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Duke's People

 

Duke Ellington was riding particularly high in 1963.   In January he embarked with his orchestra upon a highly successful European tour through the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia and Germany.  Simultaneously  he was enjoying the perks of a recording contract with Frank Sinatra's new Reprise label which gave him complete control over his own recordings; even more, he was given the unusual authority to produce sessions for other artists as he travelled around Europe. Ahead of him lay a unique opportunity to write, produce, and direct his own show.  During January in Sweden, between performances with symphony orchestras, in hotel suites, or in the passenger seat of a white Volvo Amazon Sport, he wrote much of My People, an engagement commissioned by the Century of Negro Progress Exposition in Chicago.  

But by the time the band returned home in June, they found a nation much changed from the one they had left only a few months before.  

 It seems almost too great a coincidence that 1963, the centennial of Lincoln's  Emancipation Proclamation, would also mark the crest of the modern-day civil rights movement.  The year began as Alabama Governor  George Wallace, after his January swearing-in at the State Capitol, defiantly declared, "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"  In May the Birmingham campaign of the Souther Christian Leaddership Committee  culminated in televised images of vicious police dogs and fire hoses used against peaceful protesters.  

In the ten weeks before the famed March on Washington in August,  there would be 758 civil rights demonstrations in 186 cities and 14,733 arrests.  The year drew to a close with  the assassination of President Kennedy in November to highlight a decade of racial turmoil in America and the entire world  that reverberates to this day.

In February, traditionally the occasion of Negro History Week, the Kennedy Administration seemed to take a stance in favor of the civil rights movement by marking the Emancipation centennial with a reception attended by over eight hundred civil rights activists, intended to be bipartisan and to bring individuals of all races together.  Before the event, the President had been presented with a document on Civil Rights developments of the last hundred years, prepared by the United States Civil Rights Commission.  Some famous names, including Judge Thurgood_Marshall, NAACP head Roy Wilkins, and musicians Sammy Davis, Jr. and Lionel Hampton were in attendance at the White House that day.

Noticeably missing from the reception was the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther. King , Jr., who had declined an invitation after having talked to the President about segregation, to no avail.

Subsequent to the White House event, several cities celebrated the Emancipation centennial, but only Chicago marked it in a really significant way.  The idea for the exposition had begun two years earlier with the formation of the American Negro Emancipation Centennial Authority (ANECA), a young adult volunteer auxiliary supervised by the historian and businessman James E. Stamps. ANECAns were said to symbolize "a new dimension in Negro thought" and "an example of Negro youth molding Negro destiny."  Nearly fifty young South Siders worked with the Authority in developing a grand celebration to run August 16 through September 2.

The idea for the Exposition had taken root a full  two years earlier with the formation of the American Negro Emancipation Centennial Authority (ANECA), a young adult volunteer auxiliary supervised by the historian and businessman James E. Stamps.  ANECAns were said to symbolize "a new dimension in Negro thought" and "an example of Negro youth molding Negro destiny."  Nearly fifty young South Siders worked with the Authority in developing a grand celebration to run August 16 through September 2.

The Exposition was sponsored by twenty-one major American corporations, which together financed  exhibits that traced Black history from Africa to modern America.  The President himself conceived a commemorative postage stamp to be issued at the opening ceremonies.  The Exposition was expected to attract up to a million people, relying upon the attendance of the Chicago Black  community and the support of  business and social organizations.  Along with Kennedy's gesture, opening day featured the presentation  of a manuscript copy of  Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, protected by bullet-proof glass and two state troopers standing beside it.   In keeping with this theme the biggest space was devoted to a Lincoln statue surrounded by red carpet, with famous quotations displayed in the background.

 

*

 

Chicago faced its own challenge in its de facto segregation of public schools.   Just days after  the Exposition's closing, schools opened that year with public protests against the use of trailer-like structures outside school buildings, dubbed Willis Wagons after school board president Benjamin Willis.  Amid a "Freedom Day" boycott of schools by African American  students, picketers were at the homes of school officials, demanding their resignation.  Meanwhile, there were quiet negotiations between Chicago businesses and Negro leaders concerning the crisis of unemployment in the Black community.

Nevertheless, at a news conference in May, Mayor Daley boasted that Chicago was "setting the pace for the entire nation in race relations.”  He had just returned from a junket to Hawaii (a reporter from the Defender, Chicago’s largest and most influential Black community news paper, noted Daley had acquired "a heavy tan”) but went on to announce his support of Superintendent Willis, nevertheless confirming the rumors that Willis, who at $48,500 was the nation's highest-paid school administrator, was on his way out.  

Daley praised Willis's job performance and said he had "done much in his effort to make Chicago schools most outstanding.”  

