Louis Armstrong came in with this century, just about, and departed before the Seventies gave little but a sense of lost illusions to what was left of it. Not that the great jazz trumpeter and entertainer had many illusions himself. At 21, when he was leaving New Orleans for the big time in Chicago, a tough-as-nails black bouncer in a hometown honky-tonk gave him some advice. "Get yourself a white man that will put his hand on your shoulder and say: `This is my nigger'."
It was the ultimate in pragmatism and Armstrong never forgot it. Behind the eyeball-rolling and the barn-door smile he later presented in his no-threat public persona, he knew the score, racially as well as musically: learn your lines and don't bump into the social furniture, especially in the deep South. For a gentle, kind man, born black and dirt poor, there was no other way. Reading the runes of racism was part of the survival kit; the rest was a genial public face and a tough white protector.
This, as is clear from Laurence Bergreen's well-written, scrupulously researched biography, which makes vibrant use of a fresh archive of Armstrong's voluminous letters, is why the rest also included the great and the banal. For such seminal jazz moments as the almost Mozartian stop-time solo on Potato Head Blues, the still amazing introduction to West End Blues, the majestic solo and out-chorus lead on Struttin' With Some Barbecue and the response to the fresh challenge of Snafu - performances spanning three decades from the 1920s on - there was also a downside; hits like Mack the Knife, Hello Dolly and What A Wonderful World, genial travesties of his talent.
A great artist selling out to put bread on the table? It wasn't quite as simple as that. Armstrong's gregarious, larger-than-life personality, his generosity and honesty informed his art as much as his dealings with others. But so did his experiences on the margins of society; both his mother and his first wife did time as prostitutes and, barely a teenager, he drove a coal cart by day and at night played in brothels and bars where pimps, casual sex, guns, knives, fists and fatalities were part of the decor.
In such places, music was strictly functional and the idea of art for art's sake as alien as an unconsummated liaison in a brothel. Musicians were entertainers and the better ones were respected in the black and mixed race Creole community - but they still had day jobs, often menial. For Armstrong, music meant a little extra money, respect and a way up in the world.
What set him apart, of course, was the greatness of his gift. In the racial melange of New Orleans, where French and Spanish influences mingled with African, music went into the cultural melting pot, eventually emerging as jazz, with Armstrong one of the midwives. Before him there were splendid players like Bunk Johnson and King Oliver; by the time he arrived, the ensemble style had more or less codified.
Through hard work and instinct, he revolutionised its rhythmic basis, thrust the soloist to the front and took the cornet and trumpet to fresh heights of virtuosity, bringing to it all a vein of melodic inspiration that took years to run dry. In the process, he inspired generations of players, arrangers, composers and - through his idiosyncratic singing - vocalists, exerting an influence on jazz and popular music as pervasive as it is unrealised today.
That ground has been well - and better - covered by biographers such as James Lincoln Collier. By focusing on the man, however, Bergreen memorably illuminates his life, especially his early years in New Orleans, and his time as a young man in Prohibition Chicago and New York. Initially unpushy, he was Svengalied by his second wife, Lil Hardin, to leave King Oliver's great traditional band in Chicago where they were colleagues, and gradually assumed his unique place in the world of jazz and entertainment.
To do so, he had to deal with the gangsters who owned the venues where he worked. Or rather, he found a succession of brutal managers, all white, to take care of business for him. His own needs were simple - to play, joke with the audience, have someone else run the band for him, smoke marijuana and make some money.
He was also, as Spike Milligan once said in another context, a bit of a ladies' man - one bit in particular. Four wives and numerous encounters suggest that Storyville, the New Orleans red-light district the closure of which in 1917 began the jazz diaspora, left its mark on him. But his fourth marriage, in 1942, lasted thirty years until his death, while in the shrewd, shady, cynical and exploitative Joe Glaser, who became his manager in 1938, he found the white man who would put his hand on his shoulder.
The stability of his last three decades was accompanied by world fame in the film as well as the music business. But it also saw his music gradually solidify into formula. To later jazzmen such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, innovators who emerg ed in the 1940s with a political agenda to fight racism, he was passe musically and an embarrassing, Uncle Tom negro stereotype in his stage persona.
It wasn't fair. Armstrong had survived too many tough circumstances in his life to be totally pliant where whites were concerned. His famous outburst against President Eisenhower, whom he called gutless when black school children were being spat on by whites as they tried to integrate a school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, was proof of that. Neither would he go and be President Nixon's tame coloured boy at a White House do in 1969. He preferred to stay in his home in Corona, Queens, where the local kids would come in and watch television with him.
By then, the years had taken their toll. Tired and shrunken, reduced by decades of constant travel and playing, he died peacefully in his sleep in 1971. At his death he was worth some $500,000; Joe Glaser, who shuffled off this mortal coil in 1969, left $3 million, but then he never was a soft touch for a hard luck story as Armstrong was. It's a measure of Bergreen's success that his portrait leaves a sense that the world is the poorer for the passing of such an essentially decent, extravagantly gifted man.
Ray Comiskey is an Irish Times staff journalist