Duke Ellington and His World

A. H. Lawrence

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135880613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Biographies de musique

Based on lengthy interviews with Ellington's bandmates, family, and friends, Duke Ellington and His World offers a fresh look at this legendary composer. The first biography of the composer written by a fellow musician and African-American, the book traces Ellington's life and career in terms of the social, cultural, political, and economic realities of his times. Beginning with his birth in Washington, DC, through his first bands and work at the legendary Cotton Club, to his final great extended compositions, this book gives a thorough introduction to Ellington's music and how it was made. It also illuminates his personal life because, for Ellington, music was his life and his life was a constant inspiration for music.

1

ELLINGTON OPENS HIS autobiography, Music Is My Mistress with the story of his own creation in the form of a fairy tale. “Once upon a time,” he begins, a beautiful woman marries a handsome gentleman and soon they are blessed with a bouncing baby boy. The woman is his mother, Daisy Kennedy, and the man is his father, James Edward Ellington. The blessed boy, of course, is their son Edward, later known as Duke, who was born on April 29, 1899. Ellington’s only son, Mercer, said that his grandmother Daisy had such a strong influence that all the Ellington men felt a strong urge to preserve her family name. Thus, Duke Ellington was Edward Kennedy Ellington, his son was Mercer Kennedy Ellington, and his grandson was Edward Kennedy Ellington II.

Born on January 4, 1879, Daisy was the oldest of nine children. In his autobiography, Ellington described Daisy’s father, James William Kennedy, as a captain in the District of Columbia police force, and the book includes a picture of him in uniform. However, there were no black senior officers in the D.C. police until Franklin D.Roosevelt’s administration, and there is no evidence in the census reports that James Kennedy held that occupation. Some African-Americans were deputized police officers for special events in the black community, and it may be under those circumstances that Daisy’s father held the title.

According to the family, James William Kennedy was born a slave on a plantation in King and Queen’s County, Virginia, the illegitimate son of the owner and a slave woman. As a young man, James fell in love with a fellow slave, herself of mixed blood, part African and part Cherokee. This relationship was interrupted when James’s master freed him, as slave owners often did with their mixed-race sons, and he emigrated to the District of Columbia. After Emancipation, James returned to Virginia and brought his love back to Washington. Their first child, Daisy, born on January 4, 1879, was described as light-skinned, very pretty, and cultivated.

James Edward Ellington was born in Lincolnton, North Carolina, on April 15, 1879, and moved with his parents to Washington D.C. in 1886. They were among thousands of blacks who had moved north, away from the rural and semirural towns of the South, between the Civil War and World War I. His mother found employment as housekeeper and receptionist to Dr. Middleton F.Cuthbert, a prominent white physician listed in the District Social Register. At age seventeen, J.E., as he was known, was hired as a coachman for Cuthbert, and over time he progressed to driver, butler, and, by 1919, caretaker and general handyman.

Given the status of his employer, J.E. carried a great deal of weight in the black community. And it appears that he was also a charmer who swept Daisy off her feet. “You think Duke was charming?” I was told by a woman who had been a chorus girl at the Cotton Club in the 1930s. “He couldn’t hold a candle to his daddy. That man could charm the birds out of the trees.”

William “Sonny” Greer, a charter member of the Ellington orchestra, offered this portrait of J.E. The band had arrived at the King Edward Hotel in Toronto just as it had begun to snow. A young woman was walking out the front door and exclaimed with surprise about the change of weather. J.E. took off his hat, made a sweeping bow, and declared to the startled, but pleased, young lady, “Those millions of snowflakes are in celebration of your great beauty.”

J.E. and Daisy were married on January 3, 1898. Their first child was stillborn, or died shortly after birth. Daisy’s second pregnancy became emotionally complicated toward its end. According to Mercer Ellington, she went on an excursion on the Potomac River and the boat sank. It was a frightening experience. According to her sister Florence, she became phobic and refused to leave the house. Daisy’s mother dispatched one of her sisters to live with her until the child was born.

This prenatal trauma, combined with the loss of Daisy’s first child, carried over into Ellington’s early years. One of Ellington’s early memories is of being ill with pneumonia. He remembers his mother “kneeling, sitting, standing to lean over his bed praying and crying.”

