Biographies are like people--even the best fall well short of perfection and even the most flawed sometimes accomplish great things.

Lawrence Bergreen’s new biography of Louis Armstrong is a good example. It is flawed in several ways, but it is, nonetheless, a significant and worthwhile achievement. Unfortunately, the book has received more criticism than it deserves. Anyone interested in Louis Armstrong should forget the reviews and read the book.

First, I will admit that the book’s musical analysis is weak. Those familiar with Armstrong’s recordings won’t learn anything new about his music. Furthermore, when Bergreen attempts to discuss jazz history, he is sometimes misleading and occasionally downright wrong. For instance:

In the seventy years since the demise of the Storyville of Louis’ boyhood, historians and scholars have made a determined effort to place a fig leaf over the origins of jazz and have argued strenuously against the obvious, that it was born in the whorehouses and on the sidewalks in front of whorehouses, and that it came of age in these establishments. They have tried to drag it into the concert hall, the radio studio, the church. . . . anywhere but the down-and-dirty honky-tonks, dives, [and] brothels. . . (51).

Of course that’s nonsense. I don’t know of a single historian or scholar (of any significance) who has tried to "place a fig leaf over the origins of jazz."

Moreover, Bergreen sometimes muffs factual details. For example, even I know that Fats Waller, not Lil Armstrong, wrote "Squeeze Me" and that Louis’ funeral was not without music (I believe it was Peggy Lee who sang.). I can understand jazz bugs becoming apoplectic over such mistakes.

But the book as a whole rises above such inadequacies. Let us remember that Bergreen is a cultural historian, not a music critic. This book is not supposed to be a musical critique. It is not even primarily a book about music. It is about Louis Armstrong as a Twentieth century cultural phenomenon. Armstrong’s influence started with music but ultimately extended well beyond it. Bergreen is the first person to define and illustrate that influence in thorough and specific ways.

The strength of this book is Bergreen’s research. Far more than any other biographer, Bergreen draws upon the Louis Armstrong papers at Queens College in New York. Many people don’t know it, but Louis was a writer, and a very good one. For years he carried a typewriter with him from town to town, generating hundreds of letters and numerous, fragmentary autobiographical sketches. (All this in addition to his unfettered autobiography, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans [1954]). To Bergreen’s everlasting credit, he has sorted through these sources and used them in telling Louis’ story. At many points in the book, Bergreen allows Louis to speak for himself, and that provides not just a breath, but a gale of fresh air through the pages.

Of course Louis’ letters and memoirs are not always consistent--and he doesn’t usually talk about music. But that’s OK because this is a book about how Louis Armstrong transcended music and came to epitomize what is best about America. Bergreen’s central point is interesting and insightful. It is that Louis Armstrong’s life embodies the thirst for freedom, the indomitable work ethic, and the irrepressible individuality which has made America such a great nation.

To Bergreen’s credit, he displays great judgment in quoting from Louis’ letters and autobiographical fragments. He does not attempt to hide the daily marijuana use, the open promiscuity, the fascination with laxatives, the bawdy jokes, or the pornographic stories (that Louis wrote in his spare time). But neither does he exploit this information. He uses it to explain that Louis was, in small ways, a product of his age and environment, but in large ways, a man who magnificently transcended that environment.

I have interviewed many musicians who toured with Louis Armstrong. All of them praise Louis for being without guile or bitterness. "He was the most genuine person I ever met," Jack Lesberg told me some years ago. "No matter how hard Joe Glaser and others tried to package him, he was always Louis." "Louis loved people no matter what their color or background," Yank Lawson told me on another occasion, "and to my knowledge he never hated anybody."

To many who knew him, that is the central fact of Louis Armstrong’s character, and it comes through well in Bergreen’s biography. So many of the musicians who came from the squalor of early New Orleans died broken and bitter people. King Oliver and Bunk Johnson come most quickly to mind. It is a miracle of the human spirit that Louis survived the booze, the pimps, the cruelty and the poverty to achieve such charity of sprit and artistic creativity. That is the real story of Louis Armstrong, and that’s what comes through in Bergreen’s biography.

Bergreen’s background helps him immeasurably. His first biography, of James Agee, prepared him to write about Southern culture and New Orleans history. As such, Bergreen discusses in rich detail not only the New Orleans of Louis Armstrong’s childhood, but the social, cultural and political evolutions that created it. The chapters are interesting and revealing.

Bergreen’s second biography was of Al Capone, and the research for it made him an expert on gangland Chicago of the 1920’s. Not surprisingly, Bergreen writes thoroughly and deftly about the interactions between the underworld and popular music and the challenges that Louis and other musicians faced in surviving such an environment.

Bergreen’s research also allows him to flesh out the portrait of shadowy Joe Glaser. Glaser was a seedy character, and Bergreen, for the first time, reveals just how seedy. But Glaser did a great service to the musical world and to this country by taking care of Louis as well as he did for as long as he did. Bergreen discusses this complex relationship knowledgeably and responsibly.

My only quibble with the book is that the last twenty-five years of Louis’ life are treated in fifty pages. I realize that the book is already almost five hundred pages and that it would have been impossible to convince a publisher to make it even longer. But in Louis’ last decades, he became one of America’s great "ambassadors" by exporting what has made this country great--individualism, a generous heart, and a strong work ethic. I wish that contribution had been more thoroughly documented.

A couple of years ago, one of the news magazines published a list of the one hundred most influential people of the Twentieth century. Louis Armstrong was on the list, and he belonged there, not simply because he was a great musician, but because he was a great person. He made his life count. Lawrence Bergreen never loses sight of that central fact, and that’s why this a first-rate biography.