Meanwhile, there were  Black community activists picketing in front of the Board of Education building on North  LaSalle Street to protest of the proposal of additional mobile classrooms in several areas. A CORE executive explained,   "We are protesting the transfer of students from Farragut High School and the use of mobile classes because both mean subtle plans to perpetuate segregation.  This is just their way of maintaining the practice."   She cited another instance in the proposed student transfers from  Marshall to Orr High School on the North Side of the city.

 

 

On Thursday night, August 15, the eve of the public opening of the Exposition, there was a preview for VIPs, including hundreds of professionals.  Supervisor Stamps explained that the preview was part of a plan to boost many of the businesses who were backing the event a chance to see the results of their contributions.  John S. Gleason, an official from the Veteran's Administration, was the keynote speaker. Executive director Alton A. Davis predicted a huge turnout. 

 

After a great deal of ballyhoo in the press, both local and national, the Exposition opened on Friday, August 16, at 2 p.m.    After Mayor Daley cut a symbolic paper chain across the main entrance of the McCormick Place exhibition floor,  attendees viewed exhibits telling the story of Black Americans' achievements over the span of a century.  As they filed into the huge hall, they learned about the origins of slavery in the Roman Empire and saw, according to the Chicago Tribune, ''a primitive African jungle village, with grass huts set beside a small waterfall.''   Visitors then viewed exhibits that illustrated the contributions of the Negro to the city, state, and nation.

Each day of the Exposition was planned around a specific theme:  over the ensuing two weeks, there was a Government Day,  Sports Day, Fine Arts Day ("the most representative collection of paintings, sculpture and graphic arts by American Negro artists ever assembled"), Women's Day, Youth Day, International Day, and so forth.  Customarily, each day presented celebrity athletes, singers, and speakers, including gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, Chicago Cubs infielder Ernie Banks. and the Harlem Globetrotters (whose origins actually were in Chicago). The renowned children's songstress Ella Jenkins  performed at an afternoon workshop, followed by sports exhibitions and dance recitals.    Athletes Althea Gibson and Jesse Owens and musicians Oscar Peterson and  Dizzy Gillespie were awarded plaques.  A symposium on the future of the American Negro and the promise of a second Negro Renaissance included journalists Lerone Bennett  of Ebony and Les Brownlee of the Tribune, among a parade of other Black celebrities.  Every day there were three performances of the Larry Steele radio show, hosted by the famed local songwriter and impresario known as "the Black Flo Ziegfeld.”  In all, one hundred sixty-four citations were bestowed upon prominent Chicago African Americans, including Gwendolyn Brooks, already the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize and who would be named the poet laureate of Illinois. 

Another Black Chicagoan to be honored was Margaret Goss Burroughs, founder of the Ebony Museum of Negro History (later to be renamed the DuSable Museum)  and co-founder of the Afro-American Heritage Association.  Meanwhile, Ellington's show was presented every afternoon and evening.

 

 

 

 

 

Reviews of the exhibits were mixed.  "Although a majority of the booths are interesting,” the Defender observed," the only 'live' one is the National Aeronautical and Space Association's <sic> offering.  It provides factual demonstrations on how rockets operate and why.  It also explains our position in the race to the Moon."  The booth was operated by two NASA employees, one Black and the other white.

A critic from the same paper noted approvingly the variety of  Negro occupations the Exposition put on display-- in business, athletics, medicine, teaching, policing and all the rest.    Another obsessed about a list of spelling errors to be found among the exhibits:  “negro,”  “Negros,” “who's" (instead of "whose"), and a host of such egregious misspellings as “Richard Right."  She filed a direct complaint to Alton Davis, whom she intended to harass for the remainder of the Exposition.

 

*

 

Duke Ellington was one of the most honored and revered  personalities of the twentieth century.  Beyond music, from the beginning of his career he had been very much a "race man,” but strictly one of the old school:  He believed that by commanding -- not demanding-- respect, he could help advance his people along with himself.  He had never engaged directly with protest marches or demonstrations or endorsed a specific idea in the struggle for civil rights.  "Say it without saying it" had been his motto in such productions as Jump for Joy in Hollywood in 1941, which consisted of musical skits in satiric sketches such as "I've Got a Passport from Georgia (And I'm Leaving for the U.S.A.)," and Beggar's Holiday in 1947, which made its point by interracial casting.   Regarding My People more than a decade later, singer Joya Sherrill recalled that she had never seen Ellington more excited and that "he felt he was making a racial contribution."

Ellington had been given carte blanche to handle My People in any manner he chose.  He relished the challenge of writing, arranging and directing his own music.  "I enjoyed this as a challenge,”  he wrote, "because I was the lyricist, the composer, the orchestrator, I directed it, I produced it, I lit the show, I did everything, and it was just a ball."  He now had the rare opportunity to display the full range of his talents.  

