by David Hajdu
From all evidence, one piece the Orchestra Club probably heard was a piano waltz titled “Valse” that Strayhorn composed while he was in his teens. A fully developed short composition (three pages), it derives expressive force from purling melodic lines and graceful modulations. Its mood is warmly impassioned, and it moves languidly (marked lento sostenuto for tempo). Harmonically, the piece owes something to Chopin, shifting among flat keys, primarily B-flat minor, and it remains something of a prodigy’s exploration. But in its emotional lucidity and sheer loveliness, it bears the unmistakable mark of Billy Strayhorn.
He tackled a far more ambitious task in composing a hybrid of classical and vernacular music titled Concerto for Piano and Percussion. Like his piano waltz, the short piece is “through-composed”: it develops organically, with knowing use of music theory; it is no innocent’s experiment. Unlike the waltz, however, Strayhorn’s Concerto for Piano and Percussion was performed before an audience. Huddling inside against the record cold, more than six hundred family members and friends of the winter 1934 graduating class heard the piece at commencement exercises in the Westinghouse High auditorium. (There were two graduating classes each year, one in late January or February, and one in June.) The composer was one of seventeen black students in the class of 145. “Oh man, it was great,” said the percussionist Michael (Mickey) Scrima, for whom the piece was composed. A high-energy kid with huge dark eyes and a sharp nose, Scrima became music buddies with Strayhorn in the band room. (In adulthood, he would become a respected swing-band drummer best known for a stint with Harry James in the 1940s.) “It was something that he worked up just for us—a classical piece, all written down, including all my parts. I had a xylophone and timpanis all tuned up to a certain note. I even had to go out and get a set of bells just to play one part. It was all just so, just perfect. The audience loved it—it was a lot of fun, a whole lot of fun. I don’t know how much they understood it, mind you—if they realized how sophisticated this piece was, and how extraordinary it was that this kid in their school had written it.”
Years later, some Westinghouse students would swear they had heard Billy Strayhorn play Rhapsody in Blue that day, and they weren’t far wrong: there is quite a bit of Gershwin in this early Strayhorn effort. Rhythmically vibrant and catchy, it applies variations of jaunty popular-music-style phrases over chromatic harmonies and syncopated rhythms in much the way that Gershwin had popularized, by way of black jazz, European concert music and Yiddish theater songs. Strayhorn’s composition is the work of a musical sophisticate: his manuscript includes fastidious tempo markings and “enharmonic” note spellings (to distinguish between F-sharp and G-flat, technically different notes, but the same key on the piano). Moreover, for all its Gershwin influence, the piece has distinctive Strayhorn touches (the E-flat-minor chord with a major seventh early in the piece would appear recurrently in his later work) and is, as a whole, a work of stylish charm.
As a skilled musician, Strayhorn gained a certain kind of high school celebrity, which is not quite to say popularity. He was often invited to the big parties held in both white and black circles, but there always seemed to be a piano and he was inevitably asked to perform. Similarly, groups of classmates would sometimes drop by his house, prompt him to play for a while, then leave together as they had come. “Everybody was in awe of Billy, you know, because of his music,” said Beatrice Wright Westbrooks, one of his schoolmates and a Homewood neighbor. “We all thought he was really something special—everybody talked about him.” What his peers said, however, was often laced with unease. “Well, Strayhorn—he was just like, you’d say, a genius. He was very much to himself. Some might have called him like a little oddball or something, because he didn’t socialize much. But he was too busy with his work and his creations and things like that,” said his classmate Dorothy Ford Cardin. “Talent. Talent. Talent. That was Billy. But he didn’t hang around much, because he was into his own musical creative type of thing, his own niche, so to speak,” Fred Staton recalled. “He was like Einstein. He was an unusual guy, very unusual,” agreed William Brown. Below his senior-class picture in the yearbook, the inscription reads: “It’s hard to express our opinion of you…”
“I think my brother really dove with full force into everything my mother always wanted for him—music, books, art, the whole world of culture,” explained Lillian Strayhorn Dicks. “I don’t know if she wanted him to live the life she always wanted, or if he wanted to be like her, or if they both wanted Bill to be the opposite of his father. But he dedicated himself to all the finer things in life.” Strayhorn, that is, embraced all the era’s standard symbols of refinement. He studied French, joining the high school’s Cercle Français; when his brothers and sisters riled him at home, he would strike back with a casual “Taisez-vous.” He kept his clothes impeccably clean and pressed; when practicing piano at home, he neatly hung up his pants first, then played in his shirt, socks, shoes, and underwear. President of the Westinghouse Pen Club, he took out a subscription to the New Yorker and acquired a grand vocabulary, which he employed with conscientious diction; his classmates nicknamed him Dictionary. “He had a hard time, man,” said Mickey Scrima. “It’s no wonder he was timid. He was in a shell. You got to remember, those Pitts-burghers were tough. How can I say this? He had a hard time making friends. To tell you the truth, people used to call him a sissy. That’s what everybody said. The thing is, he had bigger fish to fry. All he did day and night was concentrate on the only thing he cared about, the one thing he wanted—to go on doing what he did on the day of our graduation: be a classical concert pianist.”
