by David Hajdu
Clearly pleased, Ellington offered Strayhorn work. The kind of work, however, remained unclear. As Strayhorn recounted, “He said, ‘Well, I would like to have you in my organization. I have to find some way of injecting you into it. I have to find out how I do this, after I go to New York.’ He was on his way back east then. So I said, ‘Well, all right.’” Ellington paid Strayhorn twenty dollars for his orchestration of “Two Sleepy People” and jotted down subway directions to his apartment on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem. “They were packing up—Willy Manning was getting clothes together in trunks and everything,” Strayhorn recalled. “And off they went, and off I went back home and back to the drugstore.”
Single-minded about music since childhood, Strayhorn had pursued every opportunity he had been given, had found, or had been able to create for himself in classical, theatrical, and popular music as well as jazz, throughout both the black and the white worlds as he knew them—mostly separate musical states despite his own ability to cross their borders. “He said he would go with any of the major bands that asked him, black or white,” recalls Robert Conaway. “It was only a matter of time until somebody important recognized his talent.” Yet the prospect of working with Duke Ellington in particular had extraordinary advantages. Strayhorn may not have had any Ellington records in his collection or have talked him up as much as he did Stravinsky and Art Tatum, but he was scarcely oblivious to Ellington’s significance. “He was hip to Duke,” said Mickey Scrima.
By the end of 1938, the thirty-nine-year-old Ellington had been performing professionally for more than twenty years. The first of two children born to a worshipful mother who instilled in her son a sense of privilege and a father who on at least one occasion served as a butler at a catered function at the White House (a matter of great pride to his family), Edward Kennedy Ellington earned his lifelong nickname in his childhood neighborhood, a middle-class black section of Washington, where he role-played the part of a duke and instructed his playmates to address him accordingly. Ellington began private piano lessons at the age of eight or so, though he was largely self-taught as a composer and arranger. He had some artistic talent, enough for him to make some money painting signs and to earn a scholarship that he declined to Pratt Institute, the commercial-art conservatory in Brooklyn. Leading his own band, the Washingtonians, Ellington got his first high-profile exposure in the late 1920s, a few years into his second sojourn to New York, when he and the band were featured in radio broadcasts from the Hollywood, later the Kentucky Club, off Times Square. Drawing inspiration from his individualistic musicians (including, early on, trumpeter Bubber Miley and trombonist Joe Nanton, specialists in fanciful “jungle” sounds), Ellington developed a genuinely inimitable orchestral approach distinguished by startling tonal colors and idiosyncratic improvisations.
“As the band grew, there were new members coming into the band, and they injected their personality,” said Harry Carney. “I think the personnel really was largely responsible for inspiring Duke to write, in that the fellas were creative and had a wealth of ideas. And one thing would suggest something else to him, and he managed to keep it pretty well organized.” In little time, however, Ellington proved a gifted composer and arranger as well as a brilliant motivator and a resourceful editor of his musicians’ ideas. Sometimes in collaboration with band members Miley, Barney Bigard, and others, sometimes writing alone, Ellington built an increasingly sophisticated repertoire of original pieces, including “Mood Indigo” (1930), “Sophisticated Lady” (1933), “Solitude” (1934), and “In a Sentimental Mood” (1935)—plus, to the pleasure of music critics and scholars, ambitious longer works such as “Creole Rhapsody” (1931) and “Reminiscing in Tempo” (1935). As early as 1933, open-eared critics such as the English composer and author Constant Lambert recognized in Ellington a black composer comparable to Ravel and Stravinsky in imagination and originality of vision. While Billy Strayhorn hoped to emulate Stravinsky, Duke Ellington was already seen in some informed circles as the celebrated modernist’s peer. As a personality, too, Ellington projected an air of Continental polish that meshed exquisitely with Strayhorn’s own infatuation with townhouse culture: jazz and cocktails in the very gay places on the wheel of life. Billy Strayhorn read the New Yorker; Duke Ellington was one, as Strayhorn could become by working with him.
“He called me, and we met over at Esch’s house,” said Mickey Scrima. “Billy wanted to talk about what to do about Duke. Should he pursue it? He really wasn’t sure what he would do with Duke, and he wanted to write. Finally, he decided to give it a shot. Maybe Duke would play some of his songs and, at the very least, he’d get a name for himself. Esch and I both told him, ‘Go ahead—it’s an opportunity. If it doesn’t work out, you can always leave.’”