Much of the planning for the show occurred in the South Side home of Ellington's former guitarist, Fred Guy, who had retired in 1949.  Despite his long absence from the music world, Guy remained friends with his old boss, who usually visited his apartment when he was in town.  Presently, discussion over the production details of My People was centered over the coffee table in Guy's living room.  

Duke had yet to witness the vastArie Crown Theater, an auditorium of more than 5,000 seats. As he vividly recalled in his memoir, Music Is My Mistress,

When I first went to work in the McCormick <sic> Theatre, I was knocked out by the size of the stage.  I sat in the front row of the orchestra seats and looked up at the stage, to get the audience's view...  I sat and looked for a while, and then came up with an idea to fill this big stage...  We would extend the sixteen-piece band just back of an apron... Behind the band we would have an elevation twelve feet high which would be carried all the way back to the back wall.  On either side would be stairs running down behind the band.

 

For the opening, I would have a boy and a girl dancing at the extreme back end of the elevation-- a sort of Afro dance.  Then black out, fade up to green as backdrop silhouettes the dancers; fade up amber cross lights at the point where the boy is doing the head-rolling thing, a la Geoffrey Holder; slow fade to black and first slowly cross orchestra pit, with ambers, purples, and reds,  and then quickly bright up.  Instead of two tiny figures in the distance, the audience was suddenly looking at forty-eight giant hands rising up out of the dark, towering over them on the orchestra pit elevator.  Some were shocked by the silhouette and even cried out in fright.  Thanks to Ailey and Beatty, Ellington had achieved a choreographic masterpiece on his maiden voyage.  

 A challenge equal to producing the show was maintaining a schedule to meet Ellington's other obligations.  During the run of the show, he was also writing music for the  Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare Festival's production of Timon of Athens and traveling with his band for a week of one-nighters and a second week engaged at the Michigan State Fair in Detroit.  To top it all off, he was obliged to help work out the show's choreography in New York with Alvin Ailey and Talley Beatty.

Meanwhile, My People would be played by a seventeen-piece pit band liberally sprinkled with current Ellington Orchestra members and alumni, with Jimmy Jones at the piano and conducting.  This unit was named the Billy Strayhorn Orchestra, as Strayhorn would function as Ellington's deputy director throughout the run.  From the current band came  cornetist/ violinist Ray Nance, a Chicago native himself,  trombonists Booty Wood, and Chuck Connors, and alto saxophonist and  clarinetist  Russell Procope.   Joining them was drummer Louis Bellson, who'd had a regular place in Ellington's band a decade earlier, and future band members Harold Ashby on tenor sax, trumpeter Bill Berry, and bassist Joe Benjamin.   Six local musicians filled out the balance of the band, along with singers Joya Sherrill (whose association with Ellington had begun  in the 1940s), Lil Greenwood, and Jimmy McPhail, along with a choir directed by the Irving Bunton Singers.  

Earlier in the year Duke had selected Bunton as choral director for My People.  At that time, he was the director of the award-winning Englewood High School a cappella choir, and the all-city high school chorus.

Over the ensuing two weeks, there was a Government Day,  Sports Day, Women's Day, Youth Day, International Day, and so forth.  Customarily, each day presented celebrity athletes, singers, and speakers, including gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, Chicago Cubs infielder Ernie Banks. and the Harlem Globetrotters (whose origins actually were in Chicago). The renowned children's songstress Ella Jenkins  performed at an afternoon workshop, followed by sports exhibitions and dance recitals.    Athletes Althea Gibson and Jesse Owens and musicians Oscar Peterson and  Dizzy Gillespie were awarded plaques.  A symposium on the future of the American Negro and the promise of a second Negro Renaissance included journalists Lerone Bennett  of Ebony and Les Brownlee of the Tribune, among a parade of other Black celebrities.  Every day there were three performances of the Larry Steele radio show, hosted by the famed local songwriter and impresario known as "the Black Flo Ziegfeld."  Meanwhile, Ellington's show was presented every afternoon and evening.

 

To understand My People in the context of Ellington's oeuvre, one must travel back in time.   In a sense,  My People was his latest attempt to express a narrative that was forever ahead of its time.  As far back as the 1930s, Ellington's aim in music had been to tell the story of his race in a larger format.  Early in that decade he had recorded "Creole Rhapsody" and a few years later "Reminiscing in Tempo," both of which ran beyond the three-minute limit placed upon almost all jazz records.  At the same time he envisioned an opera, entitled Boolah after its protagonist, which purported to tell the history of the African American race.

