摘要：“Dear Pal Goffin,” Louis Armstrong wrote to his Belgian acquaintance, the lawyer, hobby journalist, and jazz historian Robert Goffin, on July 19, 1944. “‘Man—I’ve been trying to get in touch with you […]. Here’s another hundred dollars toward the five hundred. […] So accept this hundred and I’ll send the other before a ‘Black Cat can ‘Lick his ‘Bu‘hind’ ….. haw haw haw…” (80). Sending Goffin a batch of money along with this playfully worded missive, Armstrong was hoping for quick results. He had written “four books of stories” about his life in the previous months and had sent them to his prospective Belgian amanuensis. Understandably, he was eager to read Goffin’s finished version of the manuscript and couldn’t wait to see his life story—for the second time after the heavily ghosted Swing That Music (1936)—in print. Goffin’s answers to Armstrong’s letters did not survive, but what did survive are the published texts that resulted from this transatlantic collaboration: the original French version Louis Armstrong: Le Roi du Jazz (1947) and the English version Horn of Plenty, translated by James Bezou and published in the US in the same year. What survived as well are large parts of Armstrong’s hand-written manuscript, which covers the jazz musician’s life between 1918 and 1931 and was published by Thomas Brothers as “The ‘Goffin Notebooks’” in Louis Armstrong, in his Own Words (1999).2
