Louis Daniel Armstrong

Louis Daniel Armstrong died in New York City on July 6, 1971. He was sixty-nine. Born in New Orleans on August 4, 1901, he learned the horn in the Waif's Home and then rewrote jazz twice: once as a cornet and trumpet soloist, and again as a singer whose gravel made the American songbook sound like speech. He was criticized for smiling through a Jim Crow circuit he also quietly helped to break. Queens was the house with the study and the tapes. This memorial names New Orleans, the city that started the sound. The house in Corona is a museum. The grave is in Flushing.