Lillian Hardin Armstrong

Musician and composer

• Born: February 3, 1898
• Birthplace: Memphis, Tennessee
• Died: August 27, 1971
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

Armstrong was a pianist, singer, and composer who is remembered primarily for encouraging her husband, Louis Armstrong, to move out of the shadow of his mentor, King Oliver. By helping him gain confidence in his own abilities and playing, she played a vital role in launching him on the career path that took him to New York to play with Fletcher Henderson and then into the recording studios to make the Hot Five recordings that had unparalleled influence in the development of jazz.

Early Life

Lillian Hardin Armstrong was raised primarily by her mother. Dempsey Hardin was a strict and religious woman who did everything in her power to protect Armstrong from the seamier side of Memphis life, especially the blues and blues culture.

By the age of five, Armstrong was enthralled by the organ in the parlor of their rooming house and within a year her mother had found a way to provide her with piano instruction. By the time she was in her early teens, Armstrong was competing in piano competitions in Memphis. Her success in school encouraged Dempsey to send her to Fisk University in Nashville to begin a college preparatory course.

After a year at Fisk, Armstrong returned to Memphis in 1917 to live with her mother. Soon they moved together to Chicago as part of the Great Migration. Within a year, Armstrong had parlayed her talent and interest in popular music into a job demonstrating songs at Jones’s Music Store, where she met many local jazz musicians. The most notable of these was Jelly Roll Morton, who impressed the young woman as a rhythmically energetic player. Armstrong strove to emulate many of the elements of Morton’s playing, although she did not yet improvise.

Jennie Jones, who owned the music store, also was a booker for bands and musical acts in Chicago. When clarinetist Lawrence Duhé needed a pianist to play with his New Orleans Creole Band in 1918, Jones sent Armstrong. Remembering her first attempt to play in a band with nonreading musicians, Armstrong had to trust her ear and her knowledge of the repertoire of popular music to survive. She succeeded well enough for Duhé to retain her services for the next three months. When her mother found out, she allowed Armstrong to continue only if she was escorted home each night by one of the band members or Dempsey herself.

During this period, Armstrong became known as “Hot Miss Lil.” By 1918, the band had moved to the more upscale Dreamland Ballroom and been taken over by cornetist Joe “King” Oliver. Not satisfied with the new group, Lil remained at the Dreamland as an accompanist to singers when Oliver relocated to the Royal Gardens. By 1920, Armstrong had yielded to Oliver’s entreaties to rejoin his group. They traveled to San Francisco, where they played for almost a year. In late 1921, she returned to Chicago and resumed working as an accompanist until Oliver and the rest of the group came back.

The ensuing period was notable for the fact that the band began to make recordings in March, 1923 (making it the first black jazz group to record extensively) and for the addition of Louis Armstrong in August, 1922. Oliver decided to add the younger cornetist to the group for reasons that are not entirely clear, but the talents of his New Orleans protégé made the group even more popular with audiences, although they did not initially impress his future wife.

By 1922, both Armstrong’s and Louis’s first marriages were breaking up and they began to see each other off the bandstand. Armstrong also became more and more interested in Louis’s musical abilities, especially after Oliver admitted that the younger man was a better player. The couple married in February, 1924.

By the late 1920’s Armstrong and Louis were seeing other people and, despite several attempts to reconcile, they separated, eventually divorcing in 1938. Armstrong returned to school and earned a music degree from the Chicago College of Music in 1928. She also continued playing at the Dreamland and recording with groups that included New Orleans musicians such as Johnny Dodds, Baby Dodds, and Freddie Keppard. Encouraged by her academic success, Armstrong relocated to New York in 1929 and began studies in classical piano at the New York College of Music.

Life’s Work

Much of Armstrong’s early career is bound up with Louis’s, but even during their marriage she occasionally branched out into other professional situations. She is well represented on recordings in the 1920’s, participating on all the recordings by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band and the first half of Louis’s Hot Five series. In addition to these, she appears on numerous recordings for other leaders and under her own name.

Armstrong led an all-female group called the Harlem Harlicans in Chicago in 1931-1932. Also in Chicago, in 1935, she began a five-year period as the house pianist for Decca Records. In this capacity (which may have been unofficial), she accompanied numerous blues and popular singers (including Georgia White, Peetie Wheatstraw, and Alberta Hunter) in addition to leading her own sessions with combos of swing musicians. Other than short stints in New York in 1937-1938 and 1940, she used Chicago as her base for the rest of her life.

During World War II, Armstrong learned how to sew and became a seamstress and clothing designer, even making some of the clothing her former husband wore onstage. For a short time, she owned and operated a restaurant called Lil Armstrong’s Swing Shack in Chicago and taught music and French on the side.

By the 1950’s, Armstrong had returned to performing regularly. Her credentials with early jazz bands allowed her entry into jazz festivals and tours across the country and in Europe. She also was frequently interviewed about her early days and recorded a series of reminiscences for Riverside Records in the 1950’s. In that decade, she also saw one of her compositions (“Just for a Thrill”) recorded by Peggy Lee, Aretha Franklin, and Ray Charles.

Through the 1960’s, Armstrong continued to play and sing as a soloist, performing many of her own songs, composed with and without her former husband. At the conclusion of a memorial performance six weeks after Louis’s death, Armstrong died onstage of a heart attack.

Significance

While Armstrong had a long and varied career, she is best remembered as the person who was perhaps most responsible for inspiring Louis Armstrong to move beyond the strictures of the New Orleans jazz style and create a style of jazz based on his improvisational genius. Her encouragement was essential to his decision to leave Oliver’s band in 1924 to go to New York to play with Fletcher Henderson in a move that had tremendous ramifications on the style of music played by eastern jazz musicians. Likewise his accession to her demand that he return to Chicago a year later launched the series of recordings he made under his own name that brought him to international prominence.

Apart from her career with Louis, Armstrong was an active songwriter whose works have been covered by numerous jazz, blues, and popular artists over the years. Her work with dozens of instrumentalists and singers during her time with Decca Records in the late 1930’s also was remarkable for the position of authority she had, which was rare at the time for an African American woman in the music industry.

Bibliography

Dickerson, James L. Just for a Thrill: Lil Hardin Armstrong, First Lady of Jazz. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002. The only biography of Armstrong to date, this book is severely compromised by significant lapses in musical, historical, biographical, and editorial methodology.

Teachout, Terry. Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. Contains much biographic material on the period of Louis and Lillian’s marriage.

Terkel, Studs. And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey. New York: New Press, 2005. Includes the transcript of an interview Terkel did with Armstrong.