To celebrate Seven Days of Satch, a week-long virtual festival produced by French Quarter Festivals Inc., OffBeat is republishing decades worth of Louis Armstrong content! For Day Three of our retrospective, we bring you an article by John Swenson first published in 2007 in which he spoke with Trombone Shorty, Maurice Brown, Leroy Jones and others about Armstrong’s masterpiece, “What A Wonderful World.”
A Wild “World”
Although Louis Armstrong is most famous for his inventiveness and influence as a player and singer, the song that has come to be most associated with him in New Orleans is “What a Wonderful World.” Armstrong recorded it in the last years of his life when he suffered from terrible infirmities that limited his ability to play and sing. What he had left when he recorded “What a Wonderful World” was his overarching spirit, an almost superhuman ability to evoke the deepest emotional response with a simple gesture. Without his technical prowess and his youthful energy, he was removed from the constraints of imitating his younger self, and Armstrong sang this song with a shaman’s wisdom, the elder’s understanding of the value of nature’s smallest gifts. Its message resonates most profoundly today in the blasted streets of new New Orleans, where life struggles on against all odds, where a blue sky is sometimes the only reason to say to one’s self “What a Wonderful World.”
