"The Night Before Christmas"- Read by Louis Armstrong (1971)

 Louis Armstrong loved kids. In the summertime he would come out of his modest home in Queens, near old Shea Stadium, and buy the neighborhood kids ice cream. At other times he would have "block parties". His own impoverished childhood was probably the impetus for this.

He was the reason I began coin collecting. His official bio at the time gave his birthday as July 4th, 1900. So, my first coin was  a 1900 Indian Head Penny. I bought it at the Hobby House on Coney Island Avenue for 75 cents. I was 11 years old and used to fantasize that this coin may have passed through his hands at sometime. I still have it. (His birth date has since been disputed and is currently listed as August 4th, 1901)

On February 26th of 1971, the year he passed away, he was home in Queens, in the same house which is now his museum, and recorded "Twas the Night Before Christmas" on his reel to reel tape recorder. Whether he meant it to be released is not really known. He had thousands of these kind of tapes on his personal collection. You can hear some of them at the museum. Each one has a hand drawn cover which he did in pencil, ink and crayon.

On March 1st he began his last commercial appearance, playing for a few weeks at the Waldorf Astoria. 2 days after the last show he had the first of two heart attacks and by July 6th he passed away in the hospital, 1 floor away from his manager, Joe Glaser, who also passed away shortly after. The two had been together since 1935.

That Christmas his recording of the poem was distributed by the cigarette manufacturer Lorillard, which pressed it onto a million 45-rpm records as a free giveaway for anyone who bought a carton of cigarettes. Some candy store owners sold the records for about 75 cents to neighborhood kids. I was one of them. I had it for decades but lost track of it over the years. Luckily you can still hear it, and download it, from you tube.

Merry Christmas from Louis Armstrong. ❤