We contributed Louis Armstrong! He grew up poor in a bad part of New Orleans, and had to work early in his childhood to help support his family. His first couple of scrappy jobs included, working on a junk wagon, cleaning graves for tips, selling coal, and singing on street corners for pennies.

uDiscover Music

Early life and career
Jazz standards are musical compositions that are widely known, performed and recorded by jazz artists as part of the genre's musical repertoire. This list includes compositions written in the s that are considered standards by at least one major book publication or reference work. Some of the tunes listed were already well-known standards by the s, while others were popularized later. The time of the most influential recordings of a song, where appropriate, is indicated on the list. A period known as the " Jazz Age " started in the United States in the s. Jazz had become popular music in the country, although older generations considered the music immoral and threatening to old cultural values. However, Chicago's importance as a center of jazz music started to diminish toward the end of the s in favor of New York. In the early years of jazz, record companies were often eager to decide what songs were to be recorded by their artists. The first jazz artist to be given some liberty in choosing his material was Louis Armstrong , whose band helped popularize many of the early standards in the s and s.
Essentials
With the original transfer supplied by Nick Dellow , here is the mother record which was shipped by Okeh to Germany for their Odeon pressings. The sound is wonderfully immediate, and crystal clear. Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Or sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. We thank you! These recordings sound even better knowing some the backstory that inspired them. Thanks for posting!
It was released a few weeks after the recording and soon began to attract the attention of record buyers. A few weeks after joining the band, at his second session with Henderson, they recorded the wonderful Shanghai Shuffle arranged by band member, clarinettist and saxophonist, Don Redman. Also with Louis in the orchestra at this time was Coleman Hawkins the brilliant tenor saxophonist. The Hot Five were back in the studio in the last week of February where Louis managed another first. By the time the second verse came around Louis had dropped the paper on which the lyrics were written. However, it was Louis that did much to popularize scatting. Not only were these sessions marked by the addition of a drummer, but they also have the distinction of being recorded electronically, rather than by the old acoustic process.