 

 

A rare breakthrough at Paramount studios in 1935 afforded Ellington an opportunity to produce a short film,  Symphony in Black, whose musical themes-- "The Laborers," "Triangle," "A Hymn of Sorrow," and "Harlem Rhythm"-- were to serve Ellington for decades to come.

"Triangle" is perhaps the most interesting part of Ellington's suite.  Appropriately, it is subdivided into three segments: "Dance" shows a couple dancing indoors to the music of a radio;  in "Jealousy"the same  couple  encounter on the sidewalk outdoors another woman, whom the man shoves roughly to the pavement.  Finally, "Blues" arrives in the form of Ellington's "Saddest Tale," sung by the sixteen-year-old  Billie Holiday as the scorned woman of the love triangle.

The musical and historical themes of Symphony in Black came to be repeated on an even larger scale eight years later in Ellington's early masterpiece, Black, Brown and Beige, a suite with three movements, running around forty-five minutes.  Here Ellington's long-held vision of "A Tone Parallel to the History of the American  Negro" found its fullest expression.   An officially declared Duke Ellington Week led up to its Carnegie Hall premiere on January 23, 1943.  Its audience represented the entire spectrum of music, from highbrow musicians and critics to Ellington's own peers.  For the occasion, Ellington was awarded a ceremonial plaque by many of the most celebrated names in music.

 

 

 

The immediate reaction to Black Brown and Beige by the New York pundits, however,  proved a huge disappointment to Ellington. The esteemed jazz maven John Hammond wrote that it wasn't jazz, and the classical critics said it was a nice try, but a failure nonetheless.  None of them seemed to notice the integrity of the piece or the coherent and colorful story it tells.  Indeed, the reason for the tempest was that critics couldn't categorize it.  So obsessed were they by their own conceptions of music that they never really listened at all.  In a phrase Ellington often used regarding musicians of the highest rank, the work was "beyond category."  But the loud objections to his most ambitious achievement provoked a bitterness that did not fade.  The complete  suite was performed only twice, at its New York premiere and at its Boston Symphony Hall recital the following week.  Ellington never made a studio recording of the entire suite.

 

 

 

 

Black, Brown and Beige excerpts, RCA Victor 1944

Henceforth, Black, Brown and Beige would appear only in fragments that total about half the original's length.  Those same fragments, however, remained an inspiration for Ellington for the  remainder of his career.  In effect, they became the superstructure of My People twenty years later.  Ellington borrowed part of the "Work Song," the spiritual "Come Sunday," and "Light," a montage of the preceding themes which ends Black.  "The Blues" (a.k.a. "The Blues Ain't") from the end of Brown was the fourth and final prop for his Chicago show.  Of these themes, "Come Sunday" has endured the longest and remains a jazz standard.  In 1958 Ellington recorded a version with his own lyrics, sung by Mahalia Jackson.  These lyrics reappear in My People.

 

 

 

 

 

Joya Sherrill with Duke Ellington, ca. 1944

 

The love triangle set forth in both Symphony in Black and Black, Brown and Beige remained a pivotal point in the new show.  Notably, "The Blues" from the Brown movement is not formally a blues at all, but rather a return to the love triangle  Although the piece contains a blues in its instrumental break, most of it  is constructed as concrete poetry in a manner suggesting triangles or pyramids, the metaphorical root of the blues:

 

The blues

The blues ain't

The blues ain't nothing

The blues ain't nothing but a cold, gray day

And all night long it stays that way.

 

The blues

The blues don't

The blues don't know

The blues don't know nobody as a friend

Ain't been nowhere where they're welcome back again.

 

Mean, ugly, low blues.

 

At this point, on the 1944 Victor recording, Joya Sherrill sings a verse that leads into a tenor saxophone solo on an extended instrumental break, whose theme was later retitled "Carnegie Blues."  Then she re-enters:

 

 

The blues ain't something that you sing in rhyme

The blues ain't nothing but a dark cloud marking time

The blues is a one-way ticket from your love to nowhere

The blues ain't nothing but a black crepe veil ready to wear.

Sighing

crying

Feel 'most like dying.

 

The blues ain't nothing

The blues ain't

The blues

 

 

 

 

 

 

Although the My People's tripartite structure suggests that of Black, Brown and Beige, here

 the parts don't tell a linear story.  

Ellington remolded his old template as a triangle or pyramid.  Within this outline, he implants the themes of family and religion, sexuality, and finally race.  In effect, the movements inform Ellington's self-portrait, which are devoted respectively to his future, past, and present.  It seems a paradox that, while he never appears physically, Ellington's musical signature is unmistakable from beginning to end.

