The Secret of Louis Armstrong

The Secret of Louis Armstrong!

OMG!!!  OMG!!!  OMG!!!

We are living in the prophesied end times, when the Lord pours out his Spirit on all flesh!  (Joel 2:28). But who could predict what some of these manifestations would be!

I just had an overpowering vision of Louis Armstrong, returning with Jesus Christ, riding down with His Saints, from Heaven, blowing his Trumpet!  Tears are filling my eyes!  So many things are coming together for me with this vision!

Bible-believing clergy often remind us that what we do on earth, if we’re tuned in, is preparatory, literally, for what we do in the Heavenly after life and for when we return to earth, to rule and reign for a thousand years!

So the Holy Spirit brought this all together in a moment.  As a youth, young Louis received a cornet from a Jewish couple.  They prayed a Blessing over this trumpet and for Louie.  In God’s Sovereignty, it was no accident.

In his trumpet teleology and development, Louis was aware of the spiritual roots of jazz, its Pentecostal origins and spirituals sung by slaves, as well as the substance of the New Orleans funeral marches in the early 1900s.

Indeed, Shelton G. Berg wrote, “When a musician composes or improvises, the material emanates from two creative wells.  There is the ‘spiritual’ well, which houses our emotions and experiences, and also the ‘technical’ well, in which resides the theoretical elements that we have practiced and perfected.  Music is at its best when the impetus is from the spiritual well.  The technical well will be unconsciously called upon to provide the raw materials of expression.”

No one knew this better, or felt this more deeply, than Louis Armstrong (who also saw, through the decades, the misdirection of the spiritual and therefore technical, tainted by jazz icons, influenced by and soon dead from drugs and alcohol).

In the Armstrong repertoire, we see the first spiritual influences of jazz sustained in his “Shadrack” and the ever popular, “When The Saints Go Marching In,” the latter so popular it can still be heard whistled around the world; its recordings and sheet music still purchased regularly, by students, in western civilization and beyond.

But the most amazing song, of Louis Armstrong, was revealed posthumously!  Posthumously!  Has anyone ever wondered why “What A Wonderful World” was revealed posthumously?  It was kept a secret.  It was his message of the Heaven he’d encountered before his passing! And, with that classical smile of pearlies, he wanted “What A Wonderful World” to be a message to the world after his arrival in Heaven!

For sure, it’s not his description of earth, in the present he knew.  No.  He was describing his very real vision of Heaven!  Just as Martin Luther King had been “to the mountain top,” Louis Armstrong’s posthumous song was a vision of his experience in Heaven!  And the ultimate answer and fulfillment to everyone who has ever prayed the Our Father, with “On earth as it is in Heaven,” is exactly the scene when Jesus Christ returns with His saints, to rule and reign on earth a thousand years! Musically!

And with the majestic “Power Arrival” of the glorious Jewish King, Jesus Christ, is the one and only Louis Armstrong, blowing his trumpet unlike it’s ever been blown before! Right into the ears of the Messiah and for all the world to hear!  Now THAT is something to look forward to!  And tears are still filling my eyes.

I must add a personal note.  In 2011, when I left my mother’s hospital room for the last time, I softly kissed her on the forehead and days later she passed away.  But after that kiss on the forehead, leaving her for the last time, a nurse came in as I was going out, who activated in a music box “What a Wonderful World.”  It was the last song I heard in her presence.  And until today, I thought, “That makes no sense to me!  What kind of a world has it been for her, when she’s been in pain every day for two years?”  But it was only today I realized it was Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” she’d soon be going to: Heaven! And that song consoled her very much!  And it was a supreme irony that all her life, she’d had a strong fear of black people; yet this was the last song she’d hear, consoling her more than any other, by the black man, Louis Armstrong.