Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong was a keeper of the African American string-band tradition, a multi-instrumentalist with a very extensive repertoire, and also a multilinguist, painter, and teller of folk tales and anecdotes drawn from his long life and career. Born William Howard Taft Armstrong in Dayton, Tennessee, on March 4, 1909, he grew up from age 3 in the Furnace Hill district of LaFollette, where his father worked at a furnace. Using his father's homemade fiddle, he was playing in a string band with his brothers by age 10, and two years later he left home to work with fiddle player Blind Roland Martin in Knoxville. He became known as a songster, a performer who had mastered many styles of music. Four Armstrong brothers formed a band in Knoxville and performed on WROL as the Wandering Troubadours. Howard Armstrong and his brother Roland later joined bassist Carl Martin to play on Knoxville's Vine Street, in other public places around the city, and in surrounding towns. After passing an audition for Brunswick Records' on-location recording sessions in Knoxville, they recorded the instrumental tunes "Knox County Stomp" and "Fine Street Rag" on April 3, 1930; the release appeared for the country market as the Tennessee Trio and for the blues market as the Tennessee Chocolate Drops. In West Virginia, while playing in a bar with guitarist and singer Ted Bogan and Roland Martin, Armstrong was dubbed "Louis Bluie" by an inebriated woman, and the name remained with him. The Great Depression curtailed the music business, and Armstrong, Martin, and Bogan ranged farther afield, playing house parties, bars, social clubs, barbershops, and dances throughout the Southeast before eventually moving to Chicago. There Armstrong sought work in immigrant neighborhoods by singing in patrons' native languages for Poles, Irish, Germans, and Italians. He also performed at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, and on March 23, 1934, he and Bogan recorded four string-band titles for RCA Victor's Bluebird Records, though only two singles were issued and no later sessions followed. As string-band music fell out of favor, Armstrong moved to Sparta, Tennessee, and worked as a sign painter. In 1940 he took a welding job at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was there when the Japanese bombed the U.S. naval base on Dec. 7, 1941. After returning to the mainland, he lived first in Chicago and then in Detroit, where he worked on the Chrysler assembly line for 25 years. Following his retirement in 1971, he reunited in Chicago with Bogan and Martin, resumed recording, and joined the acoustic music revival scene. The group appeared at the National Folk Festival in Washington, D.C., and in folk clubs across the country. After Martin died in 1979, Armstrong performed as a solo artist and became the subject of two documentaries. In 1982 he played the Knoxville World's Fair, 49 years after appearing at the Chicago World's Fair, and after moving to the Boston area in 1996 he continued performing until shortly before his death on July 30, 2003.