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  Portrait of Billy Strayhorn by Duke Ellington, 1973.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Preface

  1. Something to Live For

  2. Passion Flower

  3. Overture to a Jam Session

  4. So this is Love

  5. Beyond Category

  6. I’m Checkin’ Out, Goom Bye

  7. All Roads Lead Back to You

  8. There was Nobody Lookin’

  9. Up and Down, Up and Down

  10. Blood Count

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Discography

  Index

  Praise for Lush Life

  Copyright

  FOR ROY HEMMING

  PREFACE

  Interviewer: How do you collaborate?

  DUKE ELLINGTON: Sometimes, you know, I get an idea or somebody gives me an idea or we have a job to do, you know, and it has to be done. And sometimes I may need a little help, you know. He never needs any help. And so I’ll call him from wherever I am, if I’m in another city, and say, “Now, this thing is going to be in four parts,” or something like that, and, “You know, I mean, I think you would enjoy doing, say, for instance, the second movement, or the third movement—or the first, second, and third, and fourth movements. I will do the fifth movement.” You know.

  BILLY STRAYHORN: Yeah—you just did the fifth movement. I did the first four.

  DUKE ELLINGTON: Well, I have a tremendous responsibility, you know. After all, if we’re going to do a suite of four parts, I mean, I think Billy should do three of the movements, and I should only do one, because I have the responsibility of presenting it and being on stage when it’s premiered. And, you know, I mean, I’m the one who’s going to catch it, no matter whether, what it is, you know. If it’s a big success, I have the tremendous responsibility of having to bow.

  (Laughter)

  BILLY STRAYHORN: He bows magnificently.

  DUKE ELLINGTON: Oh, listen—it’s the greatest thing. It’s a wonderful thing, I mean, to bow after a Billy Strayhorn orchestration. This is one of the things I do best.

  Duke Ellington was teasing, of course. But what if, behind the ironic hipster repartee, there was at least a hint of revelation in his talk of composing less than all of the work associated with him?

  In a triumphant, celebrated career spanning five decades, Edward Kennedy Ellington transcended his origins as a dance-band leader to achieve international renown as one of the most original and enduring composers of the twentieth century. His stature has grown markedly in the years since his death in 1974. The perpetually expanding catalog of music recorded under his direction—more than 1,500 releases on compact disc worldwide—has become the largest in jazz and among the largest in all genres. Repertory orchestras such as the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra in Washington, DC, and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band in New York perform Ellington with all the formal reverence granted the classical canon. Musicologists, educators, and historians have made Ellington inquiry an expanding field of study. What, then, would it mean if at least a portion of that “Ellingtonia” had been created in a manner far more complex and collaborative than many of Ellington’s listeners may know? What if Duke Ellington wasn’t just kidding and if, to an extent, sometimes, he really was taking bows for another composer?

  What about Billy Strayhorn?

  That’s the question I began seeking to answer in the spring of 1984. I first heard Strayhorn praised with an almost evangelical fervor (a phenomenon that soon grew familiar as I asked more musicians about him) when I interviewed Gil Evans, the composer and arranger best known for his collaborations with Miles Davis, which produced the hybrid of improvisational pensiveness and orchestral sophistication labeled “cool jazz.” “All I did—that’s all I ever did—[was] try to do what Billy Strayhorn did,” Evans told me.

  What exactly did Billy Strayhorn do? And if he was so great, why wasn’t he better known? I found a few basic facts a matter of record: William Thomas Strayhorn, born 1915, served as Duke Ellington’s arranger for nearly three decades. He composed the Ellington Orchestra’s theme, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” and was the co-composer, with Ellington, of “Satin Doll” and other jazz standards introduced by Ellington’s orchestra. Beyond that and such particulars as his birthplace (Dayton, Ohio), city of residence (New York), and various jazz-magazine awards he won (the Down Beat Jazz Critics’ Poll for Best Arranger, 1946 and 1948, etc.), the absence of historical material on Strayhorn seemed conspicuous. From 1939, when Strayhorn began his association with Ellington, to his death from cancer in 1967, The Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature listed precisely one article on the subject of Billy Strayhorn. Moreover, in the first stages of my research, as I conducted exploratory interviews with musicians and Ellington specialists, I encountered a preponderance of riddles and contradictions.

