Duke (70 page)

“I have recently spent several days”:
Booker T. Washington, letter to Oswald Garrison Villard, Aug. 10, 1913; Washington,
Papers,
248.

“A secret city all but unknown”:
Green, viii, vii.

“The newest and hottest place”:
Alicia Ault, “U Street: The Corridor Is Cool Again,”
The New York Times,
Apr. 14, 2006.
“A level of living”:
www
.ellingtonapartments.com.
“He assumed the dogs would not object”:
Landis, 19.

“I could play the dances”:
Tucker,
Ellington,
6.
“So many pompous gentlemen”:
Langston Hughes, “Our Wonderful Society: Washington,”
Opportunity,
Aug. 1927.
“The usually darker (although not always poorer) people”:
Hughes,
Autobiography,
59.
“The worst Jim Crow around New Orleans”:
Foster, 73.

“The ordinary Negroes”:
Hughes,
The Big Sea,
208–9.

The group “interpreted [spirituals] as the slaves did”:
Jerome I. Wright, quoted in Seroff, liner notes for
There Breathes a Hope: The Legacy of John Work II and His Fisk Jubilee Quartet, 1909–1916.

“Castes”:
MM,
17.

J.E. Ellington was born in North Carolina in 1879:
Census records and Washington city directory listings relating to DE and his family are summarized in
RIT,
1–2, and Tucker,
Ellington,
17.
“Rather prominent socially”:
MM,
10.
“His confidant and very close friend”:
Ulanov, 2.
“The way [J.E.’s] table was set”:
Mercer Ellington,
Duke Ellington in Person,
8.

“A Chesterfieldian gentleman”:
Ruth Ellington, oral-history interview.
“I have always wanted”:
MM,
12.

“Stiff-lipped”:
Ulanov, 3.
“The Rosary” made DE weep:
Boyer, “The Hot Bach,” 238.

“The violently crossed influences”:
Ulanov, 5–6.
“They slept apart”:
Mercer Ellington, oral-history interview.
“No one else but my sister Ruth”:
MM,
6.
“He spent and lived like a man who had money”:
Ibid., 10.

“The world of make-believe”:
Frazier, 25. “
I’d guess that eight out of ten”:
Malcolm X, 43.

“My mother, as I said before, was beautiful”:
MM,
12.

“Once upon a time”:
Ibid., x.

“Spoiled rotten”:
Ibid., 6.
“Edward, you are blessed”:
Ibid., 15.
“This is the great, the grand, the magnificent Duke Ellington”:
Ulanov, 1.
DE supplied multiple explanations:
See, for instance, Ulanov, 7. (For a significantly different version, see
MM,
20.)
“Proper speech and good manners”:
MM,
17.

J.E.’s father was a mulatto:
RIT,
1.
“Coffee with a strong dash of cream”:
Boyer, “The Hot Bach,” 214.
“Any talk about red people”:
MM,
12. See also Ruth Ellington: “In our house, you didn’t talk about color” (Ruth Ellington, oral-history interview).
Louis Armstrong wrote a piece for
Ebony
:
Louis Armstrong, “Why I Like Dark Women,”
Ebony,
Aug. 1954.

“The wonderful feeling of security”:
MM,
15.
DE was overprotected as a boy:
Mercer Ellington,
Duke Ellington in Person,
7. “
Hostile incidents”:
Tucker,
Ellington,
24.

Marietta Clinkscales:
Unlikely as it may sound, Mrs. Clinkscales’s name is not apocryphal. See Tucker, “The Early Years,” 52.
“Slipped away”:
Ulanov, 6.
“All through grade school”:
MM,
17.

“To get out and try my wings”:
Ruby Berkley Goodwin, “Meet the Duke,”
The Bronzeman,
Aug. 1932. See also Zolotow, 297. In old age DE told the story differently, saying that his mother had accompanied him to Asbury Park that summer and that he first heard Harvey Brooks’s playing during a stopover in Philadelphia on his way back to Washington (
MM,
17–20). No piano rolls by Brooks are known to survive, but he can be heard playing a vigorous sixteen-bar solo on “Quality Shout,” cut in 1929 by Paul Howard’s Quality Serenaders and reissued on
Jazz in California 1923–1930
(Timeless).

“I hadn’t been able to get off the ground”:
MM,
20.
“It wasn’t very long”:
Goodwin, “Meet the Duke.”

“There was no connection between me and music”:
DE, Harman interview, 1956.

In the spring of 1914:
MM,
20.
“Soda Fountain Rag”:
On occasion DE also referred to the piece as “Poodle Dog Rag.”

