Stamp of a Singer: Louis Armstrong

"To jazz, or not to jazz, there is no question!"

"Man, all music is folk music. You ain’t never heard no horse sing a song, have you?"

"I never tried to prove nothing, just wanted to give a good show. My life has always been my music, it's always come first, but the music ain't worth nothing if you can't lay it on the public. The main thing is to live for that audience, 'cause what you're there for is to please the people."

 
"My whole life, my whole soul, my whole spirit is to blow that horn."

"The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago."

"Musicians don't retire; they stop when there's no more music in them."

"If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it. And if I don’t practice for three days, the public knows it."

"Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?"

"Making money ain’t nothing exciting to me. You might be able to buy a little better booze than the wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat and when you die you’re just as graveyard dead as he is."

"When I go to the Gate, I'll play a duet with Gabriel. Yeah, we'll play 'Sleepy Time Down South' and 'Hello, Dolly!.' Then he can blow a couple that he's been playing up there all the time."

Previous celebrity stamps featured on this blog: Edgar Allan Poe, Cary Grant, Mark Twain, John Wayne, Virginia Woolf, James Dean, Groucho Marx, Bette Davis, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Arthur Conan Doyle, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Elvis Presley, Walt Disney, Ernest Hemingway, Charlie Chaplin, and Bertrand Russell.