Louis Armstrong Quotes: 30 Memorable Lines from Satchmo Himself

These 30 Louis Armstrong quotes all have a source you can check: his books Swing That Music (1936) and Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954), his letters, interviews in Life, Ebony and Harper’s, and newspaper reports from 1957 to his death in 1971. The source is given with every quote. Lines that circulate under his name without a traceable origin, including the famous “if you gotta ask” definition of jazz, are covered in a separate section near the end.

Armstrong was born in New Orleans on August 4, 1901, although he often gave his birthday as July 4, 1900, and he died in New York on July 6, 1971. His words are quoted in his own grammar, as they were printed. His letters were collected after his death in Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words (Oxford University Press, 1999), edited by Thomas Brothers. For the records behind the words, see our ranking of the best Louis Armstrong songs.

Louis Armstrong Quotes About Music and the Horn

• “If you still have to ask… shame on you.” His usual answer to “What is jazz?”, as recorded by the jazz writer Max Jones in Salute to Satchmo (1970) and in Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story 1900-1971 (1971), written with John Chilton.
• “I’ve expressed myself in the horn. I fell in love with it and it fell in love with me… What we play is life and a natural thing.” Printed in Joachim-Ernst Berendt’s The New Jazz Book (English edition, 1962) and, with “the natural thing,” in Dennis Stock’s photo book Jazz Street (1960). Neither names the original interview. Quote sites shorten it to “What we play is life.”
• “Music is life itself. What would this world be without good music? No matter what kind it is.” From a 1967 letter to Lance Corporal Villec, a U.S. Marine stationed in Vietnam, printed in In His Own Words (1999). Armstrong put apostrophes in front of most words (“Music is ‘life it’self”); we have left them out.
• “Pops, music is music. All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song.” His answer when asked about country and folk music, in his New York Times obituary of July 7, 1971. Leonard Feather printed an earlier version in The Book of Jazz (1957). Books from the 1960s credit blues singer Big Bill Broonzy with nearly the same joke.
• “It takes a swing player, and a real good one, to be able to leave that score and to know, or ‘feel,’ just when to leave it and when to get back on it.” Swing That Music (Longmans, Green, 1936), as quoted by the critic André Hodeir in Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (1956).
• “From the first time I heard it, that song used to ‘send’ me. I wood-shedded it until I could play all around it.” Swing That Music (1936), about Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” which he played as a trumpet solo in the 1929 Broadway revue Hot Chocolates.
• “When a good old good note is blown, all the cats dig it.” San Francisco Chronicle, March 23, 1965, the earliest printing found by Quote Investigator.
• “I have always been wrapped up in my music and no woman in the world can change that. Right until this day my horn comes first.” Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954).

On New Orleans and the Players Who Taught Him

Most of these come from Satchmo, which ends in 1922, when he went north to join King Oliver at the Lincoln Gardens in Chicago. A scan of the first edition is free to read at the Internet Archive. For the scene he moved into, see our overview of jazz in the 1920s.

• “Me and music got married at the home.” On the Colored Waif’s Home, where he was sent after firing a gun into the air on New Year’s Eve 1912 and where Peter Davis taught him the cornet. Quoted in his New York Times obituary.
• “In all my whole career the Brick House was one of the toughest joints I ever played in… But somehow all of that jive didn’t faze me at all, I was so happy to have some place to blow my horn.” Satchmo (1954), on a honky-tonk for levee workers in Gretna, Louisiana.
• “All in all Buddy Bolden was a great musician, but I think he blew too hard.” Satchmo (1954). In the same book he wrote that Bunk Johnson “had the most beautiful tone, the best imagination and the softest sense of phrasing.”
• “It was my ambition to play as he did. I still think that if it had not been for Joe Oliver jazz would not be what it is today. He was a creator in his own right.” Satchmo (1954). Oliver gave him lessons in return for running errands for Oliver’s wife, Stella.
• “I was playing with my idol, the King, Joe Oliver. My boyhood dream had come true at last.” The closing lines of Satchmo (1954), about his first night with Oliver’s band in Chicago.
• “As for red beans and rice, well, I don’t have to say anything about that. It is my birth mark.” Satchmo (1954). He also signed letters “Red beans and ricely yours,” a habit noted by Dennis Stock in Jazz Street (1960) and by Hugues Panassié in his 1971 biography.

On Fame, Money and His Audience

• “I never tried to prove nothing, just always wanted to give a good show. My life has 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.” Said “a couple of years” before his death, according to his New York Times obituary.
• “I never did want to be no big star. It’s been hard goddam work, man. Feel like I spent 20,000 years on the planes and railroads, like I blowed my chops off.” From a 1969 interview for the same obituary.
• “Making money ain’t nothing exciting to me… You might be able to buy a little better booze than some 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.” Ebony, November 1964.
• “I haven’t heard no band that plays more perfect music than Guy Lombardo yet. That’s the way I feel, and I don’t let my mouth say nothing my head can’t stand.” From Richard Meryman’s interview in Life (April 15, 1966), published in 1971 as the book Louis Armstrong: A Self-Portrait. The second sentence is usually quoted on its own.
• “I got a simple rule about everybody. If you don’t treat me right, shame on you!” Said to Larry L. King for his profile “Everybody’s Louie,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1967.
• “I love my audience and they love me and we just have one good time whenever I get up on the stage.” Quoted in his New York Times obituary.
• “Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.” Quoted in The Observer (London) on April 21, 1968, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (1996).

