What A Wonderful World
Louis Armstrong
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Browse piano sheets by Louis Armstrong on Zen Virtual Piano. Louis Armstrong was raised by his mother, Mayann, in a New Orleans neighborhood so dangerous it was known as The Battlefield, and he left school early with only a fifth-grade education. Arrested on New Year's Eve 1912, he was sent to the Colored Waif's Home for Boys, and there Peter Davis taught him the cornet in earnest; he ended up leading the home's brass band. Joe King Oliver, the best-known cornetist in town, took him under his wing, and Armstrong was soon among the most sought-after cornetists in the city, finding regular work on Mississippi riverboats. A boy sent to a waif's home who came out as a bandleader suggests how decisive that early training was for everything that followed. Marable, whose band Armstrong played in, insisted that his musicians learn sight reading, and Armstrong later said that his time with Marable felt like going to the university, since it gave him wider experience with written arrangements. Oliver called him to Chicago in 1922 to join his band, and the pair's intricate two-cornet breaks became the talk of the town; they began recording together in 1923. He married Hardin in 1924, and she pressed him to leave Oliver and try it alone; a year with Fletcher Henderson's orchestra in New York proved unsatisfying, so he went back to Chicago in 1925 and for the first time recorded under his own name. A wife's urging and a frustrating year in New York suggest that his rise rested on other people nudging him toward his own voice, and on his willingness to leave a secure place. With improvised solos he turned jazz from a group music into a soloist's art, and his expressive singing brought in bursts of scat and a constant underlying swing. Some critics in the 1950s attacked his stage persona and used the label Uncle Tom, but in 1957 he answered them by speaking out against how the government handled the Little Rock Nine school crisis. A solo style that changed what jazz could be, and a public stand that answered his critics, hint at a performer whose influence reached past the bandstand and into public life, where his words carried real weight. Armstrong made the first recording of What a Wonderful World on August 16, 1967; the song's writers were George David Weiss and Bob Thiele, the latter credited as George Douglas. During taping, passing freight trains sounded their horns twice and the orchestra had to begin again; Armstrong shook his head, laughed and stayed calm. He kept performing until his death on July 6, 1971, and in 1972 he was posthumously given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. A calm reaction to a noisy session, and a later honor awarded after his death, hint at a musician who met setbacks with humor and whose standing only grew.
Browse piano sheets by Louis Armstrong on Zen Virtual Piano.
Louis Armstrong was raised by his mother, Mayann, in a New Orleans neighborhood so dangerous it was known as The Battlefield, and he left school early with only a fifth-grade education. Arrested on New Year's Eve 1912, he was sent to the Colored Waif's Home for Boys, and there Peter Davis taught him the cornet in earnest; he ended up leading the home's brass band. Joe King Oliver, the best-known cornetist in town, took him under his wing, and Armstrong was soon among the most sought-after cornetists in the city, finding regular work on Mississippi riverboats. A boy sent to a waif's home who came out as a bandleader suggests how decisive that early training was for everything that followed.
Marable, whose band Armstrong played in, insisted that his musicians learn sight reading, and Armstrong later said that his time with Marable felt like going to the university, since it gave him wider experience with written arrangements. Oliver called him to Chicago in 1922 to join his band, and the pair's intricate two-cornet breaks became the talk of the town; they began recording together in 1923. He married Hardin in 1924, and she pressed him to leave Oliver and try it alone; a year with Fletcher Henderson's orchestra in New York proved unsatisfying, so he went back to Chicago in 1925 and for the first time recorded under his own name. A wife's urging and a frustrating year in New York suggest that his rise rested on other people nudging him toward his own voice, and on his willingness to leave a secure place.
With improvised solos he turned jazz from a group music into a soloist's art, and his expressive singing brought in bursts of scat and a constant underlying swing. Some critics in the 1950s attacked his stage persona and used the label Uncle Tom, but in 1957 he answered them by speaking out against how the government handled the Little Rock Nine school crisis. A solo style that changed what jazz could be, and a public stand that answered his critics, hint at a performer whose influence reached past the bandstand and into public life, where his words carried real weight.
Armstrong made the first recording of What a Wonderful World on August 16, 1967; the song's writers were George David Weiss and Bob Thiele, the latter credited as George Douglas. During taping, passing freight trains sounded their horns twice and the orchestra had to begin again; Armstrong shook his head, laughed and stayed calm. He kept performing until his death on July 6, 1971, and in 1972 he was posthumously given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. A calm reaction to a noisy session, and a later honor awarded after his death, hint at a musician who met setbacks with humor and whose standing only grew.
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Louis Armstrong
Common questions
Louis Armstrong was a trumpeter, cornetist, vocalist and bandleader from New Orleans whose solos helped turn jazz into a soloist's art.
He first recorded it on August 16, 1967; it was written by Bob Thiele, as George Douglas, and George David Weiss.
King Oliver was the cornetist who mentored Armstrong and sent for him to join his band in Chicago in 1922.
He grew up in New Orleans, raised by his mother Mayann in a neighborhood so dangerous it was called The Battlefield.