In 1964, a 62-year-old trumpeter knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts with Hello, Dolly. This episode traces Louis Armstrong's path from the New Orleans neighborhood nicknamed 'the battlefield,' where the Karnofsky family fed him and lent him money for his first cornet, to the Colored Waifs' Home, where a New Year's Eve arrest for firing a blank pistol led to his first formal music instruction under Peter Davis.

We follow his riverboat education with Fate Marable, King Oliver's call to Chicago, the way Lil Hardin reshaped his image and pushed him to go solo, and the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings that made the individual soloist the center of jazz. Then we cover the scat vocal on Heebie Jeebies, mob death threats and manager Joe Glaser, the ribbon microphone's effect on his singing, the Ambassador Satch tours, and his furious 19 ...