In 1971, at a televised memorial concert for Louis Armstrong, his ex-wife collapsed at the piano with a fatal heart attack, a dramatic bookend that overshadowed the life she lived. This episode digs into Lil Hardin Armstrong as an independent composer, bandleader and strategist. Born in Memphis in 1898 to a family shaped by her grandmother Priscilla Martin, a former slave who fled Mississippi in a mule-drawn wagon, she received rigid classical training, earned a diploma from Fisk University, and moved to Chicago in 1918. There she worked as a sheet music demonstrator for about $3 a week before bandleader Lawrence Duhé offered $22.50 to play in his cabaret band, a job she hid from her mother by claiming it was a dancing school. Her first night with New Orleans musicians taught her that no one knew the key; they simply told her to start playing after two knocks.

Her residency at the Dreamland Cafe led to King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band and the arrival of a young Louis Armstrong, whom she initially found unrefined, with a terrible haircut and provincial clothes. She restyled him, hired a German classical tutor, married him in February 1924 after both obtained annulments, and pushed him to leave Oliver for Fletcher Henderson in New York while she stayed in Chicago and hung a banner declaring him the world’s greatest trumpet player. The 1925 Hot Five recordings for OKeh, rehearsed in their East 41st Street apartment with Kid Ory and Johnny Dodds, shifted jazz from collective polyphony toward the soloist. After separating in 1931 and divorcing in 1938, she led an all-girl orchestra broadcast on NBC, sang for Decca, made a tuxedo for Louis as a tailoring graduation project, and halted her own autobiography to protect his image, only to die weeks after his funeral, with her manuscript and letters vanishing from her home.

• A classically trained sight reader learning to improvise on two knocks
• How she engineered Louis Armstrong’s look, technique, finances and ambition
• The Hot Five sessions and the birth of the modern solo artist
• Life after divorce as a nationally broadcast bandleader and Decca vocalist
• Her songs’ afterlife through Ray Charles, Ringo Starr and a 2012 Parov Stelar sample