We celebrate the Duke's birth on April 29, 1899 – 125 years ago today – in Washington DC.
By "The Duke" we are not referring here to the actor John Wayne (born May 26, 1907 in Winterset, Iowa), but rather to Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington, one of the greatest songwriters and composers of all time. be born in the United States.
Aside from their shared nickname, it seems that the only thing Duke Ellington had in common with John Wayne was that they both suffered from lung cancer. In Ellington's case, cancer killed him at the age of 75, on May 24, 1974, at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York (not UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, as is inexplicably claimed on some websites!).
Born in Washington, D.C., he grew up at 2129 Ida Place (now Ward Place) NW, in the District's West End neighborhood. His father, James Edward Ellington, worked as a blueprint maker for the Navy Department and, on occasion, as a butler, sometimes at the White House. His mother, Daisy (née Kennedy) was the daughter of former slaves. Their house was musical; both of Ellington's parents played the piano. (We are told that James Edward Ellington preferred to play arrangements of operatic arias, while Daisy preferred the semi-classical parlor songs that were popular with the middle and upper classes at the time.)
Ellington child
And let's make no mistake; the Ellingtons were indeed upper-middle class: sophisticated, educated, mobile, proud of their racial heritage, and unwilling to allow their children to be restricted by the Jim Crow laws of the era. According to Studs Terkel, writing in his book Giants of Jazz (The New Press, 2nd edition, 2002):
“Daisy [Ellington] surrounded her son with dignified women to strengthen his manners and teach him elegance. His childhood friends remarked that his casual, casual demeanor and elegant attire gave him the appearance of a young nobleman.
It was this noble bearing that prompted Ellington's high school friend, Edgar McEntee, to give him the nickname that Ellington carried so well for so very long. According to Ellington himself:
“I think he [Edgar McEntee] felt that for me to be eligible for his constant company, I should have a title. So he called me Duke. ")
For young Ellington, piano lessons were essential; it was, for children of his generation (and mine too!) an inevitable childhood rite of passage. That said, like so many red-blooded young Americans, Ellington preferred baseball, at which he excelled. In his autobiography, he recalls that:
“President [Theodore] Roosevelt would sometimes come on horseback and stop and watch us play.”
(FYI: Ellington's love for the game ran deep, and his first paying job was selling peanuts at Washington Senators games.)
(Because we should all know: the Senators, also known as the "Nationals," played in Washington, D.C. from 1901 to 1960. It was in 1960 that the team broke the collective hearts of its fans district and moved to Minnesota, there to become the "Minnesota Twins": "twins" as in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.)
Ellington's first piano teacher was the spectacularly named Marietta Clinkscales (OMG; who could make up such a name?). As a teenager he took up ragtime piano and studied harmony, although as a teenager his growing love of music shared in equal parts a real talent for painting and design. …
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The article Music History Monday: The Duke (https://robertgreenbergmusic.com/music-history-monday-the-duke/) first appeared on Robert Greenberg (https://robertgreenbergmusic.com).
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