It’s fitting that today — on Juneteenth National Independence Day — we look back 99 years ago to the day when Louis Armstrong, an aspiring trumpet player from a New Orleans shantytown, liberated himself, his music form and America’s Second City.
It happened in OKeh Records’ sunless portable studio in the Loop, on the fourth floor of a brick warehouse in a shabby neighborhood of wall-to-wall storehouses, wholesalers and newspapers. The musicians had two choices to get their equipment upstairs: lug it up themselves or borrow the freight elevator. At most sessions, there was an audience of two: one engineer and an equally lonely producer. There, Armstrong and his mates cut 38 discs aimed not at all of music-loving America, but at the narrow all-Negro market derisively known as race records and especially at Black people in the not-so-old Confederacy.
The recording process was as slapdash as its setting was rudimentary. Performers came straight from their late-night gigs, sometimes back-to-back-to-back shows that ended at 3 in the morning and left them adrenaline-charged but sleep-deprived. Records were made of shellac and, on average, captured just three minutes of sound. Fees were flat and low. Musicians gathered at large horns set up around the room. The recorders acted like funnels, dispersing sounds to a stylus that cut them directly onto a rotating disc. Any mistake meant starting over. OKeh reasoned that it was bad to “expert” the musicmakers and inhibit their freedom. It also was expensive. And while OKeh was the industry leader in race records, its standards were low, sloppiness was tolerated, and part of the attraction was that Black artists could be underpaid and overworked.
But Little Louis transcended those bleak circumstances. The music that his Hot Five and Hot Seven bands set to wax in that cramped studio would become a yardstick against which all other jazz would be measured, then and still. It crafted a new language for the callow genre and transformed an all-ensemble approach into the art of the soloist — the highest art when that solitary performer was Armstrong.
At 24, Armstrong was the youngest of the combo that inaugural night of record-making on Nov. 12, 1925. He’d lured in his pals for these sessions pitched to Southern tastes: trombonist Edward “Kid” Ory, whose band he’d joined after King Oliver left Louisiana; two talented Johnnys, Dodds on clarinet and St. Cyr on banjo and guitar; and pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong, Louis’ wife of 21 months. It was his first time recording with a band of his own, and listening to him egg on his bandmates makes clear how he relished the role: “Oh, play that thing, Mr. St. Cyr, lord. You know you can do it.” It wasn’t just fellow musicians he was inviting in to the merrymaking, but his prospective audience. The band laid down just three songs that night — “My Heart,” “Yes! I’m in the Barrel” and the most memorable and first to be released, “Gut Bucket Blues.” If those had been the only tracks they ever committed to wax, it would have made a compelling footnote to the Armstrong catalog, but the quintet returned to the studio twice in February and, on the 26th, it etched itself into history.
“Heebie Jeebies,” a lilting ditty, opened with Louis warbling, “I’ve got the heebies, I mean the jeebies.” Then he inserted “eef,” “gaff,” “mmff,” “dee-bo,” “rip-bip-ee-doo-dee-doot” and other nonsense syllables that sounded more like a musical instrument than spoken English and that he sang while making funny faces. Was it, as Louis insisted, that he dropped the sheet with the lyrics and, not remembering them, made up plosive vocables? He told the story so joyfully that people assumed it couldn’t be so, but it might well have been. It wasn’t the beginning of scatting; Armstrong had done that himself with his kids quartet, and the technique traced back to Irish lilters and German yodelers. But this Hot Five version spread faster than the Great Chicago Fire.
Forty-thousand records sold within weeks, along with “Heebie Jeebies” shoes, hats, sandwiches and a dance choreographed to accompany the song. Drummer and later vibraphonist Lionel Hampton was one of many boyish musicians walking Chicago’s wintry streets in hopes of catching cold and echoing the gravelly Louis, while Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan were but a few of the adult crooners copying his hi-de-ho-style chatter and irrepressible cool. “You would hear cats greeting each other with Louis’ riffs when they met around town — I got the heebies, one would yell out, and the other would answer I got the jeebies, and the next minute they were scatting in each other’s face,” recalled Armstrong friend Mezz Mezzrow. “Louis’ recording almost drove the English language out of the Windy City for good.”
He’d stepped into the city at a magical moment. Chicago was bounding back, recovering from a flu pandemic that killed 8,500 of its residents, from a world war that took another 4,000 and from a race riot that was the deadliest in the country during that Red Summer of 1919, claiming 23 Black lives along with 15 white. By 1922, Chicago had become America’s railroad hub. Its stockyards processed more meat than anywhere on the planet, while its electronics industry made it the Silicon Valley of that time. Steel mills churned, construction boomed and, although its Second City moniker originally derived from its being built afresh after the fire of 1871, it now challenged New York for the title of America’s most vibrant metropolis.
Black Chicago flourished, too. Its numbers swelled from 44,000 in 1910 to an astonishing 234,000 in 1930. Historians would label this Great Migration northward of southern Black people the “flight from Egypt,” and Chicago was their promised land. Especially enticing was The Stroll. That’s how everyone referred to the bright-lit blocks on State Street between 26th and 39th, in the heart of the Black South Side, where, in the 1920s, there were more jazz clubs, cafes, cabarets and vaudeville houses than in Harlem or Back o’ Town. At the mixed-race black-and-tans, Black and white people crowded together around the bandstand in unheard-of intimacy, dressed to the nines. In an era before TVs, cars, air conditioning and suburbs had taken full hold, this was where adventuresome teenagers and their parents flocked to taste the good times.
“Unless it happened in New Orleans, I don’t think so much good jazz was ever concentrated in so small an area,” said Eddie Condon, a white jazzman coming up then in Chicago. “Around midnight you could hold an instrument in the middle of the street and the air would play it.”
Armstrong was already imagining new vistas by then. While he’d leave Chicago in 1929, he’d already changed in ways that made the second-string cornetist who’d stepped off the train from New Orleans seven years before nearly unrecognizable. His timing was pitch-perfect, as always — leaving shortly before the stock market took its historic tumble and Elliot Ness and his Untouchables took down Al Capone’s jazz-loving mob.
The silent movie and jazz ages were both winding down. While Armstrong had played mostly for Black listeners during his time on the South Side, the whole world would soon be his oyster. And while Harlem and Hollywood were his immediate destinations, neither would be the home that the Second City had been or reshape him nearly as much.
This piece is adapted from Larry Tye’s latest book, “The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America.” Tye is also The New York Times bestselling author of “Bobby Kennedy” and “Satchel.”
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.