There is also contemporary evidence that, following her marriage, Daisy became depressed and remained intermittently so throughout her life. Her youngest sister Florence told an interviewer, “Daisy was the ‘Belle of the Ball’ until she got married. Then she changed. But once Edward was born, she was alive again, but she was never the girl she was before she married J.E.”

Shortly after their son was born, they moved into J.E.’s parents’ house at 2129 Ward Place in Northwest Washington (now 1217 22d Street N.W.). Greer told the author that after he met Duke in 1919, Daisy would occasionally invite him for Sunday dinner. She was always a gracious hostess, inquiring about Greer’s family, even though she didn’t know them personally. Taking note of his slight stature, she would always ask if he was getting enough to eat. He said she always looked sad, “[b]ut when Duke walked in, she’d light up!”

Daisy was the oldest in a family of five girls and four boys, two of whom died at an early age. Ellington said that all of the girls, even after they were married, spent a great deal of time at his mother’s house. He felt some of them even preferred it to their own homes. “It was a wonderful, warm family,” he wrote. “And whatever one owned they all felt they owned a part of it, and that included me.”

He was right. All the women in the family felt he was special. Ellington was the first grandchild on his mother’s side, and, according to Ellington, he was “pampered and spoiled by aunts and female cousins alike.” One of his cousins recounted, “I never seen nothin’ like it…. We were so happy to see him we thought he was the grandest thing in the world.” Sonny Greer told the author that a close relative described the family interaction as “Daisy, the Queen, and Edward, the Crown Prince.”

While perceiving him as someone special, his family introduced him to the world of elegance at an early age, with assistance from Dr. Cuthbert, J.E.’s employer. His medical practice included the socially prominent, as well as the politically well-connected. The Morgenthaus and DuPonts were known to be his patients. When Ellington had to have a hernia repaired at age eighteen, the physician recommended by Dr. Cuthbert was later appointed surgeon general.

As the butler, J.E. made the decisions around the Cuthbert house and oversaw the activities of the cook and maid. He also catered many of the parties Cuthbert threw for his well-placed friends and associates. Mercer Ellington remembers both his grandparents helping prepare food for these occasions. They also worked with other family members for different caterers, including on one occasion, a reception at the White House.

Being in service to Washington society had another (albeit minor) benefit for the Ellington’s. Their employer would pass on to them used household articles, generally of good quality. Over time the family owned fine secondhand sets of silverware and china. “Maybe we never had a complete genuine set,” Mercer stated, “but all the silver was first class.” He said that both his father and grandfather had an extensive knowledge of glassware, china, and silver.

There were excellent cooks in the family, and dinners at home tended to be quite grand. Mercer noted that the table was always set like one of the many elegant functions his grandfather had butlered. “This you might say is where the ‘Dukedom’ began,” Mercer recalled, “his experience of being around when his father was working for splendid people.” Ellington himself remembers being pressed into duty as a page at one of these functions, when the boy who usually performed this task was unavailable.

Being the pampered son in this elegant household had its disadvantages too. Ellington’s mother, besides being depressed and fearful, had ambivalent feelings about Duke’s growing up. For example, when he was five years old, she listed his age as six so she could send him off to the Garnet Elementary School. But having sent him off early, she would secretly follow him to school every day and often wait for him outside the building at the end of the day.

Her anxieties about him were further exacerbated the following year when Ellington was hit on the head with a baseball bat during a game. She rushed out in the street and took him to Dr. Cuthbert, who closed the wound with stitches. Ellington said, “The mark is still there, but I soon got over it. With that, however, my mother decided I should take piano lessons.”

Most middle-class black families of that era had a piano in their home; the Ellington’s had two. Daisy Ellington played the instrument quite well, mainly popular and semiclassical pieces. Ellington said that when he was a young child, one day his mother played the “Rosary” with such affect, he “busted out crying.” She also played hymns and ragtime but, like most middle-class black women of her era, she disapproved of the blues.

