I have no monetary interests. I live in the realm of art.
Duke Ellington, 1962
This study has traced the rise, decline and resurrection, as it were, of one African-American artist, Duke Ellington, but it has attempted to balance his story against the economic, social and political background which intrudes upon it at every turn. Without this background, Ellington’s life cannot be portrayed fully, yet the image of the man left us by most writers has been almost devoid of the often unpleasant facts of existence for a Black genius trapped in a racist society.
It is for this reason that I’ve paid rather scant attention to the subject of his particular musical genius, since other writers have commented at length, and often perceptively, about it. A full assessment of what Ellington represented musically is a tempting project in itself, but it was perhaps best stated in a remark, attributed to Miles Davis, that all jazz musicians should daily get on their knees to thank Duke Ellington. Their debt to Ellington, in a musical sense, derives not so much from any direct influence he had upon his contemporaries or descendants—Ellington was, as a pianist, bandleader, composer and arranger, unique, although Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk might be counted among his progeny, as it does from his development of a new range of expression for Black folk culture. Through Ellington, particularly in its use of the chromatic scale.
Ellington, along with others of his generation, recreated the African-American folk idiom into perhaps the most pervasive cultural force of the past century. It has indeed transcended nearly every geographical and political boundary on this planet. Its sheer impact upon world culture dwarfs the achievement of any European composer who ever lived. The role of Duke Ellington in establishing this music was, of course, preeminent.
At the same time, African-American music has been rejected consistently by the white cultural establishment. While its creators have been ruthlessly exploited by the purveyors of popular entertainment, untold fortunes having been wrung from jazz and its commercialized derivatives, it has never been given its due recognition by the elite of “serious music.” Most of Ellington’s career was devoted to gaining this sort of recognition, and many of his works, particularly those he composed for performance at Carnegie Hall in the 1940s, must be considered in this context. Of these, critic Stanley Dance wrote,
The longer works and suites offered Ellington opportunities to express himself more expansively and with more freedom, to “put on” the audience playfully and, more important, to proceed with a series of “social significance thrusts.” He was a subtle tactician engaged in warfare all his life who those who cheated him in business whenever they could, and those who discriminated against what he called “my people.” …
He walked, as it were, a musical tightrope, a smile on one side of his face, a frown on the other.[1]
As his music was the expression, from his point of view, of a complex set of contradictory social relations, we find the same forces expressed in Ellington’s personality, both in the dapper aristocrat he appeared to be in public and in the little-known character he adopted in private, which some found unpleasant. To a remark, made by one critic after Ellington’s death, that he was a vain and cunning man, Dance replied,
Cunning, in the sense that he was very shrewd, he certainly had to be, to fight powerful adversaries. Inevitably there were many who resented a black musician attaining the position he did and commanding so much respect throughout the world.
Another critic, detecting “a vein of snobbery” in Ellington, caused Dance to comment that, in taking his music around the world, it was necessary for Ellington to reciprocate the respect he received from heads of state and others, because he felt “when they showed him respect he was gaining respect for his race.”[2] There is at least a kernel of truth in this judgment. It corroborates Mercer Ellington’s observation of his father’s desire to be considered “a credit to his race,” and was in fact the keystone of a social philosophy which seemed an almost comic anachronism to the generation which grew up in the latter half of Ellington’s career.
To his own generation, and to the Blacks who came of age in the 1930s, Ellington was as much symbolic ideal as were Billy Eckstine and Miles Davis in the following decades. Since the symbology of success in America has always been a matter of finances, it was perhaps Ellington’s acumen as a businessman, rather than his stature as a musician, which garnered him such adulation at the zenith of his career as a popular performer. Whatever success he achieved in this regard, however, was done at considerable expense; Ellington remained, to the end of his days, a “sharecropper” eating well at the white man’s table.
