Louis Armstrong The Decca Singles 1949-1958

In September 1949 Louis Armstrong signed to Decca Records, where Milt Gabler was their A & R man and took care of producing Pops’s records. According to Gabler, “The Decca sales organization, they loved Louis, but they also wanted pop tunes, or a plug tune. In those days, you had more than one record of a song when a publisher really worked on it, and as soon as Louis would make a pop tune, his record would go on all the coin machines immediately. And get air play.”
As Nicholas Payton wrote in 2012, “Bing Crosby said of Armstrong – ‘He is the beginning and the end of music in America.’ I agree. Louis Armstrong was the most important and influential musician of the 20th century. The Original King of Pop. Popularity and musical influence are two different things. The most influential people are not necessarily the most popular. Anybody can win a popularity contest, but to influence music requires specific contributions to the advancement of an artform. No person has ever been as popular as MJ, in that sense he is the indisputable ‘King of Pop,’ but Pop music’s king is Louis Armstrong.”
The above is an extract from the 50,000 word essay on Louis Armstrong : The Decca Singles 1949-1958 by renowned Louis Armstrong scholar and historian, Ricky Riccardi which is available to download here as a pdf
You can download and stream all 95 tracks from, Louis Armstrong : The Decca Singles 1949-1958 at Apple here
From Amazon here