 

The first act opens abruptly with a dissonant, furious 

"Jungle Triangle, recalling the "jungle" coloration Ellington had created for Cotton Club shows more than twenty years earlier.  As Alvin Ailey had given him leave to choreograph the opening number, Ellington wrote: 

For the opening, I would have a boy and a girl dancing at the extreme back end of the elevation-- a sort of Afro dance.  Then black out, fade up to green as backdrop silhouettes the dancers; fade up amber cross lights at the point where the boys are doing the head-rolling thing a la Geoffrey Holder;  slow fade to black, and first slowly cross orchestra pit with ambers, purples, and reds, and then quickly bright up.  Instead of two tiny figures in the distance, the audience was suddenly looking at forty-eight giant hands rising up out of the dark, towering over them on the orchestra-pit elevator.  Some were shocked by the silhouette and even cried out in fright.  Thanks to Ailey and Beatty Ellington created a choreographic masterpiece on his maiden voyage.

Immediately following this garish opening, "Come Sunday" calmly and quietly appears.  In this rendition  Jimmy McPhail sings Ellington's 1958 lyric against a soft choral background while Billy Strayhorn accompanies on celeste.  The lyric obviously inspired the show's title:

 

Lord, dear lord above,

God Almighty, God of love,

Please look down and see my people through.

 

The ensuing "Will You Be There" and "99 Percent Won't Do" continue the spiritual theme, featuring  first  a dramatic chorale behind a male narrator followed by an old-fashioned gospel shout by the choir.  Still further, the religious motif continues with "Ain't But the One," rendered in a faster vein, with a vocal by Jimmy McPhail, accompanied by a great band arrangement.  To conclude the religious arc, "David Danced Before the Lord" featured tap-dancer Bunny Briggs over a snappy version of "Come Sunday," first sung and then hummed in accompaniment.

 

 

 

The religious theme that dominates the show's opening reflects Ellington's past , of course, but it also forecasts the series of Sacred Concerts he produced for the remainder of his life, which he  considered the music for these concerts the most important he had ever done.  It is no coincidence that these early songs from My People, including "David Danced" and "Come Sunday," formed the core of Ellington's first Sacred Concert two years later. 

Then comes a final backward glance with a celebration of Duke Ellington's family.  "Heritage" has  one of Billy Strayhorn's's most sumptuous arrangements and a wry lyric  deliciously interpreted by Joya Sherrill.  After a brief trombone introduction, it begins with a short spoken narration over Strayhorn's celeste.  Joya is here joined by the orchestra:

 

My mother,  the greatest and the prettiest

 

My father, just handsome but the wittiest.

 

My granddaddy, natural-born proud,

 

Grandma so gentle, so fine.

 

The men before them worked hard and  sang loud

 

About the beautiful women in this family of mine.

 

Our homestead, the warmest hospitality

 

In me you see the least of the family tree personality.

 

I was raised in the palm of the hand

By the very best people in the land.

From sun to sun, our hearts beat as one

My mother, my father, and love.

 

 

Joya Sherrill

 

 

 

 

"Heritage"

 

The second act of My People explores Ellington's musical roots.  It begins with "After Bird Jungle" (not  a bop number, as one might expect from the title, but rather an instrumental extension of "Heritage"),  forming a  link to the middle section of the show.   One may imagine a dance number as a visual element to accompany the lush score.  This theme segues immediately into "Montage" (a.k.a. "Light") the second pillar borrowed from Black, Brown and Beige, wherein the  two principal themes of Black, "Work Song" and "Come Sunday," are intertwined in a straightforward rendition of the original arrangement with the choir in accompaniment.

 

 

Blues Sequence

 

 

All of this serves to introduce the main theme of the blues in its many hues and a nod to Ellington's past, from the Cotton Club on.  Tangentially the blues represents his sexual side, for in addition to his stature as a musician and a race hero, he had been a sex symbol for decades.  Beyond his  seductive manner,  his practice of bestowing four kisses upon women's faces ("one for each cheek"), and other elements of  his persona, Ellington was a notorious womanizer.  (A few years after his death he achieved the dubious distinction of being listed among over sixty musicians from the seventeenth century forward in a tome called The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People.)

 

 

 

 

When "Montage" comes to its climactic end, the show suddenly changes gears, as Bunny Briggs reappears to give a straightforward soapbox oration, accompanied by a choral response by the choir

 

My People!

Singing-- dancing-- praying-- thinking about freedom

Working-- building America into the most powerful nation in the world

Cotton-- sugar-- indigo-- iron--coal-- peanuts--steel

The railroad, you name it.

 

The foundation of the United States rests on the sweat of My People,

And in addition to working and sweating,

Don't forget that My People fought and died in every war.

