How did famous New Orleans jazz trumpet player Louis Armstrong get his first horn?
 
Seven-year-old Louis Armstrong was too poor to buy a real instrument. He didn’t even go to school. To help his mother pay the rent, every day he rode a junk wagon through the streets of New Orleans, playing a tin horn and collecting stuff people didn’t want. Then one day, the junk wagon passed a pawn shop with a gleaming brass

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Traces the life of the innovative jazz saxophonist and the evolution of his music.

Traces the life of the innovative jazz saxophonist and the evolution of his music.

Publisher Annotation: Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. On the outside, you couldn't find two girls who looked more different. But on the inside, they were alike--full of hopes and dreams and plans of what might be.

Louis Armstrong was the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century and a giant of modern American culture. Offstage he was witty, introspective and unexpectedly complex, a beloved colleague with an explosive temper whose larger-than-life personality was tougher and more sharp-edged than his worshipping fans ever knew. Wall Street Journal arts columnist Terry Teachout has drawn on new sources unavailable to previous biographers, including hundreds...