The Life of Duke Ellington: An American Original

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And we love to tell stories about history, particularly the intersection of art and culture. Many music critics believe Duke Ellington was one of the most important composers in and out of jazz, an artistic giant of the twentieth century. His story is more than a musical journey. It is a story about race, culture, and art, and a walk through the twentieth century. Here to tell this remarkable story is the late Wall Street Journal culture critic and author Terry Teachout, whose book “Duke, A Life of Duke Ellington” may be one of the finest biographies I’ve ever read. Duke Ellington was born in 1899 in our nation’s capital, and both the timing of his birth and location impacted his life greatly. Here is Terry Teachout.

Washington, D.C., in Ellington’s childhood and youth, was one of the most ruthlessly segregated cities in America. It was, you might say, the northern tip of the Deep South, but it had a large, healthy, prosperous Black middle class, a Black bourgeoisie at the same time. That is what defines the Washington of Ellington’s youth. In the neighborhood he grew up in, U Street, it was a place where you lived if you could afford to, and in the alley if you couldn’t afford to, where every kind of Black person — well-to-do and poor, striving and desperate — they were all thrown together. But it was a society that in its own class divisions mirrored the class divisions of the White world. There was a racial caste system among Blacks. It had to do with economics; it also had to do with skin color. And Duke Ellington came from light-skinned parents, and this put them several rungs up the ladder. So you had a society of strivers, but you also had a society of people who were very self-conscious about their place and class. It might have looked on from the outside. Ellington’s father was considered pretty far up on the ladder of success because he was the butler of a White doctor, and so he acquired class identity and a patina of elegance from this very affiliation. This is something that Malcolm X talks about in his autobiography. I was quite struck by that, and it’s something I think that Ellington himself may have had equivocal feelings about. On the one hand, he was himself very class-conscious, and he was a person who was inclined for his Black friends to be people with White skin. At the same time, though, he believed deeply in the self-improvement ethos of the Black bourgeoisie. That is why he was determined to make something of himself, something important. His mother had told him right from the beginning of his life: “You are gifted, you are special, you are going to do remarkable things.” And Ellington never doubted her. She was dead serious about it. And Freud said that a boy who has the absolute approval of his mother is destined for success. If that’s true, Duke Ellington had the pedigree going in.

Most great talents have mentors that inspire them. In Ellington’s muse was a musician named Harvey Brook.

Harvey Brooks was, I believe, based in Philadelphia. He was a late ragtime, early pianist. He’s not well remembered today because he didn’t make very many recordings, but he did make piano rolls. Ellington heard one early on, and he’d never heard that kind of playing before. Being from a family of the Black bourgeoisie, Ellington was not the sort of person who was likely to grow up hearing ragtime or that kind of popular music that was going around at the time. When he heard Harvey Brooks playing rags, he was stunned by how exciting the music was and how personal, how individual it was. That was really what pushed the button that made Ellington want to be a musician. He had originally intended to be an artist, a commercial artist, and he had real talent in that area. But when he heard this kind of music and realized that you could go out on a bandstand, play music like that, people would hear it and know it was you, and that women would flock around the bandstand because they found that very sexy. That was what interested him. And, of course, he discovered very quickly that it wasn’t just a matter of his being interested. He also had innate talent for it. And it was Harvey Brooks who started him down that line, so much so that Ellington actually sought him out a couple of years later, and Brooks showed him some of the tricks of the trade. Usually, you become interested in music because you hear it and it’s beautiful. You’ve become transported by it, and then you start to think, “Well, maybe I could do that, maybe I can make that.” But with Ellington, it seems to have been the actual act of performance, of getting his hands on the keyboard and hearing the kind of music he wanted to play that excited him. He’d taken a few piano lessons as a child from a woman named, believe it or not, Clinkscales. We had to track that down in the census records, but it’s absolutely true. But they didn’t stick with him because she wasn’t teaching him what he wanted to hear.

Then came the race riots in Washington, D.C., which would alter the course of Ellington’s life.

The race riots of 1919 had an overwhelming effect on Washington, D.C. They were violent; they were shocking. They caused a lot of Black people to realize just how fragile their lives were, and it seems impossible that they wouldn’t have had that kind of effect on Ellington. He had already been hearing musicians from outside Washington. He knew there was more to the music that interested him, the music that excited him, than he was hearing in Washington, and he must also have realized that if you wanted to get somewhere, if you wanted to be more than just a famous local musician, at this point in the history of jazz, you were going to have to come to the work.