Along with the announcement of a performance of William Strayhorn’s Concerto for Piano and Percussion, the program for the commencement exercises for the class of winter 1934 included the class motto, “Let success by virtue be our goal.”
2
PASSION FLOWER
High school graduation was the time for young Homewood men to follow their fathers into adult induration; most (like Jimmy Strayhorn, who found work in construction) entered a trade. Escapees were rare; a few (like Harry Herforth, who won a scholarship to the New England Conservatory) followed rarefied pursuits. What could Billy Strayhorn do? “Billy looked into colleges but was discouraged because of his race and could not get the necessary financial aid,” said Herforth. “The very idea of a black concert pianist was considered unthinkable. It had nothing to do with Billy’s considerable talent.” Strayhorn resolved to continue working as a soda jerk and delivery boy at Pennfield Drugs and eventually pay his own way through a school that would accept him. (His fountain specialty: an original recipe using lemon juice and various other ingredients to simulate coconut flavor.) He kept musically active at Westinghouse High, returning frequently to play piano for music classes and assemblies, and around Homewood, occasionally playing a few songs for a neighbor’s family gathering.
A few months out of high school, Strayhorn connected with a fellow Homewood musician, Ray Wood. Born John Raymond Wood in Kentucky six years before Strayhorn, he had had some minor success in Pittsburgh as a section player in several “sweet” bands formed of part-time musicians for weddings and civic functions. His instrument was the C-melody saxophone, and he composed a bit. For a living, Wood, the oldest of eight children, helped his mother run a small catering business out of their two-family house on Cassina Way, a few blocks from Strayhorn’s house. (Wood’s father had died a few years earlier of heart failure related to alcohol abuse.) Although his association with Strayhorn was brief, Wood would seem to have been an object of some emulation to the younger musician: an ambitious young black man striving to rise above his hardscrabble background through music and a self-styled cosmopolitanism. Tall, olive-skinned, and stunningly handsome, Wood wore a manicured mustache and a porkpie hat. His friends nicknamed him Mr. Dignity. As his mother’s chef (he took pride in his knowledge of food and his skill in preparing impressive dishes) and a photo buff (he built a darkroom in his mother’s basement), Woo
d was dabbling in several arts with some degree of success. He may not have been homosexual, but Wood probably represented the closest Strayhorn had come to a gay sensibility among Homewood’s black men.
In the autumn of 1934, the two musicians worked together on a pair of songs of the type Wood was performing in society orchestras: “You Lovely Little Devil” (music by Strayhorn, lyrics by Wood) and “I’m Still Begging You” (music by Strayhorn and Wood, lyrics by Wood). A tuneful up-tempo number, “Devil” dared a tone of sly naughtiness with sassy lyrics and melodic phrases reminiscent of schoolyard taunts. A formulaic ballad, “I’m Still Begging You” mimicked the commercial laments of the late 1920s deftly, although not especially imaginatively. Its opening words are “Queer how we first met.’* Whatever the roots of, the intricacies of, or the problems in the fleeting partnership with Wood, Strayhorn would never discuss any aspect of it with his friends or family members; he kept Wood and their work a secret, and Wood was never known to speak of his association with Strayhorn. On October 12, 1934, Wood registered copyrights for “You Lovely Little Devil” and “I’m Still Begging You” (in both writers’ names) with the Library of Congress, where the music would languish unperformed and unknown, except to the partners who left their work together behind them.