  A variety of assumptions about and perceptions of Strayhorn had settled into conventional wisdom within jazz circles. Among the most pervasive: Strayhorn was a raw talent with no professional experience until Ellington discovered him and groomed him in his own image. Strayhorn dedicated his entire professional life to the service of Duke Ellington and did virtually nothing outside Ellington’s orbit. Strayhorn’s role in the Ellington organization was, essentially, to assist Ellington in executing Ellington’s ideas as Ellington wanted. Strayhorn was Ellington’s alter ego and wrote in a style so akin to Ellington’s that few people could distinguish their work.

  Meanwhile, I found, an embittered subculture of Strayhorn devotees had long been clinging to equally reductive mirror views: Ellington was just a glamorous figurehead. Strayhorn really wrote all of his music of worth.

  Promulgated for years, none of this turned out to be so simple. Much of it proved dead wrong.

  Indeed, illusion emerged as one of the central themes of Billy Strayhorn’s life. Through interviews with hundreds of musicians, performing artists, and other colleagues, as well as with Strayhorn’s friends and family members (more than three thousand hours of conversations over the course of eleven years), unrestricted study of Strayhorn’s personal papers, music, and artifacts (protected by his estate since his death), and research at the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and various collections of jazz materials, I found that Strayhorn led an extraordinarily active and influential life despite his near anonymity. In time, it became evident that Strayhorn composed far more music than the listening public knows—hit songs, jazz pieces, concert works, film scores, music for a Broadway show. Urbane and a bon vivant, he lived well and hard. Strayhorn was homosexual, and he never seemed to care who knew. He lived in Harlem and loved Paris, where he collaborated on a musical drama with Orson Welles. His dearest friend was Lena Horne, who considered him her “soul mate” and “true love.” He worked for the civil rights movement, often closely with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Strayhorn suffered demons, and he smoked and drank until the effects killed him.

  This book is an effort to extricate Billy Strayhorn from the world of myth, to see who Billy Strayhorn was, how he came to create what he did the way he did it, and what he was doing during the applause.

  1

  SOMETHING TO LIVE FOR

  From the first, he was nameless. Lillian Strayhorn, twenty-three years old, had already had three children
by the time she delivered her third boy in the early hours of November 29, 1915, and she had buried two of them. Sadie, the firstborn, had been premature and never could build her strength; she was “a coo baby,” Lillian said. James Jr., a hearty boy born in 1912, was still faring well. Leslie, a second son, had been fine until he started walking and fell a few times, then went into convulsions; Lillian and her husband were told their child had brain fever. (As his mother often pointed out later, Leslie would have made a handsome man, which anyone could tell from the portrait she had taken of him in his coffin.) The newborn, unfortunately, was also sickly, despite being the first of Lillian’s babies to be delivered by a doctor and in a hospital, the Miami Valley facility in Dayton, Ohio; he had rickets, and his parents decided not to name him. On the birth certificate filed four days after his birth, the tiny child was referred to as Baby Boy Strayhorn.

  To heal him, the Strayhorns rejected professional advice—a doctor recommended cracking, straightening, and resetting the boy’s bones, a surgical procedure fairly common at the time—in favor of a less traumatic home cure. Lillian followed the instructions of a neighbor woman and, after washing the dishes each evening, saved the water, which tended to be swirling with fat from the family’s typical diet of fried meats. Standing her baby up in the water, Lillian massaged the greasy, soapy mixture into his skin; in time, his legs did begin to straighten and strengthen, whatever the reasons.