At Tioga Street Rear, Strayhorn’s decision came as an inevitability. “Mama knew that Bill would be going to New York someday,” said Lillian Strayhorn Dicks, “and I think Papa hardly realized Bill was still home. We all knew it would be hard on Mama, because she and Bill were so close. But she wanted this for him as much as he wanted it, and if she had any misgivings or feelings of disappointment for herself, they never showed. She encouraged him greatly, and he assured her that he would come home to see us all. For another thing, we all knew this would mean a better life for Bill, and maybe for Mama.” Lillian seemed to take additional comfort in the fact that James’s sister Julia had moved from Montclair to Newark, New Jersey; should Strayhorn’s plans with Ellington collapse, there was family nearby. For several weeks, however, no plans emerged at all. “Every day, people would come up and say, ‘What happened?’” said Strayhorn, “and I’d say, ‘Nothing happened. I went down and sang and played for the man, and he’s gone to New York.’ They’d say, ‘What’s he going to do?’ And I’d say, ‘I don’t know what he’s going to do,’ and this went on for about a month. I got a little weary of this, and I hadn’t heard from Duke.” Determinedly, Strayhorn wrote Ellington’s office, inquiring where the bandleader would be in mid-January. “Bill Esch had to come to New York, so he proposed that I go along with him and just see Duke and see what he was going to do about me. Bill decided we’d go on the train. I said, ‘That’s well and good, but I do not have enough money for the train.’ So he said, ‘Well, I’ll loan you the money.’ So he did.”
To make an impression on Ellington, Strayhorn decided that not only would he find Ellington in New York by following the bandleader’s subway directions but he would write a new composition using the directions as the theme. Ralph Koger, still a reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier (and later the paper’s news editor), remembered Strayhorn’s excitement. “We were together talking about his meeting with Duke and his plans to see him, and he played me the song he was writing to give Duke in New York. He said, ‘Listen—Duke gave me directions, and I turned them into something. So he played me the tune, and, sure enough, it told you how to get to Harlem: ‘Take the “A” Train.’” The composition, complete with lyrics, came more quickly than the actual A train, Strayhorn would explain: “‘“A” Train’ was born without any effort—it was like writing a letter to a friend. It was composed in 1939, though it wasn’t used right away. I put together all the ideas I had in my head and perfected them, then I sat down before the piano and I wrote the tune in a really short time. This is the way I like to work. All my most meaningful pieces were born like that.” Mickey Scrima was palling with Strayhorn and Esch when the two of them fine-tuned the composition. “Billy was playing the thing, and Esch was offering a little pointer here or there,” said Scrima. “I remember, because we all loved Fletcher Henderson, and Billy said he was trying to do a Henderson thing. As a matter of fact, he was afraid it sounded too much like Henderson. We all really liked the way it came out, but Billy wasn’t sure it sounded enough like Duke.”
In response to Strayhorn’s letter, a member of Ellington’s staff wrote that the orchestra would be performing at Nixon’s Grand Theatre in Philadelphia in mid-January. “I said, ‘Well, that’
s fine,’” said Strayhorn. “I had no idea of the distance between New York and Philadelphia. It was all east of Pittsburgh.” Departing Pittsburgh early on January 19, Strayhorn and Esch arrived in Newark that evening. Strayhorn got off to visit his aunt before moving on to Philadelphia; Esch continued to New York City. Unfortunately, Strayhorn discovered that the Ellington Orchestra’s engagement in Philadelphia was over. Its next stop, though, was Newark, where it was playing at the Adams Paramount Theatre, a top venue for Negro artists. “[In the] morning (January 23, the fourth day of the band’s one-week engagement], I got up and took the streetcar ride to the Adams Theatre and went to the stage door,” Strayhorn recounted. “There was Mr. Manning. He was a familiar face, and he said, ‘Oh, hello—good morning, young man. Come on in.’ So I went in, and the show was just gearing to go on. Mr. Ellington was standing in the wings with a pearl-gray suit on—I’ll never forget it. And Mr. Manning said, ‘Duke, here’s that young man.’ They couldn’t remember my name. So it was—oh, he had about five or seven minutes before he went on, so we talked. Actually, he didn’t say too much, and I didn’t say too much. We were just kind of looking at each other. I was scared to death, and he wasn’t, of course. We just kind of looked at each other. Finally, he said, ‘Well, it’s really something that you arrived at this moment. Yes, because I just sent Jack Boyd,’ who was his manager, ‘upstairs to look for your address and send for you.’” “You don’t have to,” Strayhorn said. “Here I am.”
