Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong was born in a neighbourhood of New Orleans so rough it was called the Battlefield. His father left soon after his birth and his mother, who was fifteen when she had him, sometimes turned to prostitution to feed her children. Louis left school at eleven, sang on street corners for pennies and worked for a Jewish immigrant family, the Karnofskys, hauling coal and junk. They fed him and lent him money for his first cornet.

On New Year's Eve 1912 he fired a pistol into the air and was arrested and sent to the Colored Waif's Home for Boys. It was there, under the bandmaster Peter Davis, that he was taught properly, rising to lead the home's brass band through the streets he had grown up in.

Out of the home, he delivered coal by day and played by night, studying the cornetist Joe Oliver, who became his mentor and in 1922 called him to Chicago. Within a few years his own recordings with the Hot Five and Hot Seven had rewritten what a jazz solo could be, and his gravelly singing and wordless scat had rewritten what a singer could do.

He toured for the rest of his life, became an unofficial ambassador for his country and spoke out sharply in 1957 when Arkansas barred Black children from school. In 1964, at 62, his Hello, Dolly! knocked the Beatles off the top of the American charts. He died in 1971.