1928 / Smithsonian

Louis Armstrong died in the summer of 1971, 50 years ago, and it felt like part of America died with him. There was something so regal about Armstrong, beyond what he played on his trumpet. He had become an American ambassador around the world, introducing jazz to people who had probably previously thought of the music more as a communication from Mars than anything they could normally listen to. But Armstrong brought with his horn a personality that swung, before anyone else was swinging. For those who tuned in, he had a presence as big as the Statue of Liberty, and a musical strength that could cross cultures and races, leaving everyone feeling better to be alive. If that's not magic, what is?

When I heard that New Orleans was going to have a celebration for Louis Armstrong after his passing that summer, I knew it was time to finally visit the city where so much music I loved had originated. And even though the musician's official burial was going to be near his present residence in Queens, New York, Armstrong's Crescent City friends and family knew their city that specialized in honoring the afterlife needed to pay their ultimate respects to a man who always remembered exactly where he came from. New Orleans and Louis Armstrong went together like red beans and rice. That would never change.

It is a six-hour drive from Austin to New Orleans, and luckily my roommate Rick Arnold had a big Oldsmobile 88 and wanted to go, so off we flew the morning of July 10. The jazz funeral would be the next day, and we wanted to be there and be ready. There was something tingling in the air of New Orleans when we got there, like everyone knew something historic was right down the road. And while Louis Armstrong had made it perfectly clear he did not want to be buried in his hometown because of the city's civil rights failings, those that called the city home now were going to open up the pearly gates for him and welcome his spirit safe passage no matter where he would be laid to rest. Even though this was my inaugural trip to New Orleans, a city I would call my home away from home soon enough for nearly 30 years, the writing was on the levee: get ready for some high-stepping and slow-dragging once the parades kicked off on Sunday. My inner twanger was on full-tilt.

The day of the Armstrong-less funeral started with trumpets being played everywhere you looked. That piercingly pleasant sound ricocheted up Canal Street and down Tchoupitoulas, getting louder and louder as the kick-off time of high noon approached. There will never be another human being more New Orleanian than Louis Armstrong. Dr. John, bless his heart, would come close, but the honor had already been secured by the time the good doctor showed up at Cosmio Matassa's studio in the 1950s. Louis Armstrong was it for good.

Three different parades with full-on marching bands began at different spots in the city, each moving with dedicated purpose towards City Hall downtown. And when they all arrived there at close to the same time, it was like an urban explosion of high-density jubilation had gone off. I've never heard anything like it, before or since. There was something so life-affirming, even though this was basically a funeral missing the body, that on that Sunday on that year in New Orleans, it seemed like we would all stay exactly that same age the rest of our lives, traveling the uptown avenues and back alley streets of a city so mesmerized by music that most of the time no words are needed except to order an ice-cold libation at the Golden Lantern and maybe a muffaletta or po-boy from down Royal Street at the Verti Marte.. The rest of life in the "meat world," as Dr. John used to call it, doesn't enter the equation at all.

I found something so permanently overwhelming that afternoon on the New Orleans city streets that every second of it has stayed with me to this day. A door was opened forever, and I was graciously invited in. It is hard to put into sensible sentences how music really affects me, when it moves past just the blood vessels and charging neurons of the physical body and works its way into that place which can never be seen but is always felt. That place that sometimes makes it hard to breathe because of all the surrounding beauty it brings with it, or how what feels like an invisible human hand is placed over the heart and a silent promised protection is whispered into the ear that it will always be there. It all feels like the step past reality.

Looking back now, that is the day when my initiation into the Living Brotherhood of New Orleans Musical Spiritualists started. It isn't an elitist bunch, but it is a totally unorganized group whose deep beliefs in the power of the sounds made in that city erase all doubt that eternity is waiting just ahead down on the corner. As I walked around the French Quarter that night when the parade players had put their saxophones, trumpets and drums back in the cases and returned home, I found myself alone going up and down the streets of the Quarter: Bourbon, Royal, Chartres, Burgundy, and Lord have mercy, Decatur. Which in 1971 was lined with bars for visiting foreign merchant marines from around the world, who had docked their massive cargo ships in the nearby port on the seemingly unending Mississippi River. Talk about jukeboxes from outer space: the cacophony of sounds, shouts and screams on Decatur still fills my ears with the true sound of sonic eruption, along with the sights of sauced-up sailors flying out the front doors of the taverns when the inevitable fights and frivolity grew to a fevered pitch around 4 a.m. The bars don't close in New Orleans, so there is never a rush to joy or judgment. Life and sometimes death have no deadline there, and it often feels like clocks are the only illegal item in the whole city.

When it was time to tiptoe back into reality and head for Austin on Monday morning, they were spraying down the streets all over town, washing away yet another run at rapture. The holy street cleaners have been doing this in New Orleans for hundreds and hundreds of years, longer than just about anyplace else in the whole United States, and have gotten good at it. To look around at emptiness after a day and night of total fullness, like a trick of the mind had been played, was a little disconcerting. But with it came the absolute knowledge this was no trick. It was a way of life, one that doesn't take much more than a belief in the inner goodness of all who walk there, no matter how deeply it can sometimes be hidden or even lost. The city forgives. It is the only way it can stay alive. That massive lesson ran around my mind the whole drive home. The absolute thought I left with was the certified certainty I would be back. I didn't know it would take six years to get there, and I didn't know it would then last for almost 30 years after that. What I did know now was that I didn't need to know. I had been taught that during this trip: knowing is not always necessary. It's the dangling of discovery that truly fills the heart.

New Orleans is often called The City that Care Forgot. But I've cared more about the righteously freeing music made there than almost anything I have ever found. It has helped me realize that all we really have is the earth and each other. And someday each of us will be gone, and maybe even the earth itself. But somewhere out in the farthest edges of the cosmos Professor Longhair's "Tipitina" will be heard stumbling among the stars inspiring whatever life that may be there to fall into a second-line strut all the way to the end of the universe. Forevermore.

By Bill Bentley