From that foundation of intuitive connectedness and mutual faith, Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington began working together; theirs was an uncommonly personal business relationship from the start. Strayhorn had no job description and no contract, not even a verbal understanding of general responsibilities and terms of compensation. “I don’t have any position for you,” remarked Ellington. “You’ll do whatever you feel like doing.” A flattering promise of laissez-faire empowerment, the arrangement was as much familial as it was professional: everything would take care of itself—that is, Ellington would take care of Strayhorn. Accordingly, the bandleader called on his nineteen-year old son, Mercer, a student at the Juilliard School of Music, to arrange for Strayhorn to move into the Harlem YMCA; Ellington would pay the rent of five dollars a night.
Strayhorn returned to Pittsburgh for a few days to prepare (his mother pressed and packed all his clothes) and say some good-byes. “He came back, and he called me on the phone at home and said, ‘Guess what?’” said Ralph Koger. “‘I’m going to work for Duke. I played that tune “‘A’ Train” for him, and he liked it. I’m moving to New York!’”
Strayhorn’s first night in Manhattan, however, fell short of his penthouse visions. Located on busy 135th Street about half a mile from Ellington’s Edgecombe Avenue apartment, the Harlem Y was popular among middle-class blacks as one of two or three hospitable rooming facilities open to them in Manhattan. Still, its 240 rooms were small and spare; there were communal rest rooms and hallway pay phones. On his second day in town, Strayhorn called Mercer Ellington, who lived in the Edgecombe Avenue apartment with Duke Ellington’s sister, Ruth, who was Strayhorn’s age; Ellington’s lover, Mildred Dixon; and Ellington himself, when the bandleader was not on the road. “Strayhorn said that he would like to talk, because he wanted to know about Duke Ellington,” said Mercer. “So he came to the house the night after he stayed at the Y and had dinner with my aunt and I. The result was that he stayed, and we chatted and played records and all that kind of stuff. And when the time came for us to go to bed, we said, ‘Well, I guess we’ll go to sleep.’ And I got up to go to my room. And Strays said, ‘Well, I’ll just lay here,’ and Ruth went to her room, and that was it. And he only went back to the Y from that time on to change clothes. So we said, ‘What the hell are we paying all the rent for? Go get your shit and move it here.’”
The Ellingtons had relocated from 381 to 409 Edgecombe Avenue shortly after the death of Duke and Ruth’s father, J. E. Ellington, who succumbed to pleurisy in October 1937, twenty-eight months after their mother, Daisy, died of cancer. “We had a lot of unhappiness there [at 381 Edgecombe],” said Ruth Ellington Boatwright, who was a biology major at Columbia’s New College with aspirations for a medical career when Strayhorn moved into her home. “Our apartment at 409 was very uplifting.” A broad, sunny, tree-lined street in Harlem’s posh Sugar Hill district, Edgecombe Avenue stretched along a cliff seven stories above nearly a mile of blocks spreading toward Manhattan’s Harlem River. The Ellingtons’ seven-room apartment at 409—a courtly brick-and-stone building with a vast Art Deco lobby—hovered twelve stories higher still, on the street side of the top floor. Two days after his arrival in New York, Strayhorn was living in an actual penthouse. “It was very splendorous,” Ruth Ellington Boatwright said proudly. “Mostly in the area there were theatrical celebrities, stars, and very well-to-do intellectuals. When you looked out the windows, you could see the downtown Manhattan skyline. Everything looked like toys.” The apartment was professionally decorated all in white. “He called me right away,” recalled George Greenlee, “and he said, ‘You won’t believe it—this place is completely white, even the rugs! I’m talking to you on a white telephone!’ He couldn’t get over it,” Greenlee said.
