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Excerpt from City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 (The University of North Carolina Press). Used with permission.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG

so carried away while Rev (the preacher) would be right in the middle of his sermon.” “May Ann made a choice,’” writes Thomas Brothers in Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans. Born in an upriver town near Boutte, she joined thousands of first-generation free black folk who migrated to the city. Abandoned by Willie, she survived. For church, she chose “her tradition...clos- est to the ring shouts of slavery, the one that featured communal focus on a direct experience of the Holy Spirit, the one that cultivated vigorous rhythms that made your body move and deeply felt melody that made your heart pour out.” “When I was in church and when I was ‘second lin-ing’,” Armstrong recalled, “following the brass bands in parades — I started to listen carefully to the different instruments, noticing the things they played and how they played them.”

LOUIS WAS BORN AUGUST 4, 1901 to fifteen-year-old Mary Ann Albert and her boyfriend, Willie Armstrong; Louis grew up in the deep poverty of Back o’ Town, part of today’s Central City. The boy lived first with his paternal grandparents, then his mother and little sister in a shack that was razed years later to make room for the municipal complex. “In that one block between Gravier and Perdido Streets more people were crowded than you ever saw in your life,” he wrote in Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954). May Ann, his mother, took the children to a church where people danced as saints on salvation’s path. “It all came from the Old ‘Sanctified’ Churches,” wrote Armstrong, a grade-school dropout, in a 1967 letter typed on his trusty typewriter. “The whole Congregation would be Wailing — Singing like mad and sound so beautiful. I being a little boy would ‘Dig’ Everything when those Sisters would get

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