Success was therefore a matter of compromises and sacrifices. If Ellington was able to utilize his superlative musical genius to offset the restrictions imposed upon him as an artist, he was not so fortunate when it came to the role he wished to play socially and politically. Ellington’s espousal of racial pride, which in the context of the 1930s and ‘40s appeared militant, and had to be curtailed. The war was somewhat responsible for changing his persuasion, but he was shaken more severely by the outright persecution inflicted upon him, both by the government and by the Negro establishment, in the early 1950s.
Before that time, Ellington had made gestures of patriotism. Upon the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, the Ellington orchestra played a long program of his compositions on the Blue Network (the predecessor to ABC) and was said to be “proud of the fact this was really the only American music heard on thee air that dreadful day.”[3] Years before, he had broadcast all night from a Chicago Ballroom to keep the lines open for bulletins about the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.
Thirty years later, however, this patriotism (now subsidized by the U.S. State Department) appeared forced and was used to camouflage the oppression of Blacks in the United States. Of his 1963 tour of Indian, for example, Ellington wrote,
At the press conferences, we would talk about jazz and, very often, the race situation in America. Some of them wanted information, but others wanted to discuss it from a more provocative viewpoint, and then I would have to explain that the situation of the Negro in America was more complex than we had time to clarify, but I always told them that the Negro has a tremendous investment in our country. We have helped to build it and we have invested blood in every war the country has fought, and this accounts for what has been happening. “What is being done now?” they would ask, and I would reply that I was sure our leaders have strategy, but that if I knew it I wouldn’t be very bright to reveal it, to cast it around for publication, because it would help our opponents to put up an even more formidable resistance than they now have. One man asked me, “Why hasn’t the Negro artist done more for the cause?” That upset me and I said, “If you knew what you were talking about, you wouldn’t ask a question like that.” I came back to him later, after I had cooled off a bit, and explained that we had been working on the Negro situation and h his condition in the South since the ‘30s, that we had done shows[4], musical works, benefits, etc., and that the American Negro artist had been among the first to make major contributions.”[5]
Elsewhere, Ellington reported a similar skirmish abroad concerning the race question in America:
“The United States has a minority problem… Negroes are one of several minority groups, but the basis of the whole problem is economic rather than a matter of color.”
While my opponent is busily thinking, I give him another opportunity by introducing another subject.
“The United States has an extremely accurate news service and the press enjoys almost complete freedom,” I claim. “Did you. Incidentally, hear about the five little girls who were burned up in that church down in Alabama the other day?”
“Yes”, he says with great triumph.
“Well, that was only a couple of days ago, and I’m not sure anybody else would have let such news get out that quickly if it had happened in their backyard.”
He has nothing to say to that, so I carry on:
“You have heard of the Reverend Martin Luther King, I’m sure.”
“Yes,” he says, with a measure of exultancy in his voice again.
“Let us say that he is the representative of an oppressed race of people… When I saw him just before I left Chicago a few weeks ago, he was coming down Michigan Avenue. I waved to him, and in order for him to say hello to me, he had to have his chauffeur stop this long Cadillac. An aide got out and opened the door, and two motor policemen in front of the car, and two more behind, had to stoop so that he could get out and shake hands with me. This is the way the man lives and travels who is representing that oppressed race, so the standards are not the same every place in the world. They vary according to where you are.”[6]
Such incidents, repeated everywhere in the world Ellington traveled, contributed strongly toward the Uncle Tom image which would alienate his younger audience. In many instances, he showed an astonishing lack of tact, as during his performance in 1969 at San Francisco State University, while the African-American students there were conducting a strike. According to Ralph Gleason, Ellington’s $3,000 fee was “paid out of [university president S.I.] Hayakawa’s contingency fund, the initial $50,000 of which Chicago millionaire W. Clement Stone contributed.” Members of the local Black Student Union and American Federation of Teachers grew concerned that Ellington “did not know where Hayakawa was at.” Contrary to rumors that Ellington would endorse the BSU at his concert, his announcement attempted to skirt the issue: “This concert is totally dedicated to those of us who are determinedly dedicated to developing the Black Studies program. This remark drew applause, but when Ellington, mentioned him as “our choreographer,” he was booed loudly. At a reception after the concert, “a BSU member smarting from Ellington’s even mentioning Hayakawa, put the Duke down in plain terms.”[7]
In public during his last years, Ellington was a creature of the establishment, so much so that it is difficult to determine his feelings about major social issues. In Mercer Ellington’s account, there was much more perception in his thought than he allowed the public to see:
Like Martin Luther King, he was not so much interested in the race aspect per ce as in the consideration of minority groups, the downtrodden and deprived. The idea of equality he held paramount, progressively so toward the culmination of his life. He equated the black situation inn America with other troubled situations in the world, like that of the Arabs versus the Jews, or the one-time predicament of African Pygmies under Senegalese domination. He watched with great interest the struggle for independence from Britain in the West Indies.