Living in Ellington’s home with family members his own age and with Ellington paying for his housing, his food, and his living expenses, Strayhorn soon seemed like an Ellington himself, especially to Mildred Dixon, the household matriarch, a dainty woman whose wardrobe of lacy silks was the envy of the neighborhood. “He was just like family to me and treated me with the utmost respect,” she said. “He pitched in whenever I needed help, particularly in the kitchen. He was quite a good cook, which he learned from his mother in Pittsburgh.” (Strayhorn made sweet potatoes covered with orange peels and wrapped in tin foil, baked through the afternoon.) To Ellington’s sister, Billy was a brother too. Delicately framed and soft-featured, with long, wavy black-brown hair and a taste for loosely draping dresses, Ruth had a quiet grace that diffused her intellectual vigor and self-confidence. Above all, she was dedicated to her brother, whom she always called by his given name, Edward. Her pet name for Strayhorn was Billums. “We all loved Billums like he was our very own,” she recalled. “Edward arranged it that way, and we thought that whatever he did was wonderful. That’s the way we were trained.” Ruth relished the company of an open-eyed young housemate like Strayhorn; together, they roamed the city museums on days when she had a light load of schoolwork. “The Metropolitan Museum was our favorite place in the world. We’d sit on the steps and talk into the evening about everything—art and artists and people—anything and everything. He got very analytical, very abstract. He was extremely profound.”
Temperamental differences kept Strayhorn and Mercer Ellington a few degrees apart, as did Strayhorn’s still undefined role with Mercer’s father. Wiry and reflexive, with a roguish mustache and an eruptive grin, Mercer was as at home on the street as his father was on the stage. “I was born a street hustler, I guess,” Mercer Ellington allowed. “I raised myself. I was just left to malinger, wherever I happened to be. In the house when Strayhorn was living with us, I might cook some southern food, whereas Strayhorn was really bourgeois. He was interested in the proper method of tasting wine, proper ways of storing it—temperature and all that stuff. We really didn’t have that much in common, other than music. And even that—my mother gave me my musical education up to that point. Not my father. My mother taught me how to play piano when I was younger and I lived with her. My father didn’t take me under his wing the way he did Strayhorn.”
His new town was so absorbing—Fats Waller was playing the Apollo, Artie Shaw was playing the Strand, and Gunga Din was a smash at Radio City Music Hall—that Strayhorn could keep happily occupied without any musical duties, and he had none until February 26, when Ellington sent him the music for two songs, “Like a Ship in the Night,” a popular ballad by Bob Cooper and Will Hudson, and “Savoy Strut,” a light dance tune by
Ellington and saxophonist Johnny Hodges. Ellington’s instructions: “Arrange these for a recording tomorrow at ten o’clock.” Hodges was scheduled to cut two sides for the Vocalion label with a small group of Ellingtonians (Hodges, trumpeter Cootie Williams, trombonist Lawrence Brown, baritone saxophonist Harry Carney, bassist Billy Taylor, drummer Sonny Greer, and Ellington himself on piano, along with singer Jean Eldridge for “Ship in the Night”), although neither Ellington nor Hodges had charts prepared for the band. The titular leader of a de facto Ellington session, Hodges never wrote any arrangements other than “head charts” expressed instrumentally or orally to the band. Strayhorn was certainly equipped for the task at hand, having done a wealth of orchestrations both for Fantastic Rhythm and for big bands back home. Still, he had never been called on to work so suddenly and for an unfamiliar group. “What could I do?” he commented. “I did it.” Working at the Edgecombe Avenue dining table, he wrote all through (though not straight through) the night. “He fell asleep on the manuscript paper,” said Ruth Ellington Boatwright, “then woke up and kept on working until he fell asleep on the paper again.”
The results were recorded with a casual ease that belied the arranger’s effort, according to producer Helen Oakley Dance. “The fellas put the music he wrote in front of them and played it through. It was smooth as silk,” said Dance. “Ellington didn’t change a thing, and he was delighted.” Though neither arrangement is a notable departure from Ellingtonia, neither is an attempt to duplicate the Ellington style. “That’s not the way Duke worked with Billy or the musicians on the session,” said Dance. As Strayhorn explained, “He left me to my own devices. He never sat down and said, ‘Well, this is the way you do this.’ Never, never—never. He felt that there are many ways that one can do things but one way that you can do it, and you find it.” Apparently pleased with Strayhorn’s way of doing a thing for which the ever-industrious orchestra leader had relatively little time, Ellington consigned the small-band side of his operation to Strayhorn. “From then on, Duke did very little of the arranging for the small groups,” recalled Strayhorn. “Oh, he did a little, but he turned almost all of them over to me. You could say I had inherited a phase of Duke’s organization.” This on the basis of two first-time arrangements written on one day’s notice.
