Lillian Hardin Armstrong – Lil Hardin
Singer, Pianist, Composer, Bandleader, and Fashion Designer
( February 3, 1898 – August 27, 1971)
She was a jazz pianist, composer, arranger, singer, bandleader and fashion designer. She was the second wife of Louis Armstrong, with whom she collaborated on many recordings in the 1920s.
Her compositions include “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue”, “Don’t Jive Me”, “Two Deuces”, “Knee Drops”, “Doin’ the Suzie-Q”, “Just for a Thrill” (which became a major hit when revived by Ray Charles in 1959), “Clip Joint”, and “Bad Boy” (a minor hit for Ringo Starr in 1978). Her composition “Oriental Swing” was heavily sampled to create Parov Stelar’s 2012 retro-song “Booty Swing”, which in turn gained notoriety when it was used in a 2013 Chevrolet commercial. Armstrong was inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame in 2014. Armstrong died on August 27, 1971.
She was born Lillian Hardin February 3, 1898, in Memphis, Tennessee, where she grew up in a household with her grandmother, Priscilla Martin, a former slave from near Oxford, Mississippi. Martin had a son and three daughters, one of whom was Dempsey, Lil’s mother. Priscilla Martin relocated her family to Memphis in order to get away from her husband, a trek the family made via mule-drawn wagon. Dempsey married Will Harden, and Lil was born on February 3, 1898. Will died when Lil was seven, though Dempsey later remarried.
She later studied at the New York College of Music, where she earned a post-doctorate degree in 1929