And you’ve been listening to the late, great Terry Teachout tell the heartbreaking story of Duke Ellington, and it will get increasingly heartbreaking as you listen to it. And also triumphal. “You are special, you are gifted, and you will do remarkable things,” his mother said. And to have those words spoken over you, what an advantage in life! When we come back, more of the remarkable story of Duke Ellington, as told by Terry Teachout, here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country, and especially the stories of America’s rich past, know that all of our stories about American history — from war to innovation, culture, and faith — are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu to learn more. And we continue with Our American Stories and with Terry Teachout, the late and terrific writer for The Wall Street Journal who wrote two of my favorite books about two of my favorite people, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. And let’s pick up where we last left off. We’re now moving into the area and dimension of time. Time, it would turn out, played as much of a role in Ellington’s life as location and race. Here is Teachout talking about the role of the Roaring Twenties on Ellington’s life and career.

The Roaring Twenties are a cliché. They’re movies, their scenes, and TV shows. We have this idea of what they were like. But the cliché was true. The country was completely earned inside out by Prohibition and the resulting lawlessness that stemmed from it, by the sense of personal freedom that people wanted and saw it, especially at men coming back from the First World War, coming back from Europe. You remember the song, “How are you going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Pei?” Well, that was what the Roaring Twenties meant to people. They wanted a larger life, one that had fewer restrictions, fewer limitations. They wanted excitement. Many of them wanted city life and the things that only a city can provide. It is in cities that jazz came to be, because they had dance halls, cabarets, bars, and gangsters who wanted music to be played while they were selling their illegal liquor. It was just the word “ferment.” I don’t mean the pun. There was a tremendous cultural ferment going along right then, not just in music but in every form of art. If you weren’t emulated by that, and there was nothing in you to be stimulated, and Ellington was stimulated to the highest degree by this freedom. He believed in the appearance of respectability. But he also wanted to lead a wider, freed or life, and the Twenties were the best time in the world, maybe in the history of America, to have been able to do that.

Ellington was indeed at the right place and the right time, doing the right thing, and no one place in particular played more of a role in shaping Ellington’s life than the Cotton Club in New York.

Well, it was quite a joint, and it was produced by racial segregation. In Harlem, there were a number of clubs that did not admit Blacks. They were entertainers, waiters, and part of the staff, but they couldn’t come in as customers. They were places where White people from downtown who had money to burn came up to entertain themselves, to discover this new exotic music called jazz. The Cotton Club was probably the best known of these places, decorated in the style of a plantation. What a horrible wirony! And its floor shows were accompanied by jazz. So they needed really good bands, and it was a mobbed-up joint. Not at all surprisingly, Owney Madden ran it, although by all accounts the mobsters treated the musicians and the courts girls with great respect. To have gotten that gig was a big deal for Ellington, not just because it was a high-profile gig, but because suddenly he was playing every night at a club where his band had to supply a lot of music — not just songs, not just original pieces, but music for dancing, and music for floor shows. Suddenly Duke Ellington had to produce. He was on the spot, and the Cotton Club took what he produced, and he made it known to New Yorkers with money who talked about it, and of the highest importance, he broadcast on network radio from there. It was one of the biggest breaks of his life when CBS installed a broadcast wire to the Cotton Club in 1929. He’d been making records for some time. He was known to jazz aficionados, but suddenly all you had to do to hear Duke Ellington at his very best was turning your radio on at night, and there he was. It was what made him, in a single stroke, a national figure, and a Black national figure. There had not been Black bands with this kind of exposure on network radio. Remember, too, this is in 1929, when suddenly there’s no money. It’s the Great Depression. People can’t afford to buy records, but you could afford to listen to the radio because it didn’t cost anything. That was what made Ellington a star.

And then came Ellington’s music and how he made it. It turns out Ellington didn’t compose like other composers. He was a compiler of deeds and ideas with a great facility to make something out of nothing, and he didn’t always give his collaborators credit.

