I have read several books from the Who Was series. I recently re-read Who Was… Louis Armstrong because I had to do a Black History Month project and I remembered reading it and loving it.
Who Was… Louis Armstrong by Yona Zeldis McDonough tells the story of Louis Armstrong’s life and how he didn’t get much proper schooling, he spent most of his schooling in a corrective school because him and his friends were going to shoot off a few cap guns in the street and his cap gun got replaced by a real gun and accidentally he shot it off. A policeman caught him and took him to court. Louis wasn’t imprisoned, he was just sent to corrective school. He got into the corrective school band, I don’t know why there’s a band in a corrective school, and got to play the cornet.
Louis Armstrong is important because he revolutionized music. He invented scat accidentally by replacing words to songs that he forgot with nonsense like “bibbity bobbity”. He was a black man in a time of segregation. He suffered judgement, but still went on. He got a band of blacks and whites. It was unusual for that time because that was a time of segregation.
I recommend this book and all the Who Was series. I hope they have ones on a lot of people because I want to do all of my reports with these.
Ewandini is a Junior Cannonballer.