There comes a point in the careers of a few artists when they become Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloons in our culture.

They become so prominent that their fame and/or notoriety no longer have any connection to their actual work. The best examples of such a phenomenon are Elvis and Sinatra, singers who render full names and good albums irrelevant because what they have done and who they have been have elevated them into a mythic realm. There are a lot of pretenders to the single name status—Cher, Liberace—and only one modern contender, Madonna, but it should never be forgotten that Satchmo belongs in that company too. Louis Armstrong is the one jazz musician who projected so much personality that people fell in love with him, regardless of what he was playing or doing. In The Louis Armstrong Companion: Eight Decades of Commentary, editor Joshua Barrett has compiled writing by and about Armstrong to suggest the different perspectives people have used to try to come to grips with his cultural legacy.

There has been no shortage of writing on Armstrong. Numerous biographies are available, and his autobiography—Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans—is worth checking out. Most recently, Oxford University Press has published Louis Armstrong: In His Own Words, a collection of his letters, many of which are stored here at the Hogan Jazz Archive and the Historic New Orleans Collection. For the most part though, the sheer heft of these books demand more than casual interest. Berrett’s book is less intimidating, and because it’s an anthology of writing and criticism, it gives readers a taste for how people saw Armstrong, perhaps giving newcomers to Armstrong a reason to take on the larger projects.

Not only has Berrett found a way to give readers a manageable plate from which to discover Armstrong, but he’s done so without giving the impression that he has an agenda. He neither cleans up nor trashes Armstrong; instead, he selects works that retain Satchmo’s complexity. An autobiographical excerpt from a manuscript he wrote while ill in 1969 describes growing up in New Orleans, and in it, he expresses his affection for Jews, particularly the Karnofsky family that employed him. In it he contrasts the resiliency with which Jews faced persecution with the defeated resignation he saw in many African-Americans around him. Because Armstrong came to be seen by many as an Uncle Tom figure, the passage is fascinating, but Berrett also presents passages that question the fairness of the Uncle Tom charge. In a lengthy exercise in deconstruction, Krin Gabbard examines Armstrong’s appearances in movies to suggest that he was subverting the Uncle Tom image, not inhabiting it.

Pieces like Gabbard’s suggest Berrett’s background is academic (in fact, he is a professor of music at Mercy College), and his professorial love of homework serves him well in this project. He sorted through the mountain of writing on Armstrong to find interviews with musicians who talk about their relationships with Armstrong, as well as reviews that show how he was received.

In one of the most fascinating sections of the book, Berrett collects articles written about Satchmo’s reception in Europe in the early 1930s. Even as they celebrate him and his genius, they hint at what Armstrong and other successful African-Americans had to endure. In 1934, the prominent Belgian critic Robert Goffin championed Armstrong, but in terms that are thoughtlessly racist. “What Breton and Aragon did for poetry in 1920, Chirico and Ernst for painting,” he wrote, “had been instinctively accomplished as early as 1910 by humble Negro musicians, unaided by the control of that critical intelligence that was to prove such an asset to the later initiators.” It’s hard to imagine how dispiriting it must have been to see yourself compared to some of the greatest European writers and painters while at the same time seeing black jazz musicians referred to as “untrained Negroes” and “primitive orchestras.” The grin that younger generations saw as “Tomming,” Dizzy Gillespie recognized as Armstrong’s mask: “I began to recognize [his] grinning in the face of racism as his absolute refusal to let anything, even anger about racism, steal the joy from his life,” Gillespie wrote in his book, To Be or Not to Bop.

To capture the texture of Armstrong’s life, Berrett reprints a variety of voices, many of them belonging to Armstrong himself. Not only are there autobiographical excerpts, but there are playful, rambling letters which are by themselves marvels in their length considering they were all typed, often in green ink. He also includes a diet Armstrong devised that involved, as much as anything else, a lot of orange juice, an herbal laxative, and “Bisma Rex,” which cut gas. This minutiae is side by side with accounts of his dealings with early managers and the mob, remembrances by other musicians, and commentary from critics, each suggesting another side of Armstrong, another lens through which to consider him, his talents, and his place in our culture.

Like the Macy’s balloons, Armstrong has become a soft, cuddly figure—genial, comfortable, and brilliant in a vague way. He’s better known for “What a Wonderful World” than any of his greatest jazz recordings, but as Joshua Berrett reminds us in The Louis Armstrong Companion, he was a much trickier figure. He was neither moderate nor contrite in his marijuana use, and he was worried about his weight. He could play dumb when it was useful, then directly criticize President Eisenhower’s inaction on civil rights. If anything gets a short shift in Berrett’s book, it’s Armstrong’s music, but since jazz is hard to describe effectively, that’s no surprise. The Louis Armstrong Companion isn’t the last word on Satchmo, but it’s a solid starting place.