Pops

A review in City Journal of Terry Teachout's new biography of Louis Armstrong:

In the spring of 1998, Time commissioned Al Hirschfeld, the doyen of American caricaturists, to draw an unusual cover. It would celebrate five outstanding “Artists and Entertainers of the Century”—Pablo Picasso, Lucille Ball, Charlie Chaplin, Steven Spielberg, and Louis Armstrong. Much fanfare accompanied the announcement. That illustration was never published.

A handful of staffers condemned the portrait of Armstrong as racist and made their feelings known to the managing editor. He capitulated without a backward glance. “We thought,” recalled Walter Isaacson, “it’s controversial, so why go there?” Hirschfeld redrew the cover (for a substantial fee), with Bob Dylan sitting in for the black trumpeter.

The decision was an egregious blunder. In the first place, it distorted history in the name of political correctness. Dylan is a pop and folk superstar, but he is in no sense a great musician. His compositions are elemental, his guitar work no more than adequate. As for his voice, only Woody Allen could sound so adenoidal. In contrast, Armstrong’s horn is the most authoritative instrument in the annals of jazz (“You can’t play nothing on trumpet that doesn’t come from him,” remarked Miles Davis). And Armstrong’s vocal phrasing has influenced just about every cabaret and band singer from the 1920s to the present.

Second, Hirschfeld, once an editorial cartoonist for the radical New Masses and perhaps the least biased artist in America, had no intention of giving offense. He was simply rendering Armstrong’s toothy, incandescent smile and exophthalmic eyes, markedly white against his dark brown skin. Hirschfeld didn’t create that caricature; Armstrong did. As Terry Teachout explains in his luminous biography, exaggeration and over-the-top bonhomie were the way Armstrong survived, then prevailed, and finally triumphed in life and in show business, an arena with even fewer scruples than journalism.