Negotiating Primitivist Modernisms: Louis Armstrong, Robert Goffin, and the Transatlantic Jazz Debate

Abstract

This essay will offer a series of contextualized comparative close readings of Armstrong’s manuscript, Goffin’s adaptation—which turned the manuscript into a biography—and Armstrong’s autobiographical responses to this biography.3 This negotiation of Armstrong’s life story took place within a transatlantic debate about the history and meanings of jazz as an expression of American modernism, but it also stands in the context of what Sieglinde Lemke has called primitivist modernism in her book of the same title.4 A major objective of this transatlantic debate was to gain discursive control over a music that expressed difficult notions of black agency, artistry, and racial affirmation at a time when massive socio-political and musical changes were occurring on both sides of the Atlantic.5 In the United States, these changes involved the burgeoning African American struggle for civil rights that followed the so-called Double V campaign during World War II, which had indelibly connected the fight against fascism abroad with the fight against racism at home, and the heated arguments about the presumed commercial excesses of swing music, the potential political validity of the oncoming bebop (described as “the war come home” by Lott [“Double V” 246]), and the allegedly reactionary stance of revivalist jazz. In many ways, this was also a critical moment in jazz historiography, a moment in which many previous controversies concerning the cultural powers of jazz and its significances as a musical aesthetics very much different from European classic music clashed. I cannot do justice to the complexities inherent in this clash of controversies in the context of my argument about the Goffin-Armstrong exchange here, but I do want to at least name the two book publications of the time that most immediately contextualize Goffin’s Horn of Plenty: the Jewish jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow’s collaboratively written memoir Really the Blues (with Bernard Wolfe, published in 1946) and Rudi Blesh’s 1946 study Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz, both of which contain lengthy passages on Armstrong’s apparent racial authenticity and essentialist assumptions about the racial roots of jazz.