He may sing about a "wonderful world," but jazz legend Louis Armstrong had to overcome a not-so-wonderful one in order to step foot into musical heaven. The first influential jazz soloist and perhaps the most talented ever to emerge on the music scene, Armstrong was anything but gifted with a difficult childhood. Raised by a single mother in New Orleans, Armstrong had a knack for music but no means to achieve success. He acquired a cornet as a youngster when the junk dealer he worked for bought one for him, and was sent to reform school before he was a teenager for firing a gun during a New Year's Eve celebration. The thug had potential, however, and at reform school Armstrong honed his skills on the cornet and bugle in the school band, eventually becoming the protégé of cornetist Joe "King" Oliver, taking over for Oliver in the Kid Ory Band when Oliver moved to Chicago.

Eventually moving to Chicago to join Oliver's band in 1922, Armstrong dabbled in several different bands before joining the Dreamland Syncopators, switching from the cornet to the trumpet. Moving on to record with studio-only groups called the Hot Fives or the Hot Sevens, Armstrong scored his first Top Ten hit in 1926 with "Muskrat Ramble." After this breakaway hit, Armstrong was on fire; he took lead roles in several groups while recording hits like "Hotter than That" and "West End Blues" (one of his first recordings to go down in the Grammy Hall of Fame). Continuing to play with various groups through the rest of the ‘20s and ‘30s, Armstrong pumped out jazz hits until the ‘40s, when the post-World War II era called for a shift in times away from swing music. Still, Armstrong played his heart out on the trumpet, continuing to draw in crowds through the ‘60s, long after the jazz phase of America was gone.