‘Stomp Off, Let’s Go: The Early Years of Louis Armstrong’
By Ricky Riccardi
Oxford University Press, 455 Pages

It’s unusual to complain that a book should be longer than it is — authors typically give readers too much rather than too little — and that’s especially true if the book is merely one volume of a three-volume series covering a single life. Newly published by Oxford, “Stomp Off, Let’s Go: The Early Years of Louis Armstrong” finishes Ricky Riccardi’s definitive biographical series on one of the central figures of jazz, American music, and 20th century culture in general.  

The three books total something like 1,300 pages, so it’s no wonder Mr. Riccardi has been christened, in these very pages, “The Caro of Satchmo.” Yet Mr. Riccardi is a modest and restrained answer to Robert Caro, whose book on Robert Moses, “The Power Broker,” is approximately 1,300 pages all by itself. That’s nowhere near the totality of Mr. Caro’s ongoing Lyndon B. Johnson series, which now sadly has to carry on without the genius-level editing of the late Robert Gottlieb.

All of which is to say that 455 pages hardly seems like enough — “Stomp Off, Let’s Go” could easily be two volumes, which would bring the total to four. Armstrong’s first 20 or so years, his upbringing at New Orleans, could fill at least one book, or so Armstrong himself essentially contended when he ended his autobiography, the descriptively titled “Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans,” with his arrival at Chicago in 1922.

Likewise, there’s more than enough to be said about the years 1922 to 1928 — the British musicologist Edward Brooks filled 520 pages just describing Armstrong’s recordings of these years in his 2002 “The Young Louis Armstrong on Records,” a book that’s so detailed that he even tells you whether Armstrong was using a handheld mute or a fixed mute on his horn.

What surely makes Mr. Riccardi unusual among biographers is that he penned his three volumes in reverse order.  Some 15 or so years ago, the author decided – correctly – that the period of Armstrong’s life that was most neglected was the final 20 years, wherein he led his small touring group, Louis Armstrong’s All Stars, and when he landed numerous hits on the pop music charts, as much as a vocalist as a trumpet virtuoso and bandleader.  

Thus the first volume in the series, “What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years,” covered the concluding period in the great man’s chronology, from the end of his big band in 1947 to his funeral in 1971. The second book took it back an era earlier, and was called “Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong.” 

Mr. Riccardi has said that it also made sense for him to cover Armstrong’s early period last because so much more information has been made available in the decade and a half since he began work on the first volume. It’s logical to assume that we get further away from the past as time passes, but in some cases the opposite seems to happen. Thanks to widening access to information, it’s possible to know more about the first half of the 20th century right now than it was a generation or two ago. 

Indeed, there are so many revelations about Armstrong’s beginnings that, again, the work could have been much longer.  Even Armstrong’s birth date is the subject of a new debate, thanks to fresh research that suggests it may actually be July 4, 1901.  

What we previously thought was the most dramatic incident in Armstrong’s young life occurred on December 31, 1912, when the 11-year-old boy borrowed a handgun and fired it into the air to celebrate the New Year; he was subsequently arrested and incarcerated. Well, Mr. Riccardi has gained access to New Orleans police department records and shows us that the young Armstrong had repeated run-ins with the law and was locked up more than once — though not nearly as often as his mother, who was frequently charged with prostitution and disorderly conduct.

Mr. Riccardi’s account of Armstrong’s boyhood is the most moving and even disturbing that I’ve read. Here was a man who started life many steps below the lowest rung on the social ladder, one who largely raised himself and his sister because of a father who abandoned the family and a mother who wasn’t around much either. Mr. Riccardi takes us through every stage of his development, from his early infatuation with the great trumpet kings of New Orleans, especially Bunk Johnson and King Oliver, and his hard-scrabble fight to learn how to play the horn and to read music.

Mr. Riccardi corrects lots of mistakes that have been endemic to our understanding of the mighty man; among them, he restores honor to Bunk Johnson. In the 1940s, Johnson told everyone that he had been one of Armstrong’s chief mentors, but he was so unreliable a witness that most everyone assumed he was exaggerating. Mr. Riccardi, though, surprises us by showing that there was a lot of truth to Johnson’s claims.

There are previously unknown details and surprises galore: We all knew that Armstrong’s “West End Blues,” based on a melody by Joseph “King” Oliver — the man Armstrong most consistently cited as his primary inspiration — is a likely candidate for the title of the greatest jazz record ever made. Mr. Riccardi shows us that it also was a hit record in 1928, and that well before Armstrong had begun leading a full-size dance band and crooning Tin Pan Alley ballads, he was already selling a lot of shellac.  

Above all, Mr. Riccardi brings us the brilliance of the mighty man. Somehow, against all odds, Armstrong became one of the most celebrated individuals that humanity has yet produced.  Finally, the greatest figure in all of American music has a full-dress biography that’s worthy of him.