  The rest of the Strayhorn family’s problems had no such simple remedy. Married in a Baptist church ceremony on March 10, 1910, eighteen-year-old Lillian Young and twenty-year-old James Nathaniel Strayhorn had set out to lead an easier life together than the fates—and white-dominated early-century society—seemed to allow a black couple. The only child of Alice Young, a single mother from a comfortable working family in wooded Mars Hill, North Carolina, Lillian was attentively raised and well educated. She graduated from a two-year program for women at Shaw University, a Baptist school whose curriculum stressed ladylike manners and social skills. Poised and soft-spoken, with an eye for modest, womanly clothes and an ear for elegiac language (“I see the rain is slackening”), she earned a lifelong reputation for formality. James, a descendant of the founder of the first whiskey distillery established in the South after the Civil War, was also raised in relative comfort and style, in his case with four siblings (sisters Julia and Georgia—both graduates of finishing school—and brothers Joseph and William) in a roomy Prairie Victorian house in the black section of Hillsborough, North Carolina. Though James quit school to work after completing the eighth grade, his parents, Lizzie (Elizabeth) and Jobe Strayhorn—particularly his mother, an amateur pianist and art buff—had taken pride in exposing their children to music and culture. A firecracker of a man, James seemed a perfect counterbalance to Lillian, as ebullient as she was sedate, as spontaneous as she was doctrinal, as adventurous as she was restrained. They made an exquisite-looking couple: willowy, elegant Lillian, with her curly, pulled-up hair, her clear, open eyes, and a soft smile that nudged two sets of double dimples on her cheeks; and thick-set, towering James, with his glistening liquid eyes and broad, sly, cocksure grin.

  In their second year of marriage, they left North Carolina for Dayton—electricity was the business of the future, and the Ohio Valley had emerged as a manufacturing center for the electric-supply industry. James was hired at a plant as a wire-puller: a team of men using handgrips would pull a roll of nearly molten copper until it stretched to wire thinness. Little more than a Northern industrial version of Carolina fieldwork, wire-pulling was considered a good job for a young black man; James didn’t last long, though he never said why. He tried his hand at shipping goods for another plant but was let go because he couldn’t drive. By the time his nameless son was born, three years after the move to Dayton, James was working as a janitor. Life at home was a struggle: Lillian, James, three-year-old Jimmy, and the baby all lived in one room of a boardinghouse on Norwood Avenue, a labor-housing district unequipped with the electricity that its residents were employed to supply for others, including the white working families just a few blocks to the west. Frustrated, the Strayhorns abandoned their electric-age ambitions in early 1916 and sought comfort in familiar arms. They moved again, this time to live with James’s older sister Julia in Montclair, New Jersey. Then fairly rural—Julia warned her family that ghosts lived in the fields near the multifamily house she shared on New Street—the area was low on big-company job opportunities for James. To worsen matters, word came from North Carolina that Lillian’s mother had died of an intestinal obstruction in a hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, where she worked from time to time as a relatively well-paid domestic to help support her extended family in North Carolina. In 1920, faced with disappointment after disenchantment, the family moved yet again, this time south to Braddock, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh, where the mills virtually guaranteed work to men willing to lend their bodies to the production of steel.

  By now, Baby Boy Strayhorn was a five-year-old; smallish, round-faced, and cheeky, having inherited his mother’s double dimples, he looked a year or two younger than his age. His parents hadn’t yet filed a legal name for him, though they were saying he was William, named for James’s eldest brother. Most everybody called him Bill. Unlike his older brother, Jimmy, a tall, reedy rascal who relished playing roughhouse with his father, Bill gravitated toward quiet, creative play. He liked to read—or pretend to, before he learned how; when guests came to the Strayhorns’, Bill would pick out a book, trace the words with his eyes, and theatrically turn each page as he improvised a story. And he demonstrated an ear for music. The Strayhorns’ first home in Braddock was a mixed-race boarding-house on the misleadingly named Willow Way, where a middle-aged black woman named Mame Pyle ran a discreet brothel. Since she worked at home and was generally respected by the other women in the building (including Lillian, who told her children that Mame Pyle’s independence was honorable), the madam would occasionally baby-sit for neighborhood children. Bill was among them, and when he was in Mame Pyle’s parlor, which was equipped with a bar and an equally well-stocked Victrola, he would watch the records as they played. Evidently, he could retain songs so well by ear that he quickly developed the ability to find any record anyone requested, although he couldn’t read the labels. Of course, most of the records Mame Pyle had on hand for her business were ones most young people-rarely got to hear: “race records,” including early jazz.

