Satchmo’s long-lost daughter
He was the Father of Jazz, a notorious womanizer who married four times, but Louis Armstrong was thought to have died childless.
Now, 42 years after his death, letters written to a former mistress by the genre-defining trumpeter and singer have emerged, revealing how the man known to fans as Satchmo or Pops kept a secret second family.
Sharon Preston-Folta, 57, a marketing worker with more than a passing likeness to Armstrong, has stepped forward for the first time to claim that she is his daughter, producing nine letters and other correspondence in which he professed his love for her even before she was born.
“I chose to tell my story now because it’s about my legacy,” Preston-Folta said as the correspondence went up for sale at auction this past weekend.
Experts have ruled the documents authentic.
“I matter. My story is important. I have every right to say who I am, to be proud of it. It was never a secret to me who my father was,” she said.
Armstrong was noted by several biographers as having never fathered a child, though he did adopt his late cousin’s mentally disabled son, Clarence, at the age of three.
His fourth wife, Lucille, signed an affidavit for a probate court following Armstrong’s death in 1971, stating that he had no biological children.
Yet for 16 years, he had sup- ported Sharon and her mother, acknowledging the child as his and buying them a house in New York state where he would visit them.
“After Louis was gone, because my mother didn’t step up and insist that I be recognized, the estate didn’t have to. My mother has a saying, ‘Those that know know, and those that don’t know don’t need to.’ She felt that I was recognized in his eyes,” Preston-Folta told a newspaper in Armstrong’s hometown of New Orleans.
Her mother is Lucille “Sweets” Preston, a former dancer at the Cotton Club in New York, with whom Armstrong began an affair in the 1950s.
In November 1955, Preston told Armstrong that she was pregnant with his child.
Writing to her while on tour, Armstrong referred to their forthcoming arrival as “my little Satchmo” and declared himself “so proud.”