81 Thoughtful Quotes By Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong was a legendary American music composer, singer and sporadic actor. He was renowned for exploring different avenues in the Jazz genre. With a career spanning over five decades, Armstrong reinvented the wheel with new methods of blowing the trumpet and cornet. Armstrong received wide acceptance even while bending a few rules and notion of lyrical music to incorporate his style, with his signature gravelly voice and charismatic on stage persona. During the twilight of his career, he expanded his horizons into various genres of music such as Dixieland, swing and traditional pop. Louis Armstrong (nicknamed as Satchmo or Pops), will be forever remembered as the first African-American to break the shackles of race and origin. Though, he never politicized the racial agenda in his work, he was quite vocal during desegregation in the Little Rock crisis. This Grammy Hall of Famer was awarded with Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award posthumously by the Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. We have compiled some of his most notable quotes from his observations, views, interviews etc. Read through these quotes illustrating the thinking of this legendary African American composer.
And I think to myself what a wonderful world. Oh, yeah....
If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
Musicians don't retire; they stop when there's no more music in them.
Don't do nothing halfway, else you find yourself dropping more than can be picked up.
Every time I close my eyes blowing that trumpet of mine, I look right into the heart of good old New Orleans. It has given me something to live for.
My whole life, my whole soul, my whole spirit is to blow that horn.
Some of you young folks been saying to me, 'Hey Pops, what you mean what a wonderful world? How about all them wars all over the place? You call them wonderful? And how about hunger and pollution? They ain't so wonderful either.' But how about listening to old Pops for a minute. It seems to me it ain't the world that's so bad, but what we're doing to it, and all I'm saying is see what a wonderful world it would be if only we'd give it a chance. Love, baby, love. That's the secret. Yeah. If lots more of us loved each other, we'd solve lots more problems. And man, this world would be a gasser.
A lotta cats copy the Mona Lisa, but people still line up to see the original.
Making money ain't nothing exciting to me. You might be able to buy a little better booze than the wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat and when you die you're just as graveyard dead as he is.
I got a simple rule about everybody. If you don't treat me right - shame on you.
To jazz, or not to jazz, there is no question!
It really puzzles me to see marijuana connected with narcotics dope and all of that stuff. It is a thousand times better than whiskey. It is an assistant and a friend.
All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.
If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it. And if I don’t practice for three days, the public knows it.
Unless you know what it is I ain't never going to be able to explain it to you.
Each man has his own music bubbling up inside him.
Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.
There is no such thing as 'on the way out' as long as you are still doing something interesting and good; you're in the business because you're breathing.
What we play is life.
Give me a kiss to build a dream on And my imagination will thrive upon that kiss Sweetheart, I ask no more than this A kiss to build a dream on.
I'll bet right now most of the youngsters and hot club fans who hear the name Storyville hasn't the least idea that it consisted of some of the biggest prostitutes in the world ... Standing in their doorways nightly in their fine and beautiful negligees -- faintly calling to the boys as they passed their cribs.
We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.
You got to love to be able to play
I don't let my mouth say nothin' my head can't stand....
Seems to me it ain't the world that's so bad but what we're doing to it, and all I'm saying is: see what a wonderful world it would be if only we'd give it a chance. Love, baby - love. That's the secret.
The Brick House was one of the toughest joints I ever played in ... Guys would drink and fight one another like circle saws. Bottles would come flying over the bandstand like crazy and there was lots of plain common shooting and cutting. But somehow all that jive didn't faze me at all. I was so happy to have some place to blow my horn.
The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.
There's only two ways to sum up music; either it's good or it's bad. If it's good you don't mess about it, you just enjoy it.
The best I can do is stay happy.
Not too slow, not too fast. Kind of like half-fast.