Duke’s father played the piano by ear and could sing excerpts from several operas and operettas. During card games at the Ellington house, J.E. would lead a group of his friends in songs like “Sweet Adeline.” According to Mercer, his grandfather made up the arrangements, hummed the individual parts, and conducted from the piano. Many years later, Ellington composed The Girl’s Suite, a work incorporating four songs his father and friends had rendered in barbershop fashion: “Sweet Adeline,” “Peg O’ My Heart,” “Juanita,” and “Sylvia.”

After deciding on piano lessons, his family placed him under the tutelage of the aptly named Mrs. Clinkscales. According to Ellington, the lessons did not go too well. He missed more lessons than he took. At this point in his life, at age ten or eleven, he didn’t feel the piano was his recognized talent, and he didn’t take it seriously. He said, “After all, baseball, football, track, and athletics were what real he-men were identified with.”

Fortunately, Duke did have a real he-man to identify with, his cousin William “Sonny” Ellington, the child of his father’s older brother, John. In his autobiography, Music Is My Mistress, Duke never mentions his father’s family, with the exception of Sonny. Yet, there is evidence of a large extended family on J.E.’s side: Estimates vary from fourteen to twenty members. Perhaps his mother did not approve of them, because Ellington stated that Sonny was the only person she would allow to take him “out of her sight.”

Sonny was a combination older brother, mentor, confidant, and role model for the young Ellington. He would arrive at the Ellington household on Saturday morning, and they would stay out until dinner, roaming the city. Together they would explore Rock Creek Park, the National Zoo, or the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. Sonny was also an excellent athlete, renowned for his prowess in baseball and track. He taught Duke how to swim, and a year later, Ellington saved a boy from drowning. That child, Rex Stewart, would later play in Ellington’s orchestra.

Duke was also influenced by his strong identification with his father. J.E. was an elegant man, an excellent ballroom dancer, and a connoisseur of wines. According to Mercer, J.E.’s presence was guaranteed to light up any party. Late in his life, Ellington wrote a song inspired by a statement he heard his father say to women, “Gee, you make that hat look pretty.”

Daisy Ellington was a very religious woman and an avid churchgoer. Every Sunday she took her son to two churches, the 19th Street Baptist Church, where her family worshiped, and the John Wesley AME Zion of her husband’s family. As a young child, Ellington was not aware of the difference in denominations. The important thing to him was sharing the religious experience with his mother. It gave him an extraordinary feeling of security. He said, “Believing gave me that, as though I was some special child. My mother would always say, ‘Edward you are blessed, you don’t have anything to worry about, Edward you are blessed.’”

Ellington always maintained that he was guided by some mysterious light to help him make crucial decisions. He felt that whenever he reached a critical point in his life, “he ran into someone who told him what and which way to go to get what or where he wanted to go or do.”

Duke’s cousin recounted to an interviewer an incident that took place when Duke was in his teens:

He used to come to get his dinner and he would say, “You know Mother, I’m going to be one of the greatest men in the world.” And she used to say, “Oh, Boy, hush your mouth.” He’d say “Yes, I am.” Then he would kiss her when she would be scolding him. And he would say, “Everybody in the world is going to call me Duke Ellington. I’m ze Duke, ze grand and ze glorious Duke.” We used to laugh, it was so funny. He predicted his future. Everybody in the whole world did call him Duke. He said, “I’m going to bow before kings and queens.” And he did that, too.

Freud said, “He who knows his mother’s love and is secure in that knowledge will never know failure.” Daisy Ellington seemed to have provided her son with just such secure love, so that Edward lived a truly blessed life.

2

As A YOUNG TEENAGER, Ellington’s main interests were those of many adolescent males, mostly sports and pulp magazines. His cousin Sonny helped develop this latter taste by passing on to him his old copies of Sherlock Holmes stories, mysteries, westerns, and the Police Gazette.

By age fourteen, Duke had begun going downtown with his friends, where they would lie about their ages and buy tickets to the local burlesque house, the Gayety. Even here, Ellington was putting his experience to good use. “I made a lot of observations, on show business techniques, on the great craftsmanship involved,” he wrote.