On Bebop and Modern Jazz

• “So you get all them weird chords which don’t mean nothing, and first people get curious about it just because it’s new, but soon they get tired of it because it’s really no good.” Armstrong on bebop, as quoted by Marshall Stearns in The Story of Jazz (1956). His New York Times obituary adds that he dismissed “progressive” jazz as “jujitsu music.” Miles Davis still told Nat Hentoff in 1958 that “you can’t play anything on a horn that Louis hasn’t played”; see our Miles Davis quotes.

On Race and Civil Rights

• “The way they are treating my people in the South, the Government can go to hell.” Said in Grand Forks, North Dakota, during the 1957 school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, and reported in The New York Times on September 19, 1957. In the same interview, with journalism student Larry Lubenow, he called President Eisenhower “two-faced,” gave up plans for a government-sponsored trip to the Soviet Union and said: “It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country.”
• “They would beat Jesus if he was black and marched. Maybe I’m not in the front line, but I support them with my donations. My life is in my music. They would beat me on the mouth if I marched, and without my mouth I wouldn’t be able to blow my horn.” In 1965, after police attacked civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. Quoted in his New York Times obituary.
• “I was only seven years old but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the white folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for.” From a memoir of the Karnoffsky family, who gave him work and lent him money for his first cornet, written in 1969 in a New York hospital and printed in In His Own Words (1999). It also says: “I will love the Jewish people, all of my life.”
• “I feel at home in Africa. I’m African-descended down to the bone.” During his 1960 tour of Africa, as quoted in his New York Times obituary.

Armstrong on “What a Wonderful World”

Bob Thiele and George David Weiss wrote “What a Wonderful World,” and Armstrong recorded it in Las Vegas on August 16, 1967. ABC Records did not promote it in the United States, but it reached number one in the UK in April 1968, and a 1988 reissue after the film Good Morning, Vietnam reached number 32 on the Billboard Hot 100.

• “Pops, I dig it. Let’s do it!” His reaction when Thiele played him the song, as Thiele told it to Ted Fox for In the Groove (1986) and in his memoir What a Wonderful World (1995).
• “Seems to me, it ain’t the world that’s so bad but what we’re doin’ to it. And all I’m saying is, see, what a wonderful world it would be if only we’d give it a chance.” From the spoken introduction to the version he recorded in May 1970 for Louis Armstrong and His Friends, answering young listeners who asked how the world could be wonderful with wars and hunger going on.

Louis Armstrong’s Last Words

Armstrong died of a heart attack in his sleep on July 6, 1971, at his home in Corona, Queens, now the Louis Armstrong House Museum. No last words were recorded. Against his doctor’s advice he had played two weeks at the Waldorf-Astoria early that year, followed by a long hospital stay. Back home by June, he played his trumpet for an interviewer on June 23 and said he meant to perform again. Two remarks from his last years are on record:

• “I’m going back to work when my treaders get in as good shape as my chops.” June 1971, about his legs, still weak after the hospital stay. Quoted in his New York Times obituary.
• “My whole life, my whole soul, my whole spirit is to blow that horn.” His reply when his physician, Dr. Gary Zucker, warned him that he could drop dead while performing. Zucker’s account first appeared in James Lincoln Collier’s Louis Armstrong: An American Genius (1983).

Quotes Wrongly Credited to Louis Armstrong

We checked these against his books, his collected writings and the major biographies in the Internet Archive’s full-text index.

• “Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.” His documented answer is the “shame on you” line above. Ralph J. Gleason’s anthology Jam Session (1958) already called the “gotta ask” line apocryphal, and one of its pieces gives it to Fats Waller.
• The practice quote (“If I don’t practice for one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, everyone knows it”). Quote Investigator names the pianist Hans von Bülow, credited with it in 1877, as the likeliest originator. The earliest Armstrong attribution it found is in a 2015 book.
• “The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.” Duke Ellington, in Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff’s oral history Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya (1955).
• Two kinds of music. The line about good and bad music, with Armstrong playing the good kind, appears only in quotation books, the earliest we found from 2002. Ellington’s documented version is “There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind.”
• No traceable source. Never playing a thing the same way twice, blowing who you is, finding the notes after do-re-mi yourself and cats copying the Mona Lisa turn up only in quotation collections and secondhand anecdotes from the late 1980s on.

Armstrong’s place in the history of the instrument is covered in our guide to the greatest jazz trumpet players, and his singing in our list of the greatest jazz singers.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Louis Armstrong’s most famous quote?

Probably his answer to “What is jazz?”, usually given as “Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.” The version the jazz writer Max Jones recorded is “If you still have to ask… shame on you.” His other much-quoted line, “What we play is life,” comes from a longer remark printed in Dennis Stock’s Jazz Street (1960) and Joachim-Ernst Berendt’s The New Jazz Book.

What were Louis Armstrong’s last words?

No last words were recorded. Armstrong died of a heart attack in his sleep at his home in Corona, Queens, on July 6, 1971. His last widely reported remark came in June 1971, when he said he would go back to work “when my treaders get in as good shape as my chops,” meaning his legs and his lips.

Where does “What we play is life” come from?

In Joachim-Ernst Berendt’s The New Jazz Book the full remark reads: “I’ve expressed myself in the horn. I fell in love with it and it fell in love with me… What we play is life and a natural thing.” Dennis Stock’s photo book Jazz Street (1960) prints a similar version. Neither book identifies the original interview.