The principle here—the immorality of man’s enslavement of man—and its inadmissibility took hold of his mind quite early on. It was strengthened and authenticated by what he read in the Bible: that man should not suffer under another man’s hand. He began to think more subjectively, seeing himself as a man placed in a subordinate position as a black man. The idea that he should try to change what destiny seemed to have decreed grew in him, and stayed with him till the end. Very often, and in many ways, he came out and stated honestly and definitely how he felt, but this was only with people he was close to and not for the record.[8]
Ellington was careful to insert clauses against segregated audiences in all his contracts. In addition to Martin Luther King, he was known to admire Paul Robeson, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, but he deplored the various ideological, national and caste divisions among Blacks, insisting at the same time that “blacks in the United States should look on themselves as Americans primarily and should try to straighten things out within the family before going outside.” As for himself, however, the raciaHisl struggle “was an area where Ellington never wanted to push himself to the front, never wanted esteem or to be considered heroic. He preferred to be accused of doing too little than to be lauded as a great man helping his people when within himself he felt unable to do enough,”[9]
Ellington’s well-known aversion to communism is reported by his son to have been genuine and based on religious convictions (“He disliked anything the played down the idea of the church, and he knew that communism never tolerated any philosophy other than its own.”[10]), yet it is hard to escape the conclusion that his pronouncements on this subject were based, at least in part, of the fear of a repetition of the red-baiting which had scandalized his name and nearly terminated his career in 1950. His professional association with radicals, including Communists, had been far more than casual, but whatever regard he had for them had to be sacrificed to create the image of Ellington as the ideal representative of his race.
In a sense, Ellington was prosaically typical of his race, at least according to the portrait of him drawn by his son, for his life seems a perfect case history for E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie. Indeed, the private life Duke Ellington exhibited traits that went beyond mere superstition, religiosity, or even mysticism, to what his son concedes was outright paranoia:
I firmly believe that from around 1950 onward Ellington began to develop a pronounced form of paranoia. He blamed different things on different sets of people. In world events, he believed prominent men were often influenced to act wrongly or indulge in reprisals by women somewhere in the background. He’d take headlines and check back to prove his theory. When something bad happened on the international level, he often saw the handiwork of people in powerful positions, communists, financiers, or both. While he believed that communists worked ceaselessly to overthrow the power of the United States, he also held that capitalists worked exclusively for personal gain, something he considered true of unions as well. The impact of their machinations on the society he lived in truly disturbed him…
In general, he adopted an uncritical attitude toward personal idiosyncrasies, so that where homosexuals were concerned he might have seemed part of their society, whereas in truth he never was. But although he always claimed not to believe in categories, he was in fact both criticizing and categorizing when he ascribed certain troubles to what he called the Faggot Mafia.[11]
It is striking that a man who is now considered the most successful musician in the history of jazz should have emerged with the psychology of a victim, which he of course was. That same history since Ellington’s greatest creative years, perhaps in reaction against the “credit to the race” syndrome he typified, has produced a new set of musical heroes along with a new musical language, concomitant with the African-American’s reassessment of his cultural values. All of them have faced the same social dilemma as Ellington, and regardless of their various cultural stances, they too have been victims. The African-American dilemma in the arts will not be overcome until the racist society which nourishes it is abolished.
