Raise a glass on Wednesday, March 4, to an East Tennessee native the likes of which we'll never see again. It's Howard Armstrong's 100th birthday. Maybe you don't recognize his name, but if you've ever seen a skinny black man in a beret playing jazz mandolin or fiddle and singing in Italian, German, Yiddish, or perhaps Hawaiian, as the mood struck him. you can be fairly confident it was Howard. He was diversity incarnate, but without the sanctimony.
If you seek the missing link between jazz and bluegrass, klesmer and Hawaiian, redneck and world music, look no further than Armstrong, whose nickname "Louie Bluie" was the generous gift of a speakeasy floozy. Born in Dayton, Tenn., the same day William Howard Taft, for whom he was named, was inaugurated president, Armstrong spent much of his youth in La Follette, where he played with a family band and learned his "Tennessee Italian" from local ironworkers. He was playing the streets, pawn shops and juke joints of Knoxville soon after World War I, eventually joining local guitarist Carl Martin and banjoist Ted Bogan, who formed the core of the group, Tennessee Chocolate Drops, a high-energy black string band whose music might force some revisions of the theory of evolution of cool.
He was there at the dawn of recording and the dawn of radio--he broadcast on old, pre-Cas WROL, and recorded near Market Square at the legendary 1929-30 St. James sessions--then lived about seven more decades, cutting some records in the '70s with his old chums, to startle the Internet age. We're lucky he came home more than once for reunion shows in Knoxville in the last few years of his life.
In La Follette, where a vigorous fan club led by Bill Claiborne has resurrected Armstrong's legacy as a Campbell County immortal. This Friday, they'll be showing Leah Mahan's "Sweet Old Song," the second of two very different documentaries about Armstrong broadcast on PBS (the first was Terry Zwigoff's highly recommended "Louie Bluie"); the following Friday, Knoxville's Carpetbag Theatre will go to La Follette to present their Armstrong-inspired musical play, "Between a Ballad and the Blues."
And mark June 13. They'll compete with Bonnaroo to mount a centennial Louie Bluie Music and Arts Festival. For more, see www.LouieBluie.org.
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