[2]: 12  His father, Timothy Armstrong, a miner originally from Hamsterley, and his mother, Mary (née Wilson), from Wigton, had married in Easington in 1842.

[2]: 16, 18 He lived for the most part in Tanfield Lea, though from 1902, for a few years, he moved to Whitley Bay to start and run a business as a newsagent.

In 1911, he was living with his widowed eldest child, Mary, and her children in Tanfield Lea; his second wife resided in Chester-le-Street with another daughter from his first marriage.

[11] The sociologist Huw Beynon states that what makes Armstrong stand out from other coalfield songwriters is his "impish irreverence" and "imaginative devilishness", with "nothing cloying or sentimental" in his descriptions of mining life,[12] while the folklorist A. L. Lloyd, according to Beynon, thought Armstrong wrote "as a herald of the dawn, who welcomes the day with a cock crow".

Me aad sangs hev kept me in beer, an' the floor o' the public bar hes bin me stage for forty years.

[16]: 2  In particular, Armstrong loved and was influenced by the Irish ballads that were popular amongst coal-miners in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially the genre dubbed "Come-all-ye":[c] these were usually written in lines of 14 syllables, with tunes in 68 time, and often in the Dorian or Mixolydian mode.

Johnny the bellmin he wes theor, squintin roond aboot, An' he pleaced three min at iv'ry door te torn the pitmin oot.

The new'un bein raised, took off his claes, Then at it they went dabbin' The blood wes runnin' doon the skeets An' past the weighman's cabin ... Armstrong directed that this be sung to the tune of Robin Tamson's Smiddy,[3]: 139  a ballad written by Alexander Rodger.

Little thought before the evening They’d be numbered with the dead; Let us think of Mrs. Burnett, Once had sons and now has none – With the Trimdon Grange explosion, Joseph, George and James have gone.

Armstrong wrote this song to the tune of the parlour-song Go and Leave Me If You Wish It,[19] and sang it, within days of the disaster, at the local Mechanics' Hall.

[3]: 129 According to Vicinus (1974), The Trimdon Grange Explosion exemplifies the later style of nineteenth-century pit disaster poem, with the traditional tone of lament accompanied by elements of reportage (the last four lines in the verse above).

Dolly Potts got tite an' flung a saucer at Betty Green, but it missed hor an' catched me reet between the eyes an' the mooth, an' aa've ad a greet lump there iver since.

Stanley Town Council unveiled a plaque commemorating Tommy Armstrong at Tanfield Church on 11 June 2016.