JK Rowling and her debt to Louis Armstrong

July 6^th – Must be hard, being altogether famous and yet be branded as inconsequential, particularly when you don’t feel that way yourself.

Your childhood, your formative years have a real input into the person you become. Trauma’s experienced in what are classed as these formative years, which can be either between 4 to 10 for personal trauma and 16 to 25 for social/collective trauma, can have a real impact on how you deal with and view things in later life. On the social/collective front, much like how people who lived through the Great Depression in the USA see saving for a rainy day differently to those who lived through the years of flower-power plenty, or those who lived through the Second World War in the UK see the rules of combat and appeasement differently to those who lived through the years of the invasion of Iraq (the sequel). It informs your thinking and analysis and can give you opinions that are sometimes outside the mainstream. On the personal front, how you deal with a spider in the bedroom or a thunderstorm, or with untangling precious relationships.

Louis Armstrong’s troubles as child, with poverty, homelessness, near starvation and petty crime all playing a role in his early years, must have affected how he dealt with fame and the race issues that were prevalent in his latter years. His desire to remain in with the right people where his connections gave him access to continued work and a good living, but which consisted mainly of white folk, meant that the black movement saw him as something of an Uncle Tom, and he came under increasing criticism when it came to him putting race before place and not assisting with the equality and civil rights movement, certainly not to the extent they expected of him.

But one has to say that America knows how to treat its own; when he was a good, obedient citizen the white, ruling society showered him with access and perks denied to almost everyone in the black community. As soon as he did speak out (and then only very, very, very occasionally) the FBI opened a file on him and tracked his movements, intercepted his mail and ’phone calls and generally made things difficult for him…ring any bells? Snowden anyone? And STILL we never learn…or can’t be arsed to…and still we listen and believe the platitudes our rulers tell us… because we’re SO busy, and the mobile’s just rung and it needs answering and then there’s the Wimbledon semi-finals, we simply must see how Andy Murray gets on…sleep-walking into oblivion we are…

But, through all his association with white America and its doctrine of segregation and his involvement with the gangster element and commensurate mob-and-money troubles, he remained true to the music and the message and for that principle he has to be applauded…and, of course, that doyen of fiction, J. K. Rowling, has him to thank for being able to make one of her best descriptions of people other than the chosen ones; The Muggles. That was the title of an Armstrong composition that was another name for marijuana, of which Armstrong had a lifelong love for…what are you trying to say, Ms. Rowling…?