[1] Stanley Dance, liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts, January 1946.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ralph J. Gleason, Celebrating the Duke… & Other Heroes, p. 165.
[4] MIMM, pp. 308-309.
[5] Ralph J. Gleason, Celebrating the Duke… p. 165.
[6] Ibid., pp. 234-235.
[7] Ibid., pp. 184-185.
[8] Duke Ellington in Person, p. 181.
[9] Ibid., pp. 184-185.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid., pp. 157-158.
The Duke Ellington Orchestra was virtually the sole survivor of the trend in jazz that decimated big bands in favor of small combos—even Count Basie was forced, for economic reasons, to reduce his orchestra to an octet in the summer of 1950. Forced to accept the sort of engagements he could hardly have imagined in his glory days, by the middle of the decade, that he was on his last legs. For the entire summer of 1955, the Ellington band played backing to the “Aquacades” show at Flushing Meadows, Long Island, formerly the site of the 1939 World’s Fair: The orchestra was in a sorry condition:
Five men in the band, including Paul Gonsalves and Willie Cook, were temporarily dropped from the lineup because they didn’t hold cards with the right branch of the union. A string section, an extra pianist, and two girl harpists (doing water effects which went with the swimming angle of the show) augmented the thinned-out Ellingtonians. It really did seem that the end might be in sight.
In later years Duke always evaded too many questions about the year of 1955. The reason why he went to be a backing band to a summer show must have been primarily economic. He hadn’t been drawing large audiences for some time. Around the college circuit, which was now an important factor in jazzmen’s finances, the kids wanted small groups like those of Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck. Norman Granz was concentrating increasingly on Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald. Count Basie, too, was making a comeback and getting the dates which Duke was missing. Duke was even left out in the cold by the aqua-show format. They allowed a piano solo by him, and then his musicians took over with a house conductor in charge.[61]
The long-awaited new lease on life for the orchestra came unexpectedly in the summer of 1956 at the Newport Jazz Festival, then in its third year and still located on the Rhode Island playground for the American aristocracy, which hitherto had been entertained by symphony orchestras. The band played its opening set lacking four of its musicians, and it met with little enthusiasm from the crowd. It was nearly midnight when Ellington, now with all his musicians present, returned to close the show, and some of the huge crowd was already beginning to leave.
In an uncanny moment of inspiration, Ellington called the old numbers “Diminuendo in Blue” and “Crescendo in Blue,” an up-tempo showpiece he had devised in 1937. When Paul Gonsalves stepped forward to improvise some transitional choruses between the two main sections of the score, people began to pay attention, stopping at the exits, popping their fingers and clapping on the offbeats. Chorus after chorus of earthy blues came from Gonsalves’s tenor saxophone, and the response of the audience built rapidly to a frenzy, almost drowning the sound of the band. Gonsalves finally quit after twenty-seven choruses before the Ellington ensemble returned for its “Crescendo,” a moment that made show-business history.
To this day, many jazz writers find little value in the performance of either the exuberant Gonsalves or the band, but to the crowd at Newport it was sheer magic, and through the cascade of publicity he received, the name of Duke Ellington again became golden. His portrait on the cover of Time Magazine the following month seemed to certify his “rediscovery” by middle America. The Ellington band was signed to a new contract with Columbia Records, where producer Irving Townshend apparently gave him free reign to record whatever project he chose, be they pop songs, extended suites from Shakespeare, or flights of fancy like A Drum Is a Woman, which was televised with a full cast in 1957. Within a few years he was recording with symphony orchestras, gaining recognition from universities, attracting the interest of white clergymen with his series of Sacred Concerts in the mid-to-late 1960s. Above all, beginning in 1963, he was representing the United States in international tours organized by the Department of State.
