A pair of images that appeared to show jazz musician Louis Armstrong drawing a trumpet on a mohawk-sporting man's head have circulated online for years (archived).
Examples of posts featuring at least one of the images have appeared on social media platforms such as X (archived), Facebook (archived) and Reddit (archived). According to captions included in the posts, the photos date to 1961.
Some social media users wondered whether anyone really had a mohawk haircut in 1961, while others noted the man's apparent resemblance to tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.
Despite the seemingly anachronistic appearance of the fan, the images were authentic.
A photographer for the newswire agency United Press International captured the same moment, as noted in the information provided for one copy of the image (archived) that is now in the collection of the Library of Congress.
According to the information provided by the LOC, that photo was snapped in Nice, France, in 1961.
A differently cropped version of the same image was also available on Getty Images. Getty credited the photo to the Bettmann Archive, which took over management of UPI's library in 1984. The caption provided by Getty read:
Nice, France: Goes To His Head. A handy man with a grease pencil, jazz trumpeter, Louis Armstrong supplies an unusual autograph for an admiring fan here, Jan. 31st. The fan, already sporting an Indian haircut, asked Louis for an autograph and the latter obliged by sketching a trumpet on the side of the fan's head. Armstrong is in the process of adding his name to the fan's forehead.
Yet another cropped version of the same photo also appeared in an image of a German newspaper clipping shared by the official account of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in 2020.
Translated into English using Google Translate, the caption of that clipping read:
Trumpet King: Louis Armstrong once again gave an example of his inexhaustible ingenuity in Paris. He painted an autograph in the shape of a trumpet on the forehead of a passionate admirer of his jazz skills. Berlin will soon be celebrating a reunion with the veteran of hot tones. On February 13th he will be performing at the Deutschlandhalle with his "All Stars". Two days before that, his colleague Ella Fitzgerald will also try to fill the mammoth building with the Oscar Peterson Trio.
An article from the era, published in the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, confirmed that Armstrong did go on to perform at Berlin's Deutschlandhalle arena on Feb. 13, 1961, supporting the dates the Library of Congress and Getty Images assigned to the photo.
Because the German newspaper caption said its photo was taken in Paris, not Nice, Snopes reached out to the Armstrong House for further information about precisely where the photo was captured. We will update this story if we hear back.
Regardless, both sources suggested the photo was taken in France in January 1961.
It has so far not been possible to confirm whether another frequently shared photo of the same moment, in which the fan appeared to look more directly at Armstrong, was taken by the same photographer.
As some commenters suggested, the fan's haircut may have been inspired by the mohawk sported by jazz musician Sonny Rollins as early as the late 1950s. In a 2009 interview with A Blog Supreme, which is operated by NPR, Rollins explained:
Well, the mohawk was my attempt to pay homage to the Native Americans. There was a Native American guy that I know that used to come to see me when I was at the old Five Spot. ... This was back in the '50s. That sort of brought that to my attention.
That said, the theory that the fan based his haircut on Rollins' was no more than that: a theory. No personal details about the fan, including his name, appeared to have been recorded or preserved.
Despite the lack of available information about the mohawked fan and some confusion over which city the photos were captured in, there was sufficient evidence to support the claim that the photos authentically depicted Armstrong doodling a trumpet on a fan's head in France in January 1961. Therefore, we have rated this claim as true.
Previously, Snopes looked into another widely shared photo of Armstrong showing the jazz great playing his trumpet for his wife in front of the Great Sphinx and the pyramids of Giza.