 

The speaker segues into a monologue about a wartime love triangle among the soldier, his girlfriend or wife, and a bedazzled young male who wants her attention.

 

Then chanting, with finger snaps from the whole company in support, he continues:

 

The blues is the accompaniment to the world's greatest duet,

A man and a woman going steady.

The blues is the accompaniment to the world's greatest duet,

A man and a woman going steady.

And if neither one of them feels like singin' 'em

Then the blues just vamp 'til ready.

 

At this time the orchestra brings on Joya Sherrill to mourn "The Blues,"reprising the aria that she first recorded in 1944. Then, after a dramatic trumpet fanfare, there begins a six-song blues dialogue, with Jimmy McPhail and Lil Greenwood alternating vocals on some of Ellington's "mean, ugly, lowdown blues." The series begins with McPhail's "Blues at Sundown" and ends with  Greenwood's "I Love My Lovin' Lover," wherein Harold Ashby's tenor sax introduces the first verse, and at its conclusion, Ray Nance expounds a dirty-sounding reply on cornet.   The last  chorus concludes:

 

I love my lovin' lover,

He's as sweet as he can be. 

Please, somebody, send that lady's husband back to me!

 

 

 

"My People" into "The Blues," sung by Joya Sherrill

 

 

The third act reflected the the present moment:  the struggle for civil rights.   In this context, the Exposition itself  became a staging area for the upcoming March on Washington.  It  had drawn more than 50,000 visitors in its first three days, and attendance was expected to surge further, but in the final week of August the attention of Chicago's Black community rapidly shifted to national events as Martin Luther King urged action by Christian churches.  As the centennial celebration entered its second week, events and themes shifted to the proposed march, which was quickly garnering support around the nation.  On Sunday, August 25, an evening rally was staged in McCormick Place itself, featuring a Chicago minister and one of the local leaders of the protest movement, Timuel Black.

 

Black, the co-chairman of the Chicago Committee for the March on Washington, reported to the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations that 1,500 Chicagoans would go to Washington for the demonstration.  At another meeting at the Washington Park YMCA, Black told the council that the Chicago Committee was facing a deficit of $3,000 in administrative costs and urged ministers to take up a collection for the committee at Tuesday night's prayer meetings.  He asked Chicagoans sympathetic to the aims of the march to turn on their auto headlights as a sign of solidarity.  Seven prominent clergymen of different faiths said they would meet with Senator Everett Dirksen in Washington after the next day's march and ask his support of the administration's civil rights bill.

Timuel Black

*

 

Ellington's third act reflected the the present moment and the struggle for civil rights.   In this context, the Exposition itself  became a staging area for the upcoming March on Washington.  It  had drawn more than 50,000 visitors in its first three days, and attendance was expected to surge further, but in the attention of Chicago's Black community rapidly shifted to national events and the call to action.  As the centennial celebration entered its second week, events and themes shifted to the march, which was quickly garnering support around the nation.

 

The Defender  announced on Tuesday, August 20, that the Century of Negro Progress Exposition would sponsor a "Civil Rights Night" the following Monday at 8 p.m. and that the Reverend  Fred Shuttlesworth, one of the chief organizers of the Birmingham movement, would be the guest speaker on the theme, "Why We March?”  Ralph Metcalfe, alderman of the Chicago’s Third Ward, was honorary chairman of the program, while local and national civil rights figures and organizations were to receive awards for their significant role in contemporary history.  In addition, many nationally known entertainers, including Oscar Peterson and Dizzy Gillespie, agreed to appear on the program.  It was reported that, in a joking mood, the Centennial heads had selected a"'Hall of Democratic Immortality,"' referring to the Dixiecrats in Congress.

 

In a page four article datelined New York, the Defender declared  on August 21 that leaders of the March on Washington had issued final plans for the giant civil rights demonstration and demanded desegregation of all schools that year.  In a twelve-page organizing manual the leaders charged that "the Southern Democrats that came to power by by disenfranchising the Negro...  They know that semi-slavery for one is semi-slavery for all.”

 

Monday, August 26, originally had  been ordained Negro History Day, but with whirlwind of national events, the day was renamed Civil Rights Day.  The program would feature its usual daytime fare:  citations were given to ANECA and Ebony.  Later in the day, even as alderman Ralph Metcalfe presented achievement awards to an array of Black celebrities, preparations were being made to galvanize the Black community into action.   At the ensuing Tuesday rally the Rev. Shuttlesworth spoke in support of  the March on Washington and urged further demonstrations throughout the nation.