* * *
It was a Westinghouse High School tradition for the graduating class to put together a program of four or five songs and skits in a forum of official insurgency called Stunt Day. Since Strayhorn had played piano for portions of both the 1933 and 1934 editions—including, in 1933, a spoof of a Cab Calloway performance by a student in a mop wig—a few members of the 1935 class asked him to return and help with their event. The ringleader was Oliver Fowler, a sharp-looking, pencil-mustached ladies’ man and itinerant baritone saxophonist with show-business aspirations; he went by the nickname Boggy (or Boggie, but pronounced like Bogie) and had done the Cab Calloway impersonation. “I was organizing the show’s activities, and some different people told me about Billy and recommended for me to go and meet him and so forth,” Fowler said. “He had graduated, but then when I got in touch with Billy and told him about all the talent we had available, he got to thinking that he could do something along the lines of his objectives, and he joined up. He offered to write the whole show, all the songs and everything.” For Strayhorn, this small-scale student project must have seemed a reasonable exercise. Seeking a standard to make music that bridged the classical and vernacular idioms, he had turned to George Gershwin for his Concerto for Piano and Percussion. Gershwin wrote theater music while he worked to be taken seriously as a concert artist; Strayhorn would try the same route. “Billy really idolized Gershwin and wrote that Stunt Day music in a Gershwin spirit, although it was very original. Billy was very clever,” said Robert Conaway, who served as rehearsal pianist for the production. Performed for students in the Westinghouse auditorium on May 23, 1935, the approximately twenty-minute presentation featured about two dozen students, all black, including a chorus of dancing girls and a small band led by Strayhorn. Its title—the Gershwinian Fantastic Rhythm.
“For something that was expected to be a little high school production, it made quite an impact. Everybody you saw seemed to know about it,” said Conaway. “The music Billy wrote for it really was as sophisticated as anything you would hear in a major theatrical production in that day.” Agreeing, Fowler tethered his ambitions to Strayhorn’s talent and set out to expand Fantastic Rhythm into a full-scale professional production. “Boggy was always an out-front kind of person, a big show-off,” remarked Fred Staton, a tenor saxophonist who had played with both Strayhorn and Fowler in the Westinghouse orchestra. Athletically built and smoothly confident, Staton led the Moonlight Harbor Band, a fixture at one of black Pittsburgh’s hottest spots for dancing, the Savory Ballroom (and soon to be the orchestra for the full-scale Fantastic Rhythm). “The minute Boggy saw the impact Fantastic Rhythm had in school, he figured, Hey—this is a good thing. I’d better keep it going,” said Staton.
In the weeks between Stunt Day and the June 1935 Westinghouse High commencement, Strayhorn was busy, at Carl McVicker’s request, preparing a duet to perform at the graduation exercises with a senior-class clarinetist, Jerome Eisner. “I wanted to do something that was serious and accessible at the same time, so Strayhorn suggested ‘Song of India,’ and we did it before Tommy Dorsey did the same number,” said Eisner, a bean of a youngster with a quick grin and a striped head of slicked-back, deep-waved hair. “He did an original arrangement, and he was sure generous about it. I had the introduction—what he wrote for me, it was beautiful, man—and I had the ending, which was just as nice.” They rehearsed a few times at Eisner’s house, where there was a grand piano that his mother had won by entering her daughter in a beauty contest, and then, according to Eisner, “We did it in front of the school, and the number went over very well. We could have done any stock piece, you know, but Billy wanted to do exactly what I was comfortable with, even if he had to write a special arrangement. He seemed to do it with no effort at all.”
