Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong

New York: Houghton Mifflin. Near Fine in Fine dust jacket. 2009. First Edition. Hardcover. Personal inscription, "From Brian & Kelly Christmas 2009", on the page between the half-title and the title page. Protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. Black boards and spine with title and author imprinted in gold. Full number line 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. . 475 pages. Louis Armstrong was the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century and a giant of modern American culture. He knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts, wrote the finest of all jazz autobiographies - without a collaborator - and created collages that have been compared to the art of Romare Bearden. The ranks of his admirers included Johnny Cash, Jackson Pollock and Orson Welles. Offstage he was witty, introspective and unexpectedly complex, a beloved colleague with an explosive temper whose larger-than-life personality was tougher and more sharp-edged than his worshipping fans ever knew. "Wall Street Journal" arts columnist Terry Teachout has drawn on a cache of important new sources unavailable to previous Armstrong biographers, including hundreds of private recordings of backstage and after-hours conversations that Armstrong made throughout the second half of his life, to craft a sweeping new narrative biography of this towering figure that shares full, accurate versions of such storied events as Armstrong's decision to break up his big band and his quarrel with President Eisenhower for the first time. Certain to be the definitive word on Armstrong for our generation, POPS paints a gripping portrait of the man, his world and his music .