 

The Chicago rally was staged in the evening at McCormick Place itself, featuring a Chicago minister and one of the local leaders of the protest movement, Timuel Black.  As co-chairman of the Chicago Committee for the March on Washington, Black reported to the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations that 1,500 Chicagoans would go to Washington for the demonstration.  At another meeting at the Washington Park YMCA, Black told the council that the Chicago Committee was facing a deficit of $3,000 in administrative costs and urged ministers to take up a collection for the committee at Tuesday night's prayer meetings.  He asked Chicagoans sympathetic to the aims of the march to turn on their auto headlights as a sign of solidarity.  Seven prominent clergymen of different faiths said they would meet with Senator Everett Dirksen in Washington after the next day's march and ask his support of the administration's civil rights bill.

 

The rally, most uncharacteristically, was sponsored by ANECA itself.  "The march will be one of the most significant civil rights demonstrations in the history of this country," said Sonja Hayes, an ANECA official.  "While we commemorate the Negro's contribution to the growth of our nation, we must take equal notice of the history being made today... It is imperative that we provide a forum for this march and that we give it our full support."

The morning Tribune noted that one speaker declared, "More progress toward complete acceptance has been made by the Negro in the last nine years than in the 335 years since 1619, when he arrived in North America and shackled by the chains of slavery."  It seemed somehow that the historical process of the past century had been reduced to months, weeks, days.  The centennial of Emancipation embraced the ongoing struggle against segregation.  Even as the Century of Negro Progress Exposition was becoming a staging area for a national civil rights action, the word "Negro" was itself rapidly losing its dignity and usage.

 

Remarkably, all of this activity seemed to be reflected in the third act of My People, which focused on the contemporary struggle for civil rights.  In recent interviews Ellington had seemed to distance himself from the turmoil of the moment.   "I've only got about one minute of social protest written into the script because while this aspect warrants notice, it unfairly tends to overshadow the continuing contributions of the Negro to American life."  Elsewhere he noted, a bit disingenuously,"My People is definitely not political.  It has social significance, but the emphasis will be on entertainment."

 

The final act begins with a second rendition of the raucous "Jungle Triangle," complete with lighting effects and dancers as before.  Then comes the shocker: "King Fit the Battle of Alabam,” a bitter parody of the oold spiritual which contains themes and lyrics totally unprecedented for Ellington.   Over Latin percussion and a rhumba rhythm we hear:

 

 

Martin--Luther--King fit the Battle of

Bam--bam--bam!

King fit the Battle of

Bam--bam--bam!

And the Bull jumped nasty--ghastly--nasty

 

Each verse adds another element to Ellington's narration, while the choruses provide apt commentary.  The lyrics directly summon the television images broadcast all over the world, of the fire hoses turned upon prayer vigils in the streets of Birmingham, of the violence done to Freedom Riders throughout the South, of police dogs attacking schoolchildren, as in the final verse:

 

Little babies fit the battle of police dogs

Po-lice dogs.

Little babies fit the battle of police dogs,

And the dogs came prowling, howling, growling.

The baby looked the dog right back in the eye

And said "bye" and "scram"

The baby looked the dog right back in the eye

And didn't cry and didn't laugh.

Now when the dog saw the baby wasn't afraid

He pulled his Uncle Bull's coat and said,

That baby acts like he don't give a damn

 Are you sure we're still in Birmingham?

 

Toward the end, the band shifts into a more conventional jazz rhythm to lead into the tag,

the choir and then a delayed final syllable:  "BAM!"

 

*

 

A delegation of religious leaders and public officials chartered a plane for travel to the March early on Wednesday morning, August 28, the day of the March.  Billy Strayhorn had already left the show on Monday and  began a three-day break to  to join the  March (In the interim pianist Jimmy Jones was expected to conduct the orchestra, without ever seeing Ellington's closely-guarded score.)  Strayhorn first flew to New York to preside over the annual benefit dance of the Copasetics, a social and service organization consisting mainly of dancers.   This year’s entertainment was Strayhorn’s own Down Dere, a joyful topical show to run parallel to My People.   The next day he was in Washington.  

 

Strayhorn had always maintained support for Dr. King's cause and had  accompanied his close friend Lena Horne to one of the movement's rallies.  Other good friends, the physician Arthur Logan and his wife Marian, had already arranged for him to stay at the Willard Hotel in a block of rooms reserved by the SCLC.  Strayhorn had already met Dr. King and here became  a member of his retinue before the March began.  Said Marian Logan, "Martin and Strays got together again, and Strays talked off his ear about Ellington's show and how wonderful it was.  Martin promised to go see it, and after that, he did.  Arthur and I took him, and that was where he met Edward [Ellington] for the first time.”

 

While King's August 28 speech before the Lincoln Memorial is best-known by its "I have a dream" refrain, there was more to it than that.  He spoke emphatically about the Emancipation Centennial to emphasize what had and had not changed in the preceding hundred years:

 

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.  This momentous decree came as a great beacon light to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice...  But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.  One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.  One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.  One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land.