The Black establishment, too, began to mend its fences with Ellington. He had perhaps always been somewhat an outsider to the Black bourgeoisie, but in this he was no different from any other African-American man choosing to make his living in jazz, this class’s traditional badge of shame. The very presentation to Ellington of the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal, the highest honor the organization bestows upon distinguished Blacks, contained evidence of their mutual alienation. John Hammond described the ceremony, in 1959, in which Arthur Spingarn himself, president of the NAACP, awarded the medal to Ellington:
It was presented at a large banquet at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, where Arthur spoke of Ellington’s many achievements and his many famous compositions, including “Mood Indigo,” “Black and Tan Fantasy,” and “Take the Train!” Several of us in the audience shouted “Take the ‘A’ Train,” to no avail. Duke was not only credited with Billy Strayhorn’s famous theme for the Ellington band, but the whole point of the title was lost. No surprise. The NAACP never was known for its knowledge or appreciation of jazz![62]
In the 1960s and ‘70s Ellington began to pursue his new career as an elder statesman and American cultural ambassador. Whatever conflicts remained in his life, Ellington received a new, sanitized image to accompany this cultural preeminence, however short he may have fallen from the goals he had once coveted for himself, his music and his people. However compromised his honors may have been, it can be said without irony that Duke Ellington died an Honored Person.
XIII. RESURRECTION
Duke Ellington, "Where Is Jazz Going?" Music Journal, March 1962
"[Today's jazz] as always in the past, is a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct."
"I have always been against any attempt to categorize or pigeonhole music, so I won't attempt to say whether the music of the future will be jazz or not jazz, whether it will merge or not merge with classical music."
"There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind."
"If it sounds good, it is successful."
Duke Ellington with Stanley Dance, "The Art Is in the Cooking," Down Beat. 7/62 (TDER, 332)
"[What] is really involved here, I think, is personal taste rather than categories.
"Music itself is a category of sound, but everything that goes into the ear is not music. Music is music, and that's it. If it sounds good, it's good music, and it depends on who's listening how good it sounds."
George Avakian, "Ellington at Newport." Liner notes to Columbia CL 934 (TDER, 290)
[on critics' response;] "By next morning it was generally conceded to have been one of the most exciting performances any of them had ever heard. All were agreed that it was a triumph of the good old (R&B, if you will) blues beat which has been too often missing in jazz in the last fifteen years."
[As people began dancing in the aisles during Paul Gonsalves's 23-chorus interlude] "A platinum blonde girl in a black dress began dancing in one of the boxes... and a moment later somebody else started in another part of the audience. Large sections of the crowd [of 7,000 people] had already been on their feet; now their cheering was doubled and redoubled as the interreacting stimulus of a rocking performance and crowd response heightened excitement.
"Halfway through Paul's solo [the audience] had become an enormous single living organism, reacting waves like huge ripples to the music played before it."
Despite the late hour, Ellington sensed the need to calm the crowd and called on Johnny Hodges to play his slow, sensuous "Jeep's Blues."
Duke Ellington, "Reminiscing in Tempo," TDER, 361
"Jazz is a music that came out of the United States with very deep African roots, and from the beginning-- before the '20s-- it represented a freedom of expression as it does today. Since that time it has taken on many complexions. It has traveled so much and picked up influences everywhere it has gone, that, by now, I think there's a little bit of everybody's music in it. But it remains a highly personalized art, and everyone ways what he wants to say the way he wants to say it."
"I believe it is a good thing to get all the training possible, no matter what kind of music you're in, but there is always a risk, in my opinion, of original thought being modified by scholastic training, unless you know wat you want to do."
Program for Ellington's A Concert of Sacred Music, performed at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, Sept. 16, 1965:
Communication is "the built in answer to that feeling of aloneness" all humankind experiences.
"Communication itself is what baffles the multitude. It is both so difficult and so simple. Of all man's fears, I think men are most afraid of being what they are-- in direct communication with the world at large. They fear reprisals, the most personal of which is that they 'won't be understood.'"
Only God has "total understanding."
