OPEN SOURCE: Terry Teachout's "Pops:" Louis Armstrong's Culture Changing Genius

Chris Lydon: You refer to him at one point as a middlebrow genius, which I think is awfully good, but spell it out.

Terry Teachout: I used that phrase because Armstrong is a guy whose favorite band leader was Guy Lombardo, a guy who just liked a good tune, who happened to be a culture-changing genius. And he didn't see why you couldn't like Guy Lombardo and Caruso and the Beatles and Barbra Streisand, and Joe Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton — he just thought it was all music. The picture on the cover of my book was taken by Philippe Halsman in 1965. It is an outtake from a session that was photographed for the cover of LIFE, this very famous photo that everybody's seen of Armstrong with his eyes popping and the horn pointing outward and he's dressed in this tux. He looks wonderful and he looks like the Armstrong we all know. In this photograph, Armstrong's just standing there with a very enigmatic half-smile on his face, holding his horn, dressed beautifully, looking like a man who knows something that maybe we don't know, a man who knows his complexity, the complications of his own personality, who has seen the world as it is and in a very deep sense has accepted the world as it is. Armstrong is a man who is at peace with himself. At the very end of his life he sent a letter to a friend that I quote at the end of my book, where he says that 'my whole life has been happiness and I love everybody.' And he wasn't kidding, he really wasn't kidding. That kind of acceptance of the fundamental realities of life, not meaning that you don't want life to be changed, but that you accept the world as it is, and decide that you're going to make the best of it, that's really at the heart of his character, and I think of his genius too. It allows him to take in all things in his music and his art, the sadness, the beauty, the joy, the comedy, and make them one.

Chris Lydon: You refer to him at one point as a middlebrow genius, which I think is awfully good, but spell it out.

Terry Teachout: I used that phrase because Armstrong is a guy whose favorite band leader was Guy Lombardo, a guy who just liked a good tune, who happened to be a culture-changing genius. And he didn't see why you couldn't like Guy Lombardo and Caruso and the Beatles and Barbra Streisand, and Joe Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton — he just thought it was all music. The picture on the cover of my book was taken by Philippe Halsman in 1965. It is an outtake from a session that was photographed for the cover of LIFE, this very famous photo that everybody's seen of Armstrong with his eyes popping and the horn pointing outward and he's dressed in this tux. He looks wonderful and he looks like the Armstrong we all know. In this photograph, Armstrong's just standing there with a very enigmatic half-smile on his face, holding his horn, dressed beautifully, looking like a man who knows something that maybe we don't know, a man who knows his complexity, the complications of his own personality, who has seen the world as it is and in a very deep sense has accepted the world as it is. Armstrong is a man who is at peace with himself. At the very end of his life he sent a letter to a friend that I quote at the end of my book, where he says that 'my whole life has been happiness and I love everybody.' And he wasn't kidding, he really wasn't kidding. That kind of acceptance of the fundamental realities of life, not meaning that you don't want life to be changed, but that you accept the world as it is, and decide that you're going to make the best of it, that's really at the heart of his character, and I think of his genius too. It allows him to take in all things in his music and his art, the sadness, the beauty, the joy, the comedy, and make them one.