The following is jazz journalist Morgan Enos’s interview with two-time Grammy-winning Louis Armstrong historian, author, and archivist Ricky Riccardi. His latest book, Stomp Off, Let’s Go: The Early Years of Louis Armstrong – the third in a trilogy about the foundational jazz figure – was released 3 February.
Riccardi won his second golden gramophone at the 2025 Grammys, for Best Liner Notes for King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band’s Centennial, released 30 August 2025 via Archeophone Records. Links to purchase both can be found at the end of this article.
Ricky Riccardi’s first two books. 2011’s What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years, and 2020’s Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong, did a tremendous amount to buoy Satchmo in the modern consciousness, beyond tired jazz-history beats and attendant, caked-over conceptions.
It follows that Armstrong’s mentor and role model, Joe “King” Oliver, would receive similar treatment – not only via Archeophone, who tastefully restored the previously murky sound – but in Riccardi’s trusted hands.
“Yes, the music is important. This music is 100-plus years old. It’s Louis Armstrong’s first recordings. It’s the end of this polyphonic era of New Orleans jazz before Oliver starts going. It’s more kind of arranged big band sounds,” Riccardi says. “The music tells its own story.”
“But within my notes,” he adds, “I wanted to tell the human being story.” And that’s where I wanted to begin, interviewing Riccardi: asking about him.
UK Jazz News: You and your wife, Margaret, recently celebrated the 21st anniversary of your first date. How would you describe the role she and the kids play behind the scenes?
Ricky Riccardi: What can I say? My family is everything. They’re the driving force behind everything I do; from taking liner notes, to gigs and lectures, to running over to libraries and teaching. I do it because I love it, and it’s the passion. But it helps pay the bills, helps quality of life, and [my family] is just always on my mind.
Margaret and I had our first double date on January 30, 2004. Then, we had a one-on-one date on the 31st, and we knew we’d be married. It sounds corny, but it’s true.
Then, our third date: that’s when I famously told her that I was going to write a book about Louis Armstrong, because we were at that stage of talking about career goals. She was talking about getting a degree in chemistry, and how she could be working at a lab as soon as she graduated from college, and making $50k a year on opening day. And she’s like, “Well, what about you?”
I was getting my master’s in Jazz History and Research at Rutgers at the time, so I told her my goal was to write a book about Louis Armstrong. She sat up: “Wow, that’s so exciting!” And I had to calm her down immediately and say, “It’s not going to make money. I’m not in the jazz history world for money. This is just what I want to do.”
I graduated with that degree in May 2005, and we got married that June. For four years, the only gig I could find was as a full-time house painter, working for my father. So, she was the rock during those years.
She did work in a lab for a year, then she transitioned to teaching high school, which she’s been doing for 17 years. But the whole time, man – I started this blog in 2007; I hired an agent in 2006. My first book [What a Wonderful World] – it must have gotten rejected 30 times.
By year three or four, I was still painting houses. I could see she was getting nervous. My parents were getting nervous. But there was some weird thing in me that knew this was important, and that it was different.
UKJN: How so?
RR: Nobody had written about Armstrong’s later years. I was meeting people; I was interviewing the musicians who knew him. I was going up to the Armstrong archives, listening to Louis’s tapes. I said, Man, this is something. I just have to stick with it.
I’ll tell you one more quick Margaret story: in the middle of all the house painting, I started this blog. This was before the whole social media boom. It was discovered by a man in New Orleans, John Pult. He was booking people to come down to Satchmo SummerFest in New Orleans, to give lectures. He was looking for somebody young, who hadn’t been there before.
He found my blog, and he called [the indispensable jazz historian and archivist] Dan Morgenstern. Dan said, “Oh, yeah: book Ricky. He’s got things that even I don’t have.”
So, that was my coming out party. John booked me for three days, just showing Armstrong videos from my personal collection. Day one, there were maybe 25, 30 people in the room. Day two, the room was almost full. And the front row was a murderer’s row: George Avakian, Dan Morgenstern, Gary Giddens.
Day three: the word had spread. Now, the room was standing room, and I actually got a standing ovation at the end. Margaret ran out of the room crying hysterically, calling my parents on the phone to let them know.
So, it was like, This feels like something! And I swear to god: two days later, I was painting houses again. So, just for dealing with me all those years, she’s a saint.
UKJN: But something had to give.
RR: It did start falling like dominoes.
I got the book deal about a month after that. We had our first kid in April 2009, and then I got the Armstrong House job in October 2009. That first book came out in 2011 – actually, the day my second daughter, Melody, was born. I always make the joke that the book took much longer to conceive – har, har. But I had basically been working on that book since the moment I heard Louis Armstrong’s music.
I had my dream job, dream wife, two kids: everything was kind of cool. And I never really intended to write another book. That was the book I envisioned. I pulled it off. I was happy.
Then, people started asking: “What are you going to write about? What are you going to write about?” So, I came up with this idea that people were sleeping on Armstrong’s middle years. So, I wrote Heart Full of Rhythm: [The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong]; I got that idea in 2016, and it came out in September 2020.
My editor said, “Hey, do you want to finish the trilogy?” in November 2020. And I’ll never forget, my oldest daughter Ella’s response was, “No. You just wrote a book. We already lost you for a few years. We’re going to lose you again.”
UKJN: That’s heavy.
RR: That was a killer.
A lot of times, people ask me how I juggle all this stuff. And the truth is, I really don’t think about it. Every day, I wake up: What’s on the agenda? I have a job, so I have to clock in my time. But then I teach, and then I have to write books; that’s nights and weekends, and stuff like that.
