"For Posterity": The Personal Audio Recordings of Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong exerted a defining influence on one of the most influential products of the American imagination: jazz. As noted by one of Armstrong's biographers, however, Armstrong's character was "buffeted by the forces of racism and commercialism." From the perspective of the archives, Armstrong's reaction to these influences was a form of psychological withdrawal that often coalesced around his interaction with recording technologies. Armstrong developed an intimate relationship with audio recording and relied upon its particular form of capture to shape a posthumous identity that was beyond the distortive influences that shaped his public and commodified image, and that was appreciably honest in its relationship with, to use Armstrong's word, "posterity"