Satchmo in Ghana: Louis Armstrong’s role in inspiring the sounds of free Africa
Revolutions do not arrive by plane, car, or tank; they arrive via the airwaves. Throughout history, music has consistently been used as a mark of social protest or unrest. During the early 20th century, for instance, Black artists in America often used jazz music as a means of subverting or countering the racist discrimination which permeated through virtually all aspects of society. Soon, jazz would become a revolutionary sound for the entire globe, with New Orleans trumpeter Louis Armstrong as its defiant spokesperson.
Jazz has always mingled with the world of politics, particularly during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Artists like Nina Simone, John Coltrane, and Max Roach used their inventive jazz styling to espouse Black excellence and identity during a period where Black people were consistently subjugated, abused, and, in many cases, murdered throughout the United States with little to no aid provided by the nation’s government. Having been an active jazz musician since way back in 1918, Louis Armstrong was best placed to witness the development of the genre, though he rarely dabbled in the political world.
While Armstrong often stayed away from the world of politics, he certainly was not apolitical. In fact, he was often outspoken about issues of segregation. When asked to go on a US state-sponsored tour of the Soviet Union during the late 1950s, Armstrong refused, saying, “The way they’re treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” refusing to represent the government that he saw treating Black citizens as second class.
Armstrong still acted as a kind of jazz ambassador to the world despite his refusal to visit the Soviet Union. During the mid-1960s, he embarked upon a world tour sponsored by the US State Department to spread the revolutionary sounds of jazz to nations around the world, including the newly independent state of Ghana. The trumpeter’s first encounter with the vibrant land of Ghana first occurred in 1956, when Armstrong touched down in the capital of Accra, in a country then known as the British Gold Coast.
Greeted by a sea of excited fans that seemed to stretch back across the tarmac for miles, estimates at the time suggested as many as 100,000 people turned out to see Armstrong. Moments after stepping off the aircraft, a group of local musicians began serenading the jazz star, and he quickly joined in himself, blending the sounds of Dixieland jazz with the diverse, euphoric sounds of Ghanaian highlife music. On the face of it, this event was a resounding success for Armstrong and the global popularity of jazz, but in a political sense, the events of that day in May 1956 were momentous.
At the time, Ghana was already verging on independence from its colonial oppressors. Since the 15th century, the nation had been under the control of European powers, and since the 19th century, Britain ruled over Ghana with an iron fist. During the mid-20th century, more and more nations in Africa were beginning to call for independence, and Ghana was the very first to achieve such a feat. Less than one year after Armstrong touched down in Accra, the British government passed the Ghana Independence Act, making the West African nation unified and independent on March 6th, 1957.
To claim that Armstrong was responsible for Ghanaian independence would be needlessly egregious, but Satchmo was certainly a key figure in carving out the cultural sounds of this newly independent nation. Given that his arrival and performance in the country were witnessed by up to 100,000 residents—an audience only rivalled in size by the Grateful Dead’s Raceway Park show decades later in 1977—his musical influence soon spread like wildfire across the nation.
His euphoric jazz represented a sense of freedom and expression that had not been afforded to Ghanaian artists living under colonial rule, so it is no surprise that those artists soon began blending Dixieland-style jazz with the traditional sounds of West African folk and highlife music.
Ghana’s political strifes were not solved overnight with the advent of independence, but its freedom from colonial rule set off a domino effect which would soon see fellow African nations pushing for independence. The role of Louis Armstrong and jazz in all of this is easy to overlook, but his role in providing the sounds of an independent Africa should certainly not be forgotten.
Even today, the distant influence of his airstrip concert in 1956 can still be heard in the musical output of Ghana and the wider West African region. He might not always have been a political performer, but Armstrong was a revolutionary in his own way, and Ghana was a nation very close to his heart. “I came from here, way back,” he poignantly said during his visit. “At least my people did. Now I know this is my country too.”
