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Music, Baseball and New Orleans Pride: Louis Armstrong’s Forgotten Team, the Secret Nine

Sepia-toned photo of a 1931 baseball team, "Armstrong's Secret 9." Players in uniforms, with bats. Text: "To my pal Lee, best wish from Little Joe Lindsey."

If you had wandered into New Orleans on a hot Sunday in August 1931, you could have followed the sound of a trumpet to find the real celebration. Brass lines rolled across the levee, laughter rose from the stands, and somewhere behind second base a man already a legend in jazz picked up a baseball and grinned like a boy. August 16, 1931, was Louis Armstrong Day, a homecoming holiday that mixed music with sport and placed a sandlot team in crisp white uniforms at the centre of the city’s attention. The team had a name you could chant from the bleachers. The Secret Nine.


Armstrong was only thirty, already famous enough to draw crowds on reputation alone, and yet still restless. He had just made his first film and his records were selling better than those of white stars who had once dominated the market. Ricky Riccardi, Director of Research Collections at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, later explained that there was a bidding war for Satchmo’s future because he had crossed over from so-called race records to mainstream pop. In the middle of this new success he returned home for the first time in nine years, partly to play a string of sold-out shows at the Suburban Gardens, and partly because life elsewhere had grown dangerous. His manager, Johnny Collins, had gone back on a deal with a Harlem nightclub owned by the mob. The result was a gangster walking into Armstrong’s dressing room before a show in Chicago, holding him at gunpoint, and warning him to stay away from New York. Collins summed it up in simple terms. “We have to stay away from Chicago, we have to stay away from New York, it’s too hot. Let’s go on tour.”


Louis Armstrong attending a Mets game at Shea Stadium
Louis Armstrong attending a Mets game at Shea Stadium

New Orleans, with its open windows and easy flow between pavement and stage, was the perfect place to catch his breath. He performed at a whites-only venue on the levee where the sound carried out into the night air. Armstrong liked to tell people that four or five thousand Black listeners stood outside the open windows every evening and heard every note for free. The streets became his second auditorium. Those nights set the mood for a civic celebration. If the city was going to honour its most famous son, it would do it with the two things he loved most. Music and baseball.


Riccardi put it best. “He loved playing baseball. For the world’s greatest trumpet player to name that as his number two hobby, it says a lot.” Armstrong’s affection for the game was genuine. He had grown up playing it and followed it closely all his life. So he did something generous and entirely in character. He found a local club of friends and neighbours, likely connected with the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, and dressed them like champions. Out went the worn and mismatched kit that had earned them the nickname the Raggedy Nine. In came immaculate white uniforms with “Armstrong” stitched across the chest and bold numbers across the back. The players stood taller, the photographs shine brighter, and a modest sandlot side suddenly looked professional.



The name changed too. They became the Secret Nine. Some called them the Smart Nine, a nod to how sharply they looked when they took the field. Their story was chronicled in the Louisiana Weekly, which marvelled that Armstrong’s boys were outfitted with everything a good ball club could possibly need, “from their baseball caps down to the mascot’s water bucket.” The new look gave them confidence but also one peculiar problem. The uniforms were so pristine that the men did not want to slide into bases and get them dirty. That reluctance became a running joke and later part of the team’s legend. As Armstrong himself wrote in a notebook, “Of course they lost, but I still say they wouldn’t have been beaten so badly if they hadn’t been too proudly to slide into the plate. Just because they had on their first baseball suits, and brand new ones at that. But it was all in fun, and a good time was had by all I know. I had myself a ball.”


A holiday made to swing

Louis Armstrong Day centred on Heinemann Park, home to both the New Orleans Pelicans and the New Orleans Black Pelicans. On that Sunday in August the Secret Nine prepared to face the professional Black Pelicans before a packed crowd. A comedy act took the field to warm up the spectators, Armstrong threw the first pitch, and then settled into the stands to watch his team. It did not go well for them. The Black Pelicans were sharper and won four-nothing. The newspapers said Armstrong’s team “couldn’t make the grade against Lucky Welsh’s Black Pelicans.” Riccardi later described the Secret Nine as “a glorified sandlot team,” friends who played together for fun and pride. They lost heavily, but their spirits stayed high.