“A pretty good ‘hug-and-rubbin’’ crawl”:
MM,
20. For more information on the song, which DE never recorded commercially, see Tucker,
Ellington,
41–43.
A few performances of “Soda Fountain Rag” were recorded:
The earliest known recording of any portion of the piece is DE’s sixteen-bar solo on “Oklahoma Stomp,” recorded by the Six Jolly Jesters, a pseudonym for the Ellington band, in 1929 (Vocalion 1449). He also played part of “Soda Fountain Rag” on a 1937 radio broadcast, calling it “Swing Session.” This performance was recorded off the air and has been reissued several times, most recently as part of
Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club
(Storyville). The most widely circulated version is the incomplete one played by DE at a concert he gave in 1972 at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, which was released as part of
Live at the Whitney
(Impulse). The 1937 broadcast probably comes closest to the lost original version of the piece.

“My father said something”:
Henry Whiston, “Reminiscing in Tempo,”
Jazz Journal,
Feb. 1967. Ruth Ellington recalled in her oral-history interview that her mother sometimes played ragtime as well, but Ruth was born in 1915, meaning that her memories would have postdated by several years the time when DE started to play piano in earnest.

“Practically regarded”:
Mercer Ellington,
Duke Ellington in Person,
9.
“What I was getting out of music”:
MM,
32.

“I never will forget”:
Wiggins and Middleton, oral-history interview.

“The schooled musicians”:
MM,
26.
“Harlem has always had more churches than cabarets”:
Ibid., 189.
“Once I asked him what he considered a typical Negro piece”:
Edmund Anderson, quoted in Jewell, 52.

CHAPTER TWO
“SOFT AND GUT-BUCKET”

SOURCES

Documents

Helen Oakley Dance, oral-history interview, OHAM; DE, unpublished interviews with Carter Harman, 1956 and 1964, EC; Tom Whaley, oral-history interview, IJS.

Books

Bigard,
With Louis and the Duke;
Bushell,
Jazz from the Beginning;
Calloway,
Of Minnie the Moocher and Me;
Carter,
Swing Along;
Charters,
A Trumpet Around the Corner;
Chilton,
Sidney Bechet;
Stanley Dance,
The World of Duke Ellington;
Stanley Dance,
The World of Swing;
Davis,
Outcats;
Dietrich,
Duke’s ’Bones;
Ellington,
Duke Ellington in Person;
Lees,
Meet Me at Jim & Andy’s;
Nolan,
Three Chords for Beauty’s Sake;
Schuller,
Early Jazz;
Shapiro,
Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya;
Smith,
Music on My Mind;
Steiner,
Wild Throng Dances Madly in Cellar Club;
Tucker,
Ellington;
Ulanov,
Duke Ellington.

NOTES

“Being at the right place”:
Gunnar Askland, “Interpretations in Jazz: A Conversation with Duke Ellington,”
Etude,
Mar. 1947, in
Reader,
256.
“Positively the greatest dance record”:
Charters, 146.

“IRRESISTIBLE JASS”:
Reproduced in Tucker, 55.

“Under-conversation music”:
MM,
31.
“All the embassies and big shots”:
Tucker, 53.
“I went down to the telephone office”:
MM,
31.

$10,000 a year:
Tucker, 63.
“Well, he picked up the piano by ear”:
Henry Whiston, “Reminiscing in Tempo,”
Jazz Journal,
Feb. 1967.
“When customers came for posters”:
MM,
32.

“He had just learned the difference”:
Marc Crawford, “A Visit with Mrs. Duke Ellington,”
Ebony,
Mar. 1959.
“My mother’s folks were from a higher station”:
Davis, 6.
Mercer was born eight months later:
A second child died in infancy.
“Hard days”:
Crawford, “A Visit with Mrs. Duke Ellington
.”
“Tremendous responsibilities”:
DE, Harman interview, 1964.

“I’m still hooked on Ellington”:
Crawford, “A Visit with Mrs. Duke Ellington
.”
DE claimed to have lost his virginity:
“I finally got it in when I was around about twelve years old, I guess . . . I don’t know who it was” (DE, Harman interview, 1964).
“I think that what put him into show business”:
Ellington, 19.
“I started out playing for pussy”:
DE, Harman interview, 1964.
“Proper-type stiltedness”:
DE, “Man with Four Sides” (typescript, Stanley Dance collection, Yale University).

Arthur Whetsel:
Whetsel’s last name is misspelled “Whetsol” in
MM
and numerous other sources. See Steven Lasker, “Whetsel vs. Whetsol Plus Sundry Whetseliana,”
DEMS Bulletin,
Aug.–Nov. 2002.
“Sharp as a Gillette blade”:
Whitney Balliett, “New York Drummers,”
The New Yorker,
Nov. 5, 1979, in
Reader,
489.
“I’ve never seen another man like him”:
Stanley Dance,
The World of Duke Ellington,
62.
“Brilliant”:
Ibid., 60–61 (emphasis in the original).