To put it in the nastiest possible way, Duke Ellington was a credit hall. Classical composers sit down, write a piece; they bring it to the concert hall and the…
Orchestra rehearsals, and they play it.
Ellington couldn’t write that way because he didn’t have the technical grounding that you get from classical training. In the early years, he also had a band full of people, some of whom were very poor sight-readers, and Ellington himself…
…was not a good sight-reader.
In the early years, he would create pieces of music right there on the bandstand, in the rehearsal hall, and of course you could do that. That’s what jazz is like. It’s very much an improvised music. But Ellington had an interesting diffuse.
You should see.
He had an extraordinarily good ear for harmony, for rhythm, but he wasn’t good at writing singable melodies. When you’re leading a dance band, and to a great extent your success is reliant on pieces in song form that can become hits, it can become an impediment to your writing. On the other hand, he had put together a band full of hand-picked musicians, picked by him. He was with them every night, every day, on the road at the Cotton Club, and they were constantly improvising, and some of them, Johnny Hodgers in particular, were extraordinarily good at making up melodies and melodic fragments, and Ellington was listening. What he’d liked to do best was if you played a snatch of melody that he liked, he’d buy it from you for cash on the spot. And of course what he was buying was the total rights to this. Jazz musicians don’t tend to think ahead about this, this kind of thing. You know, they play it, they toss it off. They’ve got a million of them. If Duke says, “Likes this piece,” and he’ll buy it, “Okay, fine, you know, I’ll take twenty-five bucks for it.” And then he turns into a song, and not infrequently the song would become a hit, and unless the musician had been very shrewd about retaining rights, all of the proceeds from that hit went to Ellington.

And then there was “In a Sentimental Mood,” his classic, a song among many he was known by it. It turns out there was the Ellington version of how that song came to be, and then there was the reality.

He loved to tell these stories, not just about “In a Sentimental Mood,” but about many of the songs that he wrote. He had these little vignettes about what the songs meant or how they got written. Memory serves. He claimed to have written it when he had a woman sitting — two different women, one sitting on either end of the piano bench with him — and he wrote that song on the spot to get over with both of the ladies. That’s a lovely tale. He’s not beyond it. But he left out the most important part, which is that the melody of the song came from somebody else. It came from Otto Hardwick, the lead saxophone player of the band. So if he was composing that song on the spot to get over with the two ladies, he was composing it with somebody else’s tune. That’s a very characteristic form of Ellentonian obfuscation. I would say he didn’t like to talk about this aspect of his compositional process, and you can see why. There’s a certain kind of genius who wants you to think that he does everything equally well. Ellington was that kind of days.

Ellington was a man of many, many talents. He was also a man of many secrets.

Ellington was leading the life of a voluptuary. He was leading a life that would have scandalized many people had they heard about it. He certainly wanted to keep his compositional process secret because there were aspects of it that were trade secrets, and there were other aspects of it that I think he would have found embarrassing: the fact that he was much more a collaborative artist than he cared for the public to realize. When you get into the habit of keeping secrets, whether you’re an artist or a spy, it’s something that can really spread throughout every aspect of your personality. And I think that’s what it was with Duke.

And you’ve been listening to the late Terry Teachout telling the story of Duke Ellington. When we come back, more of this remarkable story here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories in the life of Duke Ellington has chronicled in the terrific book “Duke, A Life of Duke Ellington” by the late Terry Teachout. A two-week trip to London that the Palladium would change how Ellington viewed himself and his music. The reaction by the audience was that powerful and that positive.

Ellington was fairly famous by the time he went to London, but he was famous in a way that a Black man would be famous in America in the 1930s, a way that is somewhat limited. The whole racial caste system in this country meant that he was not seen as an artist, but as an entertainer. Even though he saw himself as an artist, there was a ceiling that he always bumped up against in his country. So he goes over to London and, suddenly, very suddenly, that opening night, suddenly he completely overwhelms an audience that has never heard his band live. They’ve never heard anything like this. There had been some jazz played in Europe before that time. Louis Armstrong had played it. But the Ellington band was, I think, peculiarly well designed to appeal to an unusually wide range of critics and aficionados in London at that time, because it was a kind of orchestra that played not just improvised solos but compositions. So you had a whole lot of classical musicians of real distinction over there, who heard that band and who insisted when they wrote about it that it was, in its way, equivalent to the best classical music that was coming out of America. That was a very, very big thing for a Black man to hear and to be told at that time. This was a man who was going from gig to gig in private cars on a train, which sounds very fancy when I say it, but he did that because you couldn’t get a hotel in the South if he were Black. And suddenly he goes to London and he’s being treated like a kind of prince, like the genius that he was, and he is also able to stay in the best hotels. It thrilled him.

Ellington said this to a friend about staying at a luxury hotel in England: “You know, I lo-“