HEART AND SOUL OF SATCHMO ARMSTRONG ALSO HAD WAY WITH PROSE.

Byline: Tom Nolan Special to the Daily News

``Louis Armstrong: In His Own Words''

Selected Writings by Louis Armstrong; edited with an introduction by Thomas Brother

(226 pages, Oxford University Press; $25)

Trumpet player and singer Louis Armstrong - generally credited with popularizing if not inventing the rhythmic element of swing, and during his lifetime one of the most recognizable entertainers on the planet - deserves acknowledgment also for an achievement obscured by his dazzling musical accomplishments.

Armstrong was a prose writer of considerable talent, author of two published autobiographies and many articles, some of which were altered by publishers but all of which he alone wrote. The largely unschooled Armstrong thought of and referred to himself as a writer and spent a good deal of time recording memories, conveying opinions and maintaining an extensive correspondence.

This fascinating and lively collection gathers for the first time several items (half of which have never been published) that run the gamut of Armstrong's written output - anecdotes of childhood and career, letters to fans and journalists, a revealing communique with longtime manager Joe Glaser.

``Louis Armstrong: In His Own Words'' constitutes a significant chunk of what editor Thomas Brothers calls ``Armstrong's written legacy,'' a body of work Brothers deems ``a treasure for jazz history, for the history of African-American culture, and, indeed, for the cultural history of the United States.'' Large claims - but they're justified by this absorbing and in many ways thrilling book.

Of greatest interest, perhaps, are Armstrong's vivid recollections of his impoverished childhood in New Orleans in the early years of this century; of his early love of music, and of chasing after his hometown's first great jazz musicians as they played on wagons or in the streets, marched in parades or worked in dance halls.

Among the honor roll he calls are drummer Paul Barbarin, clarinetist Alphonse Picou, trombonist Kid Ory and (always) cornetist Joe Oliver. ``No trumpet player ever had the fire that Oliver had,'' Armstrong insists. ``Man he really could punch a number ... no one created as much as Joe.''

Equally precious to young Louis was how ``King'' Oliver was willing to guide him: ``And, as a kid, I couldn't help but notice the difference in the kindness in Mr. Joe ... All the rest of the musicians around New Orleans ... were full of 'you know what' and they never had time.''

In addition to Oliver and to his mother May Ann, Armstrong gives thanks and credit to a Jewish family named Karnofsky, who employed him as a youngster on their coal wagon and gave him crucial encouragement, applauding his earliest musical attempts: ``They really wanted me to be something in life ... Appreciating my every effort.'' Armstrong writes: ``It was the Jewish family who instilled in me singing from the heart.''

By his own account, Armstrong was a singer even before he played a horn. His richly human timbre can be heard here in every typed or handwritten phrase.

Brothers, an associate professor of music and author of ``Chromatic Beauty in the Late Medieval Chanson,'' seems especially qualified to discern the song in Armstrong's sentences. In his informative and insightful introduction and notes, Brothers shows how Armstrong brought ``improvisatory or performative techniques to his writing,'' using quirky punctuation to ``personalize the text.''

The author-musician used creative use of italics, dashes, quote marks, and capitalization to emphasize, convey emotion, and alter rhythm - much as he might bend or shake or repeat a musical note or line. He used the typewriter as an instrument, and punctuation as grace notes.

As a writer too, then, Louis Armstrong displayed an idiosyncratic brilliance. The scenes he describes in this inimitable way are often from a colorful early life in a milieu inherently crude and sometimes violent. And what Armstrong candidly and earthily reveals of his personal behavior (especially his cavalier attitude to marriage vows) sometimes displays what one might call selfishness and willful ignorance. But Armstrong also shows (and Brothers comments on) where such traits originate: in the permissive show-business world in which he reigned, and in the demimonde of pimps and hustlers from which he sprang and where he learned dubious ``wisdom'' he always clung to.

Of the New Orleans whores and gamblers who cosseted him and were his first audience, he writes: ``Yea, those were my people, my crowd... (and) still are.''

The positive aspect of Armstrong's loyalty to his origins is that the vitality of his home town stayed with him all his life and lit up his art. Listening in 1951 to his Hot Seven group's 1920s recording of ``Potato Head Blues,'' he says, he ``could look direct into the Pelican Dance Hall, at Gravier and Rampart Streets in New Orleans, during the days of the First World War...''

Reading Armstrong's self-typed pages (printed here in all their orthographic eccentricity), we are given extraordinary glimpses of that vanished world, and of the remarkable man who emerged from it with (despite justified pride in his great achievements) humility intact. ``I must have been born with talent,'' Armstrong reflects.

``All that I needed was a little Encouragement to bring it out of me ... I was just a Kid trying to find' out which way to turn. So that May Ann and (sister) Mama Lucy could feel proud of their Louis. Not trying to be too much, just a good ordinary Horn Blower.''

As epitaph, that far from ordinary horn blower might have been content with words he wrote of drummer Big Sid Catlett: ``All that I'd have to do is ... SEE (him) ... DOING JUST any old THING MISCELLANEOUSLY ... and it would Hang me (make me feel good). That man really had a Soul ... He's gone, but not, forgotten. Nay Nay.''

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(1) Louis Armstrong

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