Thank God for Louis Armstrong. He saved my Monday.
I had woken to the usual weekend news updates—more political unrest, more bad pandemic numbers.
And, then, “What a Wonderful World” popped up on my Pandora.
Suddenly, I’m seeing “trees so green,” “red roses too,” “skies so blue,” and “friends shaking hands.”
What timing!
Evidently, I was not the first to experience his magic. In 1968 when the writers coaxed a nearly 70-year-old Armstrong to record their song, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been assassinated, there had been race riots in Chicago and D.C., and the communist forces had launched their TET Offensive in Vietnam.
So Louis Armstrong to the rescue, and a piece was born that one critic called “one of the most uplifting, life-affirming songs of all time.”
Amen to that.