Armstrong's Daughter (+Bonus Armstrong Audio Interview)

Last time, we watched the only film of “Slim and Sweets,” a popular Black dance duo of the 1940s. Luther "Slim" Preston (born in 1919, exact date unknown) and Lucille “Sweets” Woods (born June 22, 1921) were married in 1941. Soon, they were appearing in nightclubs and on bills with noted stars in stage shows. Black newspapers in the late ‘40s mention that they even presented a comedy version of Shakespeare’s "Romeo and Juliet," presumably in dance. In December 1949, Luther was a founding member of the Copasetics, the long-lived group of leading performers, mostly Black tap artists, formed in memory of the recently deceased dance pioneer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Sadly, Luther “Slim” Preston died less than a year later, on November 23, 1950, at the age of 31.

Soon afterward, Lucille “Sweets” Preston—she kept her married name— began a relationship with Louis Armstrong. They knew each other well, and had performed on the same bill many times. They first toured together in late spring 1945, playing theaters for about a week at a time. Here are notices about New York City and Chicago:

NY Amsterdam News, April 21, 1945

Chicago Defender, June 2, 1945

They collaborated again in the spring of 1946:

And they toured together again the next year. I previously showed you some advertisements from a stage show where they all appeared with Billie Holiday in May 1947.

Louis didn’t usually address her by her given name Lucille, but it’s worth noting he had been married to another Lucille, last name Wilson, since October 12, 1942. Since 1943, they had lived in that now-famous house in Queens, NYC. Meanwhile, Louis and Sweets had an agreement that when she traveled to his gigs, she would say that she was his “secretary,” as she does in this excerpt from a BBC radio program. She recorded this for him as an “audio letter,” as people used to do, and you can hear how much she was devoted to him—she calls him “my guy” and says “This time it’s binding”:

As you may know, Armstrong was in the habit of leaving his reel-to-reel tape recorder on during ordinary daily activities. Here, in mid-1954, the comedian Mantan Moreland walks in while Sweets is there, and Louis jokes, “You remember my secretary?… I’m teaching her how to take dictation!” (Where I put the three dots, Sweets says something like, “I’m not gonna grapple with you two!,” meaning, “I know how you two like to banter. and I won’t get in the middle of it.”) They all laugh:

The next year, Sweets and Armstrong had a daughter, Sharon, born on June 24, 1955. Sweets was not intimate with anyone other than Armstrong at that time, as she specifies in this short interview with Sharon (posted online in 2015):

Armstrong was thrilled, and called Sharon his “Little Satchmo,” and even told his wife Lucille about the baby, as he recalls in this letter to his manager Joe Glaser (writing from Las Vegas on August 2, 1955):

He writes, “I explained to her, the reason why (“Sweets”) and, when we first saw each other [again] up in Montreal, Canada, we had no intentions about sex.” He goes on to say that they later did have sex that time in Montreal. There is no complete itinerary of Armstrong’s performances, but the earliest I know of in Montreal is August 14, 1951, so that might be the one. Then he goes on to say, “but where we really whaled (sic) and that cute little baby was made—was in Las Vegas:

(The full letter is transcribed in Thomas Brothers’ book of Armstrong’s writings.)

Two years later, on April 3, 1957, he wrote from Utica, N.Y. on a cursive typewriter (yes, those existed long ago) to tell Glaser to buy an apartment in Harlem for Sweets and Sharon, near the Madison Avenue Bridge. Later in the same letter, he suggested that they might all live together someday:

Later, he bought them a house just north of NYC, in Mount Vernon, N.Y. But of course he never left his wife in Queens. In fact, he never acknowledged Sharon publicly, and when he died, his will stated that he had no children.

In recent years, Sharon Preston-Folta (her married name) has taken full control of her legacy. She published a short memoir in 2012, and is the subject of an Emmy-winning documentary film. It is distributed and available internationally via PBS.

Lucille "Sweets" Preston passed away quietly in her sleep on Sunday March 22, 2020, surrounded by family, at the age of 98.

All the best,
Lewis

P.S. For assistance with this essay I thank John Alexander, director of the film Little Satchmo, and Sharon Preston-Folta, who answered questions that I sent to John,