  The Strayhorns bounced around the Pittsburgh area, always struggling. In 1925, after five years in the borough of Braddock, they moved to neighboring Rankin, sharing space in a big corner building on Fifth and Harriet Streets. Finally, in 1926, they settled in a single-family house in the Homewood district of Pittsburgh proper. This would be the first place Bill would know as a permanent home—a 1,600-acre patchwork of blocks housing some 42,000 working-class people, 15 percent of them black. In front of the Strayhorns’ house lived a large Italian family with a son who had blond hair; he came back home from the navy and ran the numbers. Next to them were the Hickenbottoms, a black family with lots of kids. Laterally adjacent to the Strayhorns, across a vacant lot, lived Harry Collins, who had an enormous stomach and very short, thin legs; he was a bootlegger and operated a small-time speakeasy in his back room. Next to him, there was a tin-roof shed where two older black men lived together. They had a fondness, late in the evening after a few drinks, for doing the buck dance—indoors. The neighbors could tell they were dancing because of all their hooting and hollering, as well as bumping into things; once one of them kicked over their potbelly stove and burned down part of their shed. A few doors down, there was a Presbyterian church, all white, although the pastor would invite the black kids in when they climbed up the outside walls to watch the services through the tilted-open stained-glass windows. Behind the Strayhorns, at first, lived the Moskendrics, an Italian family with five children, who in time moved to Susquehanna Street, a nicer block in the neighborhood.

  This fair
ly typical urban outgrowth of the industrial era was scarcely a melting pot, despite its diversity and intimacy. “Blacks and whites lived next door to each other, and if you didn’t like what your mother made for dinner, you’d eat what you had to and go next door to the Italians, walk right in and sit down with them. But this only went so far,” remembered James “Steve” Stevens, a lifelong resident of Homewood who lived near the Strayhorns. “The white people had a definite superior attitude, even though they lived next door to you. You knew to hold your tongue with the white people—even the kids your own age—and let them have their way, because they didn’t treat you as an equal. Whenever there was a skirmish, the police would side with the whites without asking us a question.” To prevent matters from reaching that point, one old black woman rocked on a Hermitage Street porch and watched the children play, keeping a special eye out for the safety of the white children and warning a wayward one with a cry: “Get out of the street before you kill yourself, you little white devil!” As thanks for this peacekeeping service, neighbors would bring her tins of Five Brothers pipe tobacco.

  Housing in Homewood was racially configured to some degree. The whites generally occupied the residences on the main streets—good-sized and well-equipped two-story row houses—and the black families those in the alleys behind them—low-hanging, unpainted shelters with no electricity. The Strayhorns lived at 7212 Tioga Street Rear, a dirt-and-gravel road named for the bigger, tree-lined and paved street in front of it. Lillian tried to train her children to refer to their address as “Tioga Street, the zenith way.” The location’s shortcomings weren’t entirely semantic, however. “The landlords who owned these properties didn’t want to keep them up, although they still wanted to make money off them. So they would let a black person move into them, and that’s how the neighborhood was integrated,” recounted Robert Conaway, a boyhood friend of Billy Strayhorn’s who worked with him musically in Pittsburgh (and eventually married one of his sisters). “Billy lived on a little side street where they had a little shack,” said Conaway. “He lived in a four-room shack there—actually, that’s what it was, a shack. They [later] tore it down. It was an eyesore, actually.” At best, the house was spartan: a box, flat-roofed and made of wood, with two rooms on each floor. Facing the front door, stairs led up to two bedrooms; the toilet was in the basement. The largest room in the house was the kitchen, at the rear of the main floor, and it had a wood-burning stove, a round table, and press-back chairs arranged on an apple-green painted floor. In the front room, two folding chairs faced the heater (wood-burning) that handled the whole house. There were plain pipe-and-globe gas light fixtures, unpainted walls, and no pictures hanging.