What You Didn't Know About Louis Armstrong's Secret Daughter

May 2024 ยท 2 minute read

In 2012, a woman named Sharon Preston-Folta published a book in which she claimed that her father was jazz legend Louis Armstrong. In an excerpt from her book "Little Satchmo: Living in the Shadow of my Father Louis Daniel Armstrong," Preston-Folta described what it was like growing up a secret, unable to claim her own ancestry. "For more than 50 years, I swallowed that bitter secret whole," she wrote. "Some days, it would go down easy. On others, I would have to choke it down."

Louis Armstrong was a prolific writer of letters, and his belief that Preston-Folta was his daughter is apparent through his correspondence with her mother, Lucille "Sweets" Preston, a dancer with whom Armstrong had an affair for decades, and letters he wrote to others close to him. There's also documentation to show that he bought a house for her and her mother, and saved money toward her college education.

"He died thinking in the back of his mind that he had a daughter out there," Louis Armstrong House Museum archivist Ricky Riccardi told The New York Times. Several letters to Lucille document Satchmo's belief that Sharon was his daughter. He told her to "give my little daughter a big kiss from her daddy," and in one called the girl his "little Satchmo." But despite Armstrong's obvious conviction of Sharon's parentage, there was one person who was clearly not convinced.

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