Lookback: on fact-checking a biography at the last minute

From 2009:

A good biographer will do just about anything to comb snippets of apocrypha out of his book. Fortunately, Louis Armstrong almost always told the truth about himself, but anyone who gets interviewed once or twice a week throughout the second half of his life is likely to streamline some of his favorite stories, and in writing Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong I did everything I could to track down the earliest possible primary sources for Armstrong’s oft-told tales….

Read the whole thing here.