Louis Armstrong: Shine

Historians still debate what turned a 1920s Jazz Giant into a 1930s vaudevillian. Did profiteering white gangsters convert him at gunpoint into Uncle Tom? Was Louis's lip ruined by too many high C's topped by an F above the melting point of tungsten? Or did Armstrong, heady with success and coveting super- stardom, willingly conspire? Whatever the explanation, Satchmo's "Shine" so cheerfully catalogs sundry "chocolate drop" stereotypescurly hair, pearly teeth, shady colorthat Hollywood rewarded him with leopard-skin livery in A Rhapsody in Black and Blue (1932). Evidently Uncle Tom's tuxedo had been repossessed. But Louis at least set the fashion standard for Fred Flintstone.