美国国家公共电台 NPR Satchmo In His Adolescence: 1915 Film Clip May Show Young Louis Armstrong

 

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Many works of literature have been written about Louis Armstrong. But now, jazz journalist James Karst has written about the effort to decipher a few seconds of old film that may show Louis Armstrong as a 13 or 14-year-old boy - a turning point in his life before he became famous around the world.

James Karst writes about this footage in a magazine of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. He joins us from member station WWNO in New Orleans. Thanks so much for being with us.

JAMES KARST: Hi. Thanks for having me today.

SIMON: What did you discover and where?

KARST: So I found a very brief silent film clip that shows a street scene in New Orleans, apparently¹ in 1915, and it shows a lot of pedestrians² walking back and forth³. And a couple of seconds into this film clip, a newsboy walks into the scene. His back is facing the camera at first, and then he turns around and you can see that he's holding a newspaper - what I believe to be the New Orleans Item, an afternoon paper. And he briefly⁴ engages the camera, smiles and then he turns around and keeps going.

I discovered this film on the Getty Images website, where it apparently has been for a little bit over a decade. And I saw it and immediately recognized that Louis Armstrong, when he was a young man in this very year, was a newsboy in New Orleans and was one of, apparently, relatively⁵ few black newsboys in New Orleans and in this location. And so I immediately set out to determine whether or not it was him.

SIMON: And how did you begin to confirm that?

KARST: Yeah, well, I took a number of different routes. One of the first things I did was I got in touch with a Professor Kurt Luther from Virginia Tech University, who has worked on a project to identify people in Civil War-era photographs, and I talked with him about strategies for making an identification like this.

From there, I went in other directions. I looked at census⁷ records to see how many black newsboys were on the records at the time, and then I also compared features on this - the boy. I took a screen grab of the video and compared the distance between the eyes and the width of the nose and the angle of the ears and the shoulders and compared that with early images - known images of Armstrong.

SIMON: Louis Armstrong was at a home for boys who got into trouble with the law, right?

KARST: He had been released the year before - in June of 1914 - from an institution that was known as the Colored Waifs Home. And this was a reformatory - it was part reformatory, part orphanage⁸. And Armstrong was sent there for at least the second time in early 1913 after he had been arrested for shooting a pistol into the air.

And it was at - while at that reformatory that he began to receive his first formal music instruction. He played in the marching band there. They would parade around the city and play at events on the lake and stuff like that. But when he came out, he was, you know, faced with the challenges of being 13 or 14 years old at the time and needing to provide some income for his family. He grew up in dire⁶ poverty, of course.

SIMON: You take a look at this, like, 8 seconds of film, I guess it is, and maybe it's the power of suggestion, but it certainly looks like Louis Armstrong. And you (laughter) - you really do get a sense, even from this 13-year-old youngster, of just overwhelming charisma⁹.

KARST: Yeah, that has been sort of the reaction. The overwhelming reaction to my story is - you know, I fully¹⁰ expected people to try to pick it apart because it's kind of a ridiculous thing to propose. But overwhelmingly, people have said, holy smokes, we think this, you know - it looks like him. He smiles the beautiful Louis Armstrong smile that later became famous. Yeah, it's been fascinating to me.

SIMON: Well, we want to go out a bit with some Louis Armstrong music - Louis Armstrong's first recorded solo. I guess you recommended this to us - 1923 "Chimes Blues¹¹" - and it was released by King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band.

(SOUNDBITE OF KING OLIVER'S CREOLE JAZZ BAND'S "CHIMES BLUES")

SIMON: Jazz journalist James Karst - his article is "Young Satchmo" and appears in the magazine 64 Parishes. Thanks so much for being with us.

KARST: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

(SOUNDBITE OF LOUIS ARMSTRONG'S "SAVOY BLUES")

1 apparently   

adv.显然地；表面上，似乎

参考例句：

• An apparently blind alley leads suddenly into an open space.山穷水尽，豁然开朗。
• He was apparently much surprised at the news.他对那个消息显然感到十分惊异。

2 pedestrians   

n.步行者( pedestrian的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Several pedestrians had come to grief on the icy pavement. 几个行人在结冰的人行道上滑倒了。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Pedestrians keep to the sidewalk [footpath]! 行人走便道。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

3 forth   

adv.向前；向外，往外

参考例句：

• The wind moved the trees gently back and forth.风吹得树轻轻地来回摇晃。
• He gave forth a series of works in rapid succession.他很快连续发表了一系列的作品。

4 briefly   

adv.简单地，简短地

参考例句：

• I want to touch briefly on another aspect of the problem.我想简单地谈一下这个问题的另一方面。
• He was kidnapped and briefly detained by a terrorist group.他被一个恐怖组织绑架并短暂拘禁。

5 relatively   

adv.比较...地，相对地

参考例句：

• The rabbit is a relatively recent introduction in Australia.兔子是相对较新引入澳大利亚的物种。
• The operation was relatively painless.手术相对来说不痛。

6 dire   

adj.可怕的，悲惨的，阴惨的，极端的

参考例句：

• There were dire warnings about the dangers of watching too much TV.曾经有人就看电视太多的危害性提出严重警告。
• We were indeed in dire straits.But we pulled through.那时我们的困难真是大极了，但是我们渡过了困难。

7 census   

n.(官方的)人口调查，人口普查

参考例句：

• A census of population is taken every ten years.人口普查每10年进行一次。
• The census is taken one time every four years in our country.我国每四年一次人口普查。

8 orphanage   

n.孤儿院

参考例句：

• They dispensed new clothes to the children in the orphanage.他们把新衣服发给孤儿院的小孩们。
• They gave the proceeds of the sale to the orphanage.他们把销售的收入给了这家孤儿院。

9 charisma   

n.(大众爱戴的)领袖气质，魅力

参考例句：

• He has enormous charisma. He is a giant of a man.他有超凡的个人魅力，是个伟人。
• I don't have the charisma to pull a crowd this size.我没有那么大的魅力，能吸引这么多人。

10 fully   

adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地

参考例句：

• The doctor asked me to breathe in,then to breathe out fully.医生让我先吸气，然后全部呼出。
• They soon became fully integrated into the local community.他们很快就完全融入了当地人的圈子。

11 blues   

n.抑郁，沮丧；布鲁斯音乐

参考例句：

• She was in the back of a smoky bar singing the blues.她在烟雾弥漫的酒吧深处唱着布鲁斯歌曲。
• He was in the blues on account of his failure in business.他因事业失败而意志消沉。