At the time I wrote Heart Full of Rhythm, I was working a four-day schedule, so at least I had a three-day weekend, but I didn’t want the kids to see me glued to the laptop all time, always doing research.
Putting them to bed at eight o’clock, then writing till 11 o’clock, going to sleep, waking up at four o’clock, writing on the bus, coming home, playing with the kids: it was a lot. So, I felt like those last two books had eaten up about eight years of my life, on top of everything else.
The big change came in 2020, when the pandemic hit, and I transitioned to working from home. I was in Queens physically maybe once or twice a week, so that gave me a lot more time with Margaret and the kids. Everybody picked up something during the pandemic; I started cooking, and became the house chef.
So, I’ve done my best to balance it all, to be there for everybody at all times. It’s exhausting – I can’t deny it – but it’s incredibly fulfilling. I can say I spent my whole day cataloguing Louis Armstrong’s tapes, and getting paid for it. Then, when the clock ran out, my wife and kids came home. I made dinner, we watched TV, we had laughs.
Then, they went to bed, and I worked on a chapter, and made some startling breakthrough in Armstrong scholarship. Then I fell asleep to a Yankee game. I cannot complain about any aspect of it.
UKJN: Armstrong altered the trajectory of your life. Beyond his world-quaking music and cultural import, something essential about his personality must have hooked you.
RR: For me, the simple answer is joy. That’s what got me when I was 15. I didn’t know why it was important. I didn’t know the historical background. It just made me feel good. Thirty years later: I put on his music, I listen to an interview, I watch him on TV, I put on a concert. Whatever it is, he always makes me feel good.
Especially writing this last book, The Early Years: my god, what he had to live through. That he survived is a miracle. I did not have that kind of upbringing, as an Italian from the Jersey Shore; everything’s good over here.
But there was something about just looking at him – like, man. This guy could have turned dark at any moment. He had his moments of rage, like when racism got him down…
UKJN: And nobody would have blamed him.
RR: Exactly. But there was something about him, internally; he would take a look around, take a breath, sometimes take a drag – whatever he needed to get through the day.
And he’d just say, I am going to put something positive out in the world. I’m not going to waste this energy complaining, or sulking, or protesting; I’m just going to be me. And, if you don’t like it: tough. If you do like it: well, thank you. I’m my own audience. That hooked me early on. This guy knew who he was; he knew his value, and you couldn’t change his mind.
UKJN: Armstrong had to make hard-ass decisions left and right. In his younger years, he could have easily been killed. One thing I really appreciate about your work is that you swerve around any sense of historical inevitability.
RR: I’ll say it right off the bat: Stomp Off, Let’s Go is the book I did not want to write. Because – and this is going back early on – all we really had was Louis’s autobiography [1954’s Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans]. Some other authors had tried to contextualise New Orleans. I was just like, Well, what am I going to do? Just rehash the same old stories?
And there was this mythology – some people would say self-mythology – where Armstrong was this rags-to-riches, kind of clichéd Dickensian story. The barefoot kid in the coal cart becomes the towering genius of 20th century music. I’m just like, There’s more to it than that.
In the last six or seven years, these different sources started coming up. [New Orleans’] Tulane University put up all these oral histories with basically every New Orleans musician who was alive in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
So, I had the voices of people who heard young Louis Armstrong – people who said, “He blew wrong. He blew false.”
Then, I had people also in New Orleans: when they were played records from the 1920s, like Armstrong’s vaunted ‘Cornet Chop Suey’, they said, “Oh, he got those ideas from [early jazz cornetist] Buddy Petit.” Well, Buddy Petit never recorded. I’m like, That’s an interesting clue.
So, now I’m listening to all these oral histories, looking for references to Buddy Petit, and on and on and on. And all of a sudden, I realised: Yeah, Louis Armstrong doesn’t come from out of nowhere.
I think when jazz history is taught, and professors have maybe one class to deal with the first 25 years, it’s easy to say, “Yeah, you know, 20th century music was kind of stiff, ragtime and march music, and then Louis Armstrong came and taught the world how to swing.” It’s neat, and pat, and you can move on to ‘West End Blues’, and modern ears can say, Oh, I hear it, and we move on to Charlie Parker.
But for me, this was more like building blocks: Who’s the first person Louis hears? Well, he remembered hearing [cornetist and early jazz architect] Buddy Bolden. I don’t know how much it sunk in, but let’s quote him on it.
[Trumpeter] Bunk Johnson was with the Black Eagle Band playing the ‘Funky Ball’, four or five doors down from Armstrong’s residence in 1911. Alright, so we have a 10-year-old Armstrong hearing Bunk Johnson. Armstrong remembers delivering coal in Storyville; here’s Joe “King” Oliver.
Then, Armstrong buys a phonograph, and he’s listening to [Italian opera singer] Enrico Caruso. He goes on the riverboats and learns the arrangements of Paul Whiteman. He’s doing more comedy; he’s playing the slide whistle; he’s starting to sing more. And by the end of the book, when you get to ‘West End Blues’, and all that stuff, it sets the rest of it in motion.
But it is by no means a story of just a straight shot, or just a born genius, or just destiny. This guy worked at his craft, and it was a miracle. He survived bullets literally whizzing past his head, police literally beating him, with billy clubs. His mother getting arrested multiple times. His sister getting arrested.
He got out of that world, and showed up to Chicago with all this musical knowledge and experience, and he was only 21 years old.
This thing happened very slowly, but also in a very calculated manner. We’re kind of still dealing with the repercussions. But I think this book kind of serves as the instruction manual of how exactly it happened.
