The famed right-wing critic Terry Teachout once thundered, “Politics makes artists stupid,” from his perch at the Wall Street Journal, on panning the pro-Palestinian play My Name is Rachel Corrie. Teachout, a conservative flag-waver first and a critic second, has just published his first new book in five years, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, and while the author’s flame-throwing antics don’t take center-stage, they’re present here all the same, boxing their way out of the margins.
Teachout intends this biography to be a populist celebration of the trumpeter/vocalist, yet he can’t resist sneaking in broadsides at Armstrong’s “enemies”—almost all of whom, in Teachout’s view, are other critics.
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Posted in 2009, Books Tagged: biography, jazz history, Louis Armstrong, racism, right-wing hypocrisy, Terry Teachout
