The subsequent film, Louie Bluie, will speak to anyone who appreciates music history and likes to dig into the deepest roots of Americana in the form of street jazz, string blues, gospel, ragtime, and Tin Pan Alley, most of which is still available only on old 78s sold from collector to collector. In a sense, the film completed Armstrong’s strange journey from popular folk artist and club performer in the 1930s and ’40s, to complete obscurity in the 1960s, to minor resurrection amid renewed interest in old-time jazz, country and blues in the 1970s and ’80s. When he died in 2003 at the age of 94, his obituary in The New York Times called him “the last guardian of a vanishing African-American tradition of string-band music.” To Zwigoff, he was a “larger-than-life character, one of the funniest and smartest guys I ever met,” and one of the film’s chief virtues is the way it translates the impression Armstrong made on Zwigoff to the viewer.

Louie Bluie is a jaunty, engaging documentary that never at any point pretends to be comprehensive or in any way complete. Rather, it is a fleeting 60-minute grassroots snapshot of an astonishingly gifted musician in the twilight of his years still doing that which made him fleetingly famous in the music world decades earlier. A wizard on both the mandolin (which he took up after his pastor father rejected it as the “devil’s instrument”) and the fiddle, Armstrong was a genius of a performer, sliding easily from instrument to instrument and musical genre to musical genre. There was virtually nothing he couldn’t do musically (rumor had it he could play at least 22 instruments), so it is no small surprise that at least half of Zwigoff’s documentary simply observes him and his band mates jamming in various locations, from Armstrong’s living room, to a small club, to a Chicago street corner. His music is rough and unruly, primitive in its way, but it has an infectious vibe and sense of bluesy authenticity that all the overproduced, overmixed, and digitally manipulated songs of today studiously lack.

What makes Armstrong all the more fascinating of a subject is the fact that his artistic gifts did not stop at music. Rather, he was also an impressive visual artist and writer who filled pages with poetry, prose, and watercolor paintings that reflected both traditional African American folklore and his own wicked sense of humor and lack of decorum (his unpublished masterpiece, which is trotted out and paged through several times in the film, is a massive tome of writing and art called The ABCs of Pornography). Make no mistake: Armstrong earns his frequently used label of “raconteur,” and Zwigoff needs to do little but train his camera in Armstrong’s direction and let the 75-years-young Renaissance Man reminisce and riff on everything from his family life, to his music, to his appreciation of good art (he claims to be a “realist”) and disdain for modern art (one of the film’s best scenes has him deriding a modern art sculpture in downtown Chicago). With his wardrobe of brightly colored suits and berets, Armstrong has a powerful screen presence, and Zwigoff is freed of any need to overlay the film with voice-over narration or explanation. We remember him largely because of his own self-awareness, and in the end you can’t help but respect a man of his accomplishments barreling forward into the eighth decade of his life with little to suggest that anything stands in his way.

Copyright ©2010 James Kendrick

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