Lil Hardin Armstrong

Lillian Hardin Armstrong (née Hardin; February 3, 1898 – August 27, 1971) was an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger, singer, and bandleader. She was the second wife of Louis Armstrong, with whom she collaborated on many recordings in the 1920s.

Her compositions include "Struttin' with Some Barbecue", "Don't Jive Me", "Two Deuces", "Knee Drops", "Doin' the Suzie-Q", "Just for a Thrill" (which was a hit when revived by Ray Charles in 1959), "Clip Joint", and "Bad Boy" (a hit for the Jive Bombers in 1957). Armstrong was inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame in 2014.

Lil's grandmother, Priscilla Martin, was a former slave from near Oxford, Mississippi. Martin had a son and three daughters, one of whom was Dempsey, Lil's mother. Priscilla Martin moved her family to Memphis to escape from her husband, a trek the family made by mule-drawn wagon. Dempsey married Will Harden, and Lillian Hardin was born on February 3, 1898. She grew up in a household with her grandmother. Will died when Lil was seven. Dempsey later remarried to John Miller.

During her early years, Hardin was taught hymns, spirituals, and classical music on the piano. She was drawn to popular music and later blues.

Hardin first received piano instruction from her third-grade teacher, Violet White. Her mother then enrolled her in Mrs. Hook's School of Music. At Fisk University, a college for African Americans in Nashville, she received more advanced training, and earning a diploma from Fisk, returned to Memphis in 1917. In August 1918, she moved to Chicago with her mother and stepfather. By then she had become a proficient sight-reader, a skill that helped her gain a job as a sheet music demonstrator at Jones Music Store.

The store paid Hardin $3 a week ($61 in 2023 dollars), but bandleader Lawrence Duhé offered $22.50 ($458 in 2023 dollars). Knowing that her mother would disapprove of her working in a cabaret, she made it known that her new job was playing for a dancing school. As observed by Thomas Brothers, the discrepancies between her education and that of Duhé's band members were apparent; when she asked what key the New Orleanians were going to play in, they remarked, "We don't know what key. When you hear two knocks start playing." Three weeks later the band moved to a better booking at the De Luxe Café, where the entertainers included Florence Mills and Cora Green. From there, the band moved up to Dreamland. Here the principal entertainers were Alberta Hunter and Ollie Powers. When King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band replaced Duhé's group at Dreamland, Oliver asked Hardin to stay with him. She was with Oliver at Dreamland in 1921 when an offer came for the orchestra to play a six-month engagement at the Pergola Ballroom in San Francisco. At the end of that booking Hardin returned to Chicago while the rest of the Oliver band went to Los Angeles. She later studied at the New York College of Music, where she earned a post-graduate diploma in 1929.

In Chicago, Hardin returned to work at Dreamland as a pianist in an orchestra for Mae Brady, a violinist and vaudeville stalwart. While there, she fell for Jimmie Johnson, a young singer from Washington, D.C., whom she married on August 22, 1922. The marriage was short-lived, ending in divorce. The Oliver band returned from California and opened at the Royal Gardens with Bertha Gonsoulin at the piano but soon found itself back at Dreamland with Hardin at the piano.

King Oliver's band was enjoying enormous success at Dreamland when he sent for Louis Armstrong to join as second cornetist. Armstrong was beginning to make a name for himself in New Orleans and regarded Oliver ("Papa Joe") as his mentor. At first, Hardin was unimpressed, remembering that she "was very disgusted" by Louis, who arrived in Chicago wearing clothes and a hair style that she deemed to be "too country" for Chicago, but she worked to "take the country out of him", and a romance developed (to the surprise of other band members, some of whom had been trying to woo her for some time with no success). They would visit cabarets and after-hour spots after their job at Lincoln Gardens, but their relationship was solidified after Armstrong's mother's intervention in 1923, when she visited Armstrong in Chicago. She and Armstrong needed to be divorced from their previous relationships (Lil Hardin to Jimmie Johnson, Louis Armstrong to Daisy Armstrong) and "claimed desertion" from said relationships to annul the marriages. Hardin and Armstrong were married on February 5, 1924, and honeymooned/toured with the Oliver band in Biglerville, Pennsylvania. The Defender noted that Hardin was dressed in a "Parisian gown of white crepe elaborately beaded in rhinestones and silver beads."