Ricky Riccardi
speaker
185 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Ricky Riccardi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
He moves into a tiny flat with his mother and sister. And this neighborhood was so dangerous, it was known as the battlefield. And Armstrong, he spent most of his adult years telling these stories with a little bit of a wink and a smile. And he would talk about Black Benny, you know, the drummer who would fight during the parades.
And he would say, oh, well, my mother, whether or not she was a prostitute, I cannot say. But, you know, she's worked hard and taught us the rudiments. And so for this book, I wanted to keep Armstrong's words in place, but I wanted to dig a little deeper and talk about some of these characters.
And the deeper I went into police records and newspaper reports, all I can say is it's a miracle he emerged alive because from the time he's five, six, seven years old, he is seeing gunfights and stabbings and there's gamblers and pimps and prostitutes and His mother is arrested almost every year and sent to the house of detention, sometimes three, four weeks.
Armstrong would have to watch over his baby sister, cooking for her and for him and doing whatever he could to make ends meet. He's working. He's selling newspapers. He's working for the Jewish Karnofsky family. He's doing whatever he can to survive. But the police are there.
He mentioned the only time he was ever scared in his childhood were the police because they would whip his head and then ask his name later. gets arrested multiple times, the first time at the age of nine for being a dangerous and suspicious character.
And even in his teenage years, when he finally starts taking music seriously and getting more and more gigs, he said it was a miracle he didn't die at these honky-tonks because, you know, every night there would be a gunfight, bullets going right past him. And he said that, you know, the bouncer, his name was Oscar Slippers Johnson, he would protect Armstrong, make sure he didn't get hit.
And that's why I think when you read Armstrong's second autobiography, Satchman, My Life in New Orleans, it ends with, with him leaving New Orleans and joining King Oliver, because I think in his mind that was the climax. Everything that followed was gravy because he had survived this childhood that if it was a Hollywood film, somebody would say, well, this is cliche. This is rags to riches.
You know, nobody could have actually experienced this. But in his case, it's all true. And I found all the facts to back him up.
He did. And that was one line in his New York Times obituary that I'm sure had a lot of Hello Dolly fans kind of scratching their head. But it's true. And, you know, he told that story, too. He was stabbed in the shoulder by the prostitute that he tried serving as the pimp for. And he showed off that scar for the rest of his life.
So I also take time in the book to talk about the other figures from the Waif's home, the orphanage where he spent a couple of years and some of these people.
It was. According to his sister, she said definitively it was their mother's gun.
He was there a year and a half.
I mean, you hate to say something like, you know, that's the best thing that ever happened to him. But honestly, it was the first time that he had structure in his life. You know, the wife's home gave him three meals a day and schooling and taught him trades. But they more importantly, they had a music program run by a man named Peter Davis.
And at first, Davis did not give Armstrong the time of day because he knew kids from Armstrong's neighborhood were nothing but trouble. But he saw that Lewis was always hanging around the band room and eventually started him on the tambourine and the drum and the horn, the bugle, and finally the cornet.
And so on New Year's Eve, when Armstrong was arrested, the newspapers, you know, they referred to him... as Louis Armstrong, comma, old offender. That was his reputation at the age of 12. But then on Decoration Day, the Wavestone Band did a parade through Armstrong's neighborhood, and the newspapers covered that, and all of a sudden it was Louis Armstrong, comma,
And so the Waves Home made him into a musician. It really showed him this is your way out if you take this seriously. And he did. And even though they had this incredible music program, I followed the stories of some of the other kids there and who ended up, you know, shot in the head at the age of 17, who ended up in Sing Sing, who ended up, you know, a well-known pickpocket. And so, yeah.
He could have made any wrong choice at any time and have been one of those kids. He could have been gunned down. He could have been arrested. He could, you know, the whole sound of the 20th century could have changed. And we're just lucky that he had some angel on his shoulder or something that kind of helped him through. And we're all the beneficiaries.
Yeah, that was his main occupation. He had other little odd jobs, but the cold cart, he wrote a song called Cold Cart Blues, and he knew of what he sang because this was something that he probably started.
I've kind of narrowed it down to probably 10 or 11 years old, and he did it right until, well, excusing the Waif's home exile there for a year and a half, but he did it once again right until the armistice was declared in World War I. And this was back-breaking work.
You know, he would wake up in the morning and, you know, fill up a cart with coal and then he had a mule and he would go through the neighborhoods, you know, shouting out who needs coal. And, you know, this was tough. And then when he wanted to become a musician at the age of 15, 16 years old, he would get gigs at night.
Showing 121–140 of 185 · page 7 of 10
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