Shortly, Boggy Fowler found a pair of would-be entrepreneurs willing to back a full-scale production of Fantastic Rhythm, Al Wess and Jess Williams, young partners of indeterminate profession; their investment was about five hundred dollars. Fowler handled the organizational duties, including booking the theaters, arranging for any necessary permits and licenses, and lining up the rest of the production staff and performers. For choreography, he sought Harold Belcher, an established professional tap dancer from the Hill, Pittsburgh’s black social center, who had taught himself dance while selling newspapers on the street, to increase tips. “Most of the choreography in the show was with the chorus line,” Belcher recalled. “The girls were just glad to be in the show and get a chance to get in front of the people and throw theirself around a little, because they were more or less what they call society-type girls, and they wasn’t allowed to get out and act up and whatnot. And for them to get in the show and learn a little dancing and get up and dance—why, you see, that would take away that shyness their parents had on them. ‘Oh, she’s dancing now—it’s all right.’” To handle the costumes, Fowler signed up Dorothy Ford, a tall (and somewhat bowlegged) chorus girl. “I had to make them without patterns and [with] whatever material we could afford or find at home,” she said. “I more or less copied everything from things I saw, pictures in magazines and the like. One I’m proud of was a see-through dress with a bodysuit underneath—there was a moon in one of the sets, and it looked like it was shining through the dress, so the girl looked like she was naked.” Harold Strange, a star Westinghouse art student, doubled as set designer and comedian. “I always painted—drew pictures, you know? No big nothin’,” he said. “We did go all out for some of the sets. For one number, we built a whole room with a bay window and a landscape behind it. That was Strayhorn’s idea. Him and the music gave us most of the ideas for the sets.” For publicity, Fowler enlisted Ralph Koger, a reporter at the Pittsburgh Courier, the black newspaper; Koger was well enough known locally that Fowler put his name and photograph on posters for the show. “After work, I’d put up signs—we had signs printed up, and we’d put them up all over the streets, telling people that the show was going to be there,” he said. “The radio stations did a few things, and all the newspapers covered it. I have to say, it got quite a lot of attention for a while there.” Marie Pleasant, a wispy, light-skinned singer who had been performing at the Waldorf in Pittsburgh’s genteel East End, got the part of the female lead. “One of my big numbers in Fantastic Rhythm was ‘My Little Brown Book,’ which later became so famous, of course,” she said. “Well, Billy used to tell me, ‘You inspired me to write this.’ It was because I was so shy. I was so quiet, and the song is about a person like that. He used the word peruse in the song, and it has stuck with me ever since. I always use it. Peruse.” For comedy, there was a troupe of young beginners, including featured comedian Henry Lee, who created a pantomime bit accompanied by a Stra
yhorn instrumental. “‘The Silent Fight,’ we called it, although it wasn’t silent—Billy had music in the background,” said Lee. “We wore thug clothes, caps slung along the sides of our heads, and we carried on something terrible with little antics. It was quite funny—amusing, I do believe.”
The poster for an early production of the new, full-scale show proclaimed, “Songs and Entire Book Written By Billy Strayhorne.” “I’d say he used that spelling because it was suggestive of the Hornes [a prominent black family in Pittsburgh, one of whose members was Lena Horne, a rising figure in black society]. And perhaps to distance himself from his own family,” said Robert Conaway. The sheer scale of Strayhorn(e)’s participation in Fantastic Rhythm almost justified the affectation. In addition to all the dialogue scenes—a revue-style series of sequences about urban life, the business world, and problematic love, slackly connected by a story thread involving newspaper reporters on a big-city beat—Strayhorn wrote ten original songs, accompaniment to dances and comedy skits, and incidental music; he also composed full arrangements for all the music to be performed by a twelve-piece orchestra (three saxes, one clarinet, two trumpets, two trombones, guitar, bass, drums, and Strayhorn on piano). “I was in demand, so I became involved in this show and did indeed become deeply involved,” Strayhorn would recall. “Actually, even in those early days, what I was doing was arranging, composing and lyric writing, but I thought nothing of it—I was just doing it to try and make the show a success.” He worked diligently but, it seemed, effortlessly. “To put it in one word, the kid was a genius,” said Fred Staton, who handed out the band parts Strayhorn composed. “Any time you take a teenage kid, and he would sit down and write music like he was writing a letter—whoo! Whole scores! We would just look at him. Whoo!” Clyde Broadus recalled a similar experience: “He’d create a song out of nothing. Just like that, he’d create a song and write it out and then play it. I watched him. I sat at his home, watched him, how he’d write music. He’d just sit down there—dit, dit, dit, dit—right there. I asked him, ‘How do you do that?’ He said, ‘I don’t know. It just comes to me.’”