During this time, Ellington’s creative interests focused on the visual arts. When he was in eighth grade, his teachers suggested he enter the vocationally oriented Armstrong High School, rather than the local M Street High School, so he could major in graphic arts. He was clearly a talented painter, so much that he was later awarded a scholarship to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Armstrong High School was an all-black segregated school. But more important in Ellington’s case was that the consultant to the black school system—and, later, Armstrong’s principal—was the noted African-American historian, Carter G.Woodson. In 1915, he founded The Journal of Negro Life and History.

As consultant, Woodson insisted that black history become an integral part of the curriculum. He reminded the faculty that, despite President Woodrow Wilson’s recent segregation of the District of Columbia schools, their race partook of a rich historic past. While the basic curriculum for black students was established by the white superintendent and the Board of Education, Woodson saw to it that black history was incorporated into the curriculum at all levels in the black schools.

Roscoe Conklin Bruce, a politician and contemporary of Woodson, observed, “Woodson’s work gives our children and youth a sense of pride in the black stock from which they sprang, an honorable self confidence, a faith in the future and its possibilities, to know what men and women of Negro blood have actually done.”

“They had a pride there, the greatest race pride,” Ellington remembered. Beginning with “Black Beauty,” written in 1927, the theme of race pride was to be a salient feature of many of Ellington’s finest works. Over his lifetime, he acquired a substantial library of black historical literature.

Ellington’s interest in the piano was reawakened in 1914, when he was fifteen. Every summer, his father sent him and his mother for a vacation to Wildwood, on the New Jersey seashore. Lying about his age, Ellington got a job as a dishwasher at the Plaza Hotel. His supervisor, a man named Bowser, learned of his interest in the piano and suggested that Ellington stop off in Philadelphia and listen to an up-and-coming pianist named Harvey Brooks. Bowser mentioned they were both about the same age.

The young Duke went, listened, and was impressed by Brooks’s “swinging” rhythm and his “tremendous left hand.” For some reason, hearing a musician his own age playing the piano inspired Ellington. He was encouraged by Brooks, who taught him some of the shortcuts he used when playing. Duke wrote in his autobiography, “When I got home, I had a real yearning to play. I hadn’t been able to get off the ground before, but after hearing him I said to myself, ‘Man you are just going to have to do it.’”

That fall, Ellington sought out a few teachers but felt that none of them could teach him what he needed to know. Finally, he tried a novel experiment. His family had an upright player piano. One afternoon he went to a local music store and bought a piano roll of James P.Johnson’s “Carolina Shout.” Ellington wrote, “I learned the work by slowing down the action of the keys, until I could play it at the regular tempo.”

This story is open to conjecture, because Johnson did not record piano rolls until three years later. By then, Ellington was a working musician in Washington. However, Ellington may have used a piano roll to teach himself.

“I had two educations, the Bible and the poolroom,” Ellington often noted. In fact, his musical education had begun in Frank Holliday’s poolroom during the fall of 1914. Situated in the heart of the black community, across an alley from the Howard Theater, it was a place where one could pass the time of day playing cards, pool, or bil-liards. It was less than a mile down the hill from Howard University, and people from all strata of black society could be found there, including the university’s students and its graduates, with degrees in law, medicine, and the liberal arts.

The area was not without its seamy side; gamblers, pimps, card sharks, and pool hustlers could be found plying their trades. It was here that Duke began to spend a lot of his spare time. “You do a lot of listening in a poolroom, and all of this sounded very big,” he wrote. The most important thing in the poolroom for the young Ellington, however, was not the ambience, but the piano.

“I used to spend nights listening to Doc Perry, Louis Brown, Louis Thomas—they were the schooled musicians, they’d been to the conservatory. And I listened to the unschooled, to Lester Dishman, Sticky Mack. There was a fusion of the two right where I was standing, leaning over the piano with both my ears 20 feet high.”

Throughout his entire career, listening would be fundamental to Ellington’s creative process. He referred to himself as “the world’s greatest listener.” Tom Whaley, later his copyist and musical aide-de-camp, considered Ellington’s capacity to listen his greatest asset. At this point in his life, it seems he began developing his retentive memory, the capacity to hear musical phrases from other musicians, store them in his consciousness, and retri...