The story of Louis Armstrong's musical development in New Orleans in many ways equates with the history of the birth of jazz in that city, and of its great days before major figures such as Joe “King” Oliver moved to Chicago to develop a national and international profile. Armstrong, son of an absent father and prostitute mother in an impoverished area of New Orleans (the “cheap Storyville”), became a legendary world-class musician. This spectacular rise has been celebrated and – according to Thomas Brothers – considerably simplified and misunderstood. His fascinating book, following other revisionist histories of New Orleans music, focusses on the first two decades of Armstrong's life and contextualizes the cornetist within a complex and fast-evolving city's racial and cultural life. He analyses the Big Easy's musical history as it arose from different racial and social groups; from concert, church and dance venues; and from the vibrant street life of a city notorious for its racially and sexually inflected parades and performances.

Brothers has produced “not exactly a biography … rather … one musician's experience of a complex city” (6). As a result, the book offers a dense account of the class- and racially fraught relationship between two non-white groups: the middle-class skilled-labour French-speaking downtown Creoles (descendants of gens de couleur libres) and the poor common-labouring uptown Negroes. Their musical traditions were very different; while the Creoles valued decades of eurocentric training in solfège, uniform harmony, music theory and sight-reading, their Negro counterparts drew on African plantation ragging as well as Sanctified Church- and street-based improvisatory “ratty” ring shout music of parade and second line. Although these two traditions retained their discrete characteristics until the early twentieth century, Brothers demonstrates how their dialogic relationship (rather than the melting-pot “gumbo” metaphor the rejects) helped develop that unique quality of New Orleans ragtime/jazz, something Joe Oliver and his protégé Louis Armstrong innovated as they literally crossed the dividing line of Canal Street to play with Creoles. Not an assimilationist, because holding on to the vernacular values of the music he had learned as a child, Armstrong professionalized his playing by learning different styles and drawing on varied musical identities, rising to considerable prominence after Oliver left the city.

In Armstrong's famous line, “What did I do to be so black and blue?” Brothers finds that mixture of schmaltz, intellectual intensity, tragedy and comedy out of which this remarkably sophisticated musician helped mould a whole new musical tradition.