Gary Giddins, "From the Pulpit," 1981 (TDER, 376)
The photo of Ellington on the sleeve of SC3 "denies the illness ravaging his tired frame. Six months later he was dead, and there can be little doubt that he attached great significance to the last edition of what he considered his most important work, the Sacred Concerts."
Ellington: "One may be accustomed to speaking to people, but suddenly to attempt to speak, sing, and play directly to God-- that puts me in an entirely new and different position."
(TDER, 377)
"SC1 was a patchwork of the new and the old. Of the new pieces, the most important was 'In the Beginning God,' which occupies a third of the album."
"A couple of selections were recycled from Ellington's 1963 production My People, but the best of the older music originated in the 1940s. 'New World a-Coming'... on SC1 [is] a superbly played piano solo, its jaunty spirit and tricky bass figures colored by sensitive minor key melancholy." Giddins calls attention also to the revamped "Come Sunday" and highlights "David Dance Before the Lord," with tap-dancer Bunny Briggs.
"A change of heart overtook the composer for SC2, which consists exclusively of new music." There are "long recitatives of varying success, full of outright proseletizing. Some of the choral sections are reminiscent of school pageants."
"This was one of the last times the classic Ellington band of the '60s would record, and [Ellington's] obsession with the project is reflected in his producing and financing it himself.".
"[Alice Babs] is at the heart of SC3, where the purity of her a capella work on "Every Man Prays in His Own Language" displays an emotional serenity one associates with the singing of children."
SC3 is "Ellington's final testament. Despite great adversity. he was even in these last months a perceptive and unflinching artist. Indeed, the best moments of The Majesty of God suggest that his art was still peaking."
Gunther Schuller, "Ellington in the Pantheon," first of two articles published in High Fidelity in November 1974, about six months after Ellington's death (TDER, 414 f.)
415: "Music, especially Duke's music, speaks better for itself, and talk about music is often necessarily subjective and impressionistic. On the other hand, there are some things to be said about all great music that are more objective and factual than we sometimes care to admit. For greatness is not altogether accidental, altogether intuitive or mysterious. Much of it results from simple hard work, selflessly applied energy, and a fierce determination to learn and apply what has been learned."
After placing Ellington in his own pantheon, Schuller laments "the fact that you cannot go into the nearest music store or library and obtain orchestral scores of Duke Ellington."
Schuller admits that "even if such scores existed, they still would not readily disclose the uniqueness of which I speak. For Ellington's imagination was most fertile in the realm of harmony and timbre, usually in combination. And as played by some of the finest musicians jazz has ever known, the specific effect produced in performance and on records is such that no notation has yet been devised to capture it on paper."
These effect exist "alas only on records."
"The case for Ellington's Music as Living Repertory" (TDER, 418 f.)
The second piece continues Schuller's argument to its logical conclusion:
"Is it possible-- and is it right-- that Ellington's music should be relegated to perpetuation solely by mechanical reproductive means? Is this remarkable music not to survive in live performances or perhaps in transmutations and improvisations by others, based on the Duke's tunes"
[1] MIMM, p. 156.
[2] Interview in Stanley Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (Da Capo, 1970), p. 108.
[3] Derek Jewell, Duke: A Portrait of Duke Ellington, p. 103.
[4] Duke Ellington in Person, p. 104.
[5] In Mark Tucker, ed., The Duke Ellington Reader (Oxford, 1993), pp. 214-252.
[6] MIMM, p. 175.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Interview with Mercer Ellington, Chicago, July 22, 1979.
[9] MIMM, pp. 175-176.
[10] Quoted Ibid.
[12] MIMM, pp. 180-181.
[13] Alfred A; Duckett, “Duke of Windsor May Attend Ellington’s Concert At Carnegie,” New York Age, January 23, 1943.
[14] Alfred A. Duckett, “Duke Ellington’s Concert At Carnegie Demonstrates Maestro’s Unique Genius,” New York Age, January 30, 1943.
[15] Leonard Feather, liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Concerts, January 1943 (Prestige P-34004).
