I’ve very recently had the pleasure of hearing for the first time a Louis Armstrong album called Louis and the Good Book. The original LP, from 1958, features 12 tracks including such spiritual tunes as Go Down, Moses, Down by the Riverside, and This Train. The 8 extra tracks on the CD include thematically related material going back to the 1930s. One of my favorite songs in the CD is Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen, which appears in two quite distinct but brilliant-in-their-own-way performances, one from 1958 and one from 1938. At this YouTube link you can watch a very fine performance by Louis of the same song, said to be from 1962.

If you haven’t seen it, there is a highly fascinating article that recently appeared in Commentary (thanks to Sean S. for originally sending me the link) called “Satchmo and the Jews.” Observing that Louis Armstrong was equally beloved as a man by those who knew him as he was admired for his monumental contribution to American music, Teachout also notes that he was apparently “devoid of personal prejudice.”

Armstrong’s lack of prejudice extended to Jews, an attitude that was comparatively rare among blacks of his generation. Outside his marriages, his closest adult relationship was with Joe Glaser, a Jewish gangster from Chicago who became his manager in 1935 and with whom he was intimately associated from then on. Armstrong described Glaser as “my dearest friend,” and those who knew both men well agreed that this was nothing more than the truth.

He was similarly admiring of the Karnofskys, a family of Jewish peddlers from Lithuania for whom he had worked as a boy in New Orleans. In 1969 he wrote a lengthy memoir of his relationship with the Karnofskys called “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, La., the Year of 1907.” In it he told of how surprised he had been to discover that they “were having problems of their own—[a]long with hard times from the other white folks[’] nationalities who felt that they were better than the Jewish race. . . . I was only Seven years old but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the White Folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for.”

The young Armstrong saw the Karnofskys’ problems up close, for they took him under their wing, treating him almost like a relative. “They were always warm and kind to me, which was very noticeable to me—just a kid who could use a little word of kindness,” he recalled. He shared meals with them and borrowed money from them to buy his first cornet. Thereafter he would identify with the Karnofskys and the other Jews of New Orleans so closely that he became an ardent philo-Semite who wore a Star of David around his neck (Joe Glaser gave it to him). “I will love the Jewish people, all of my life,” he wrote in “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family,” adding that he learned from them “how to live—real life and determination.”

I would definitely recommend reading the whole piece.

And a new biography of Louis Armstrong, written by the same Terry Teachout, is being published this week: Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.

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