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The team’s identity, though, remained an enduring mystery. For decades no one could say exactly who they were. Only in 2019 was the first player definitively identified. Researcher Ryan Whirty, working with New Orleans’ International House Hotel, traced one of the faces in Villard Paddio’s famous team photograph to Edward “Kid” Brown Sr., a local boxer and member of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club. His son recognised him when he saw the image reprinted in a newspaper, remembering that their family once had a copy before Hurricane Betsy destroyed it in 1965. Kid Brown stands in the back row, third from the left. The rest of the names are still unknown.


From that single identification you can sense how local the story truly was. The Secret Nine were not professionals. They were ordinary men who loved the game and who took joy in their famous friend’s generosity. They played matches across the city that summer, scrimmaging against college and prison teams while Armstrong handled the first pitch and the publicity. For three months they were minor celebrities in their own right. Then, just as quickly, they disappeared from the papers. By 1932 the name no longer appeared in print. Their legend lived on only in the photograph and the bright memory of that holiday.



When jazz met baseball

The Secret Nine’s story also belongs to a wider tradition. Throughout the jazz and swing eras, bandleaders turned their orchestras into ball teams on their days off. Count Basie had one. Cab Calloway had another, complete with uniforms. Duke Ellington arranged pick-up games while touring. In those days a big band might travel with fifteen or sixteen musicians, just enough for a team. They played for charity or bragging rights, with no formal leagues or records, just the pleasure of competition. Baseball was the sport of jazz, as Riccardi puts it, a pastime that echoed the rhythm, improvisation, and timing that musicians understood instinctively. The Secret Nine were part of that same conversation between sport and sound.


Duke Ellington and band members playing baseball in front of their segregated motel ("Astor Motel") while touring in Florida.
Duke Ellington and band members playing baseball in front of their segregated motel ("Astor Motel") while touring in Florida.

Armstrong’s own love of the game only deepened over time. Earlier in his career, while playing cornet with King Oliver’s band, he had performed at a White Sox game in Chicago. Later he became an ardent Dodgers fan, drawn to the team by Jackie Robinson’s courage and talent. Inspired by a trip to Italy in 1949, Armstrong began making visual collages from magazine cuttings. In 1952 he created one devoted entirely to Robinson, carefully taping together photographs and headlines to tell the story of the first Black player in Major League Baseball.


He befriended Dodgers stars Junior Gilliam and Don Newcombe, and his enthusiasm survived even after the team left Brooklyn. One recording from the Louis Armstrong House Museum captures him teasing his manager Joe Glaser about the Dodgers defeating Glaser’s White Sox in the 1959 World Series. He also kept a box at Yankee Stadium, though he rarely managed to attend games without being mobbed by autograph seekers. Years later, comedian Billy Crystal recalled that his first visit to Yankee Stadium had been in Armstrong’s seats, where he watched Mickey Mantle hit one of his most famous home runs.


When the Mets arrived in the 1960s and built Shea Stadium only a few blocks from Armstrong’s home in Queens, he divided his loyalty between them and the Yankees. Friends remembered that he would watch the Mets on television while listening to the Yankees on the radio. He often invited players, including Cleon Jones, to his house after games. It was the same kind of hospitality he had shown the Secret Nine, half neighbourly pride and half fan’s delight.


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The summer the city listened

What makes Louis Armstrong Day and the Secret Nine so memorable is the sense of public joy surrounding them. The people of New Orleans stood outside the Suburban Gardens to hear him play, and later filled Heinemann Park to see his team. The city’s Black residents may have been excluded from the dance halls but they were not excluded from the celebration. For one day, music and baseball joined forces in a gesture of shared pride.



The Secret Nine remind us that the line between art and sport is thinner than it seems. Both depend on rhythm, improvisation, and courage. The team’s gleaming uniforms symbolised the power of presentation and the pleasure of being seen. The photograph by Villard Paddio captures that moment perfectly. Each man stands tall in his spotless whites, “Armstrong” emblazoned across his chest, proud even in defeat. Their performance that day was less about victory and more about visibility, about proving that a sandlot team could look like professionals if someone believed in them.


After that summer Armstrong left for Europe, the Secret Nine returned to their regular lives, and the story faded into legend. Decades later, researchers and family members revived their memory, and the Louis Armstrong House Museum continues to share new discoveries about them. Modern tributes have recreated their jerseys, honouring the same spirit of friendship and generosity that inspired the originals.


Armstrong once said that he liked to take the things that interested him, “piece them together and make a little story of my own.” Louis Armstrong Day in 1931 was exactly that: a collage of music, sport, friendship, and joy. He may have been a global celebrity, but on that field in New Orleans he was simply one of the boys, grinning as he threw the first pitch and watching his team play under his name.


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