Customer Reviews

Satch Blows the Blues

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This is an excellent compilation of Louis Armstrong material. It spans the Hot Fives of the late 1920s to the orchestras and big bands Armstrong led in the 1930s to the All-Stars of the mid-1950s.

I prefer the Hot Fives and the All-Stars over the big bands and orchestras because the musicians (Earl Hines, Trummy Young, and Barney Bigard) surrounding Armstrong are better.

Among the tracks included are: "West End Blues," a classic whose beauty demands that the listener pay attention; "St. Louis Blues," in which Armstrong transforms the heart-aching song Bessie Smith recorded into a rousing, toe-tapping showstopper; and "Black and Blue," a song that summarizes the racism that existed in the 1930s.

I will be listening to this album many times in the future.

This is the sexiest, raunchiest, jazziest collection of mean, gut-bucket and low-down blues that Louis Armstrong ever recorded. Fifty years before gangsta rap, the poor blacks of New Orleans had their own songs of violence, sudden death, and passion.

"St. James Infirmary" is a song about a black pimp who kills his white girlfriend, then goes down to the morgue to look at her dead body, and fantasizes killing her all over again!

"Black and Blue" is about a race riot in St. Louis, when white men were shooting into black houses and killing women and children at random.

"Tight Like That" is about a virgin who can't understand why it's so "tight" and has to be reassured by her much more knowing boyfriend. Get the picture, Tipper Gore? Got a problem, Cynthia Tucker?

Not that all of the songs on this album are violent and dark. There are a couple of very sexy jazz age ballads, especially "When You're Alone" and "You Made The Night Too Long." No doubt these were the songs more popular with white fans at the time -- especially love-sick flappers of college age who no doubt spent their time lounging around in fabulous gowns mooning over this or that handsome hunk. Of course it's likely that some of the livelier ones occasionally fantasized about having a forbidden black lover as well! But of this we must not speak.

Louis Armstrong was no Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice. And his music was not the white-washed politically correct pablum that modern Uncle Toms like Cynthia Tucker seem to want black children to listen to. No, when Satch sang he sang the BLUES -- songs about brutal sex, violent men, and tough times.

Let it be tight like that then!