I authored my first blog post for this webpage. In that initial post, I drew attention to the sounds of Armstrong’s den, his personal archive, and the reel-to-reel tape recordings he made in that room. I could not have predicted that my interest in exploring Armstrong’s interactions with audio technology and...

Armstrong as a consumer of twentieth century audio technology

In 1958 an article about Louis Armstrong entitled “He Tapes It All!” appeared in an issue of Hi-Fi at Home, an American magazine publication “targeted at the growing audience for high fidelity home systems.”[1] Unlike other 1950s print media articles written about Armstrong, which portrayed him as a cultural ambassador, icon, and entertainer, “He Tapes...

As Told By Women

Telling Louis Armstrong’s life story featuring the voices of women he encountered during his journey was a goal that Fellow Maglyn Bertrand and I were assigned during the Fall. I believe creating a tour that highlights women’s perspectives has inspired Maglyn and me to draw on and reflect on our own experiences as women. By...

Armstrong’s Fan Club – Part II

In 1957, Armstrong and the All Stars went on a goodwill tour of several South American countries including Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela. After landing at Buenos Aires’ airport known as Aeropuerto Internacional de Ezeiza, a welcome party consisting of some 5,000 ecstatic Argentines, greeted Armstrong and the All Stars on the tarmac. Two...

“Accurate but Incomplete”

“It’s sadly easy to reverse meaning, in fact, to tell a lie, by offering an accurate but incomplete quote,”1 said author Octavia Butler in an Essence article in 2000. After reading this article, I began to think about Louis’ life; how his collections have humanized the man from the legend the world thought they knew...

Armstrong’s Fan Club – Part I

I would like to think that if I had lived during Louis Armstrong’s time and had the opportunity to meet him, I would know how to act and what to say. However, based on my previous interactions with certain contemporary musicians during official and unofficial “meet and greets,” I am not certain I would be...

Tutti i passi che ho fatto, nella mia vita, mi hanno portato qui, ora

Photograph of Louis Armstrong, Velma Middleton, and Ray Martino backstage in Italy, 1949. A professor I had during my graduate program in Italy had my cohort and I report to Piazza Santa Maria Novella for class one day. She instructed us to find the place that was engraved with the following saying: “tutti i passi...

Armstrong’s “Social Networks”

On the Louis Armstrong House Museum’s (LAHM) digital collections webpage, I keep a folder entitled “Random Items” that holds a group of interesting but unrelated digitized archival objects. This past week I re-examined some of the objects in the folder, which includes a 1968 telegram written by Armstrong that mentions Barbra Streisand’s voice, a photo...

Fragmented Stories in Perspective

The Palace of Stories. That’s the name my friends and I settled on calling our first floor, two-bedroom/ basement apartment located in a modern gentrified Brooklyn building. We made it official by making it our WIFI name, so whenever someone visited and needed access, those words would display on their setting options in bold letters....