[16] Duke Ellington in Ibid., recording.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington, pp. 252-253.
[19] Alfred A. Duckett, op. cit.
[20] Cited in Leonard Feather, liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts, 1943 (Prestige).
[21] Cited in Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington, p. 257.
[22] Cited in Leonard Feather, liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts, 1943 (Prestige).
[23] Constant Lambert, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline, p. 215.
[24] “J.T.H. Mize Goes to Bat for Brown, Black and Beige [sic]: Rye Music Educator Puts in One Good Lick for Ellington, and Two Better Ones Against the Critics,” Musician, December 1943, p. 159.
[25] Cited in Leonard Feather, liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts, 1943 Prestige P-34004..
[26] Ibid.
[27] Cited in Ibid., p. 19.
[28] Remarks following presentation by David N. Baker, Jr., “Indiana University’s Black Music Committee,” in Black Music in Our Culture,”
[29] Liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts, 1943.
[30] MIMM, p. 183.
[31] Richard O. Boyer, “The Hot Bach,” p. 60.
[32] Ibid., pp. 22-26.
[33] MIMM, p. 309.
[34] “Expect Ellington Song To Promote Racial Accord,” Norfolk VA Journal and Guide October 9, 1943, p.14.
[35] “The Hot Bach,” pp. 49-50.
[36] Interview with John Timmons, Navy veteran, Chicago, May 18, 1980.
[38] “The Hot Bach, pp. 42-43.
[39] Duke Ellington in Person, p. 105.
[40] MIMM, p. 190.
[41] Derek Jewell, Duke: A Portrait of Duke Ellington, p. 115.
[42] Stefan Kanfer, A Journal of the Plague Years, (New York: Atheneum, 1973), p. 250,
[43] United States House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC hereinafter), Investigation of Communist Activities, New York Area: Parts VI-VIII (Entertainment) (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955), p. 2501 p. 3864.
[44] HUAC, Communist Methods of Infiltration: Entertainment (Part I) (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954).
[45] HUAC, Report on the Communist “Peace” Offensive: A Campaign to Disarm and Defeat the United States (Washington: U.S, Government Printing Office, 1951), p. 130.
[46] “Moscow Decries Peace Sabotage,” New York Times, July 22, 1950, p. 4.
[47] “The Phony Peace Drive,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 26, 1960, p. 6.
[48] Cited in Duke Ellington, “No Red Songs for Me,” New Leader, September 30, 1950, p. 4.
[49] Unidentified clipping found in files of the Chicago Defender; external evidence would place it at about September 1, 1950.
[50] Ibid., p. 2.
[51] Ralph J. Gleason, Celebrating the Duke & Louis, Bessie, Billie, Bird, Carmen, Miles, Dizzy & Other Heroes (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1975) p. 176.
[52] Ibid., pp. 200-201
[53] Associated Negro Press release, November 21, 1951, in Claude Barnett file.
[54] James L. Hicks, “Duke Benefit for NAACP Netted $1,000, Not 13 Gs,” Baltimore Afro-American, in Ibid, p. 5.to
[55] Duke Ellington and Otis N. Thompson, Jr., “Duke Ellington Says He Didn’t Say It; Reporter Insists That He Did,” Baltimore Afro-American, December 15, 1951, pp.1 ff.
[56] Claude Barnett to Duke Ellington, December 5, 1951, in Claude Barnett file.
[57] “The Duke of Ellington Honored by Host of Stars,” Associated Negro Press release, February 4, 1952, in Claude Barnett file.
[58] “Chicagoans Join in Duke Ellington Salute,” Associated Negro Press release, December 24, 1952 and ANP release, January 4, 1953, both in Claude Barnett file.
[59] “Duke Ellington Attacks TV, Then Signs for Show,” Chicago Defender, September 2, 1950, p. 27.
[60] Duke Ellington in Person, p. 99.
[61] Derek Jewell, Duke: A Portrait of Duke Ellington, pp. 119-120.
[62] John Hammond on Record, p. 309.
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