 

*

 

Confirming the central theme of Black history and identity, Ellington's first and only protest song was followed by a parade carrying placards celebrating Black Americans, accompanied by"King,” an uptempo instrumental version of the preceding.  In the words of Ellington's copyist Tom Whaley,    "[Ellington] had them coming up from the pit.  They were in rags, my people, our people, in rags coming up, and then at the end they were doctors, and lawyers and everything."

 

In an interview Ellington said, "We send them out of the hall, the theater, on our closing number,  'What Color Is Love, What Color Is Virtue?' which is a big question.  If you answer the question, it says everything you want to say," and in Music Is My Mistress he recalled,

 

On the subject of color, we had a little girl tell the story of the green people and the purple people...  who fought and fought till they both won and lived in a state of monotony since they both felt they had won an empty victory. So they both fought until they both lost.  They were all dead, and there was blood everywhere, no purple blood, no green blood, it was all red...  After the little girl finished telling her story, we had Joya Sherrill come out and say, 'We finally got on to the subject and we're sorry.  We tried to hold it back as long as we could so we're going to discuss color now.'  And then we had her sing 'What Color Is Love, What Color Is Virtue?'

 

 

 

Bull Connor's assault on Birmingham demonstrators

 

 

 

 

 

Duke Ellington meets Martin Luther King

 

 

*

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Billy Strayhorn and Tom Whaley

 

 

 

 

Joya Sherrill sings "What Color Is Virtue

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As for My People, there was still one epilogue.  In 1997 Barbara Wright-Pryor, formerly a member of Irving Bunton's chorus in the 1963 production, helped to revive the show at the New Regal Theater on Chicago's South Side.  "I was privileged to restage his 1963 musical revue, My People, with Mercedes Ellington," she said,  as stage director and choreographer.   "It was my responsibility to pull together the singers, the dancers, the entire production, which I remember virtually from beginning to end."   Dr. Robert L. Morris of the Leigh Morris Chorale of Minneapolis joined as choral director.  The process of recreating the libretto took eleven months.

 

on the record:

• Duke Ellington, My People (Contact, 1965)

Generally, the music of My People has been undervalued, if not entirely discounted, among Ellington's oeuvre.  The performances by the Irving Bunton Singers, including their participation in radically modified arrangements from Black, Brown and Beige have seldom been mentioned, and Strayhorn's gorgeous orchestration for "Heritage (My Mother, My Father and Love)" has sometimes been disparaged.  At this point, sixty years after the original production, this music is in need of re-evaluation.

 

Nadir

 The postwar years witnessed in the Ellington Orchestra a series of significant, and often dislocating, changes in band personnel.  Barney Bigard, the inimitable clarinetist, departed in 1942, eventually to be replaced by Jimmy Hamilton, a musician almost his opposite stylistically.  The following year, the orchestra lost valve-trombonist Juan Tizol, heretofore the rock of the trombone section.  Rex Stewart left in 1945, and Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton died in 1946; both of these men were, in a certain sense, irreplaceable.  Ben Webster’s tenure with the band was brief, and Fred Guy’s retirement in 1947 signaled an end for the guitar in Ellington’s band.

 

Certainly, the players who replaced these men were more than able musicians.  Over the next few years they were to include trumpeters Harold “Shorty” Baker, Taft Jordan, William “Cat” Anderson, Al Killian and others; trombonists Claude Jones, Wilbur De Paris and Tyree Glenn; saxophonists Al Sears and Russell Procope; and a plethora of vocalists (Ivie Anderson had left in 1942) including Betty Roche, Joya Sherrill, Marie Ellington (no relation to Duke), Kay Davis and Al Hibbler.  The loss of his famous soloists, however, meant that Ellington had to face less devoted and less receptive audiences, and again he found his most formidable competitor to be his own past.

 

Although the new recruits were often exceptional talents, as Mercer Ellington admitted, “these were near sounds, but not the real heavy, individual sounds people had come to expect.”[39]  During the war years, sin p. 190.ce there could be no foreign tours, the orchestra was restricted to repeated circuits around the United States.  As the decade progressed and attendance in ballrooms began to diminish, Ellington was often forced to accept less desirable engagements.  Then too, after the war jazz performances in a concert setting became rather commonplace, Norman Granz’s Jazz At The Philharmonic series being the most notable example.  As Ellington was to recall later:

 

By 1950 everybody was giving concerts, and even a concert at Carnegie Hall no longer had the prestige value it had in 1943, but our series there had helped establish a music that was new in both its extended forms and its social significance.[40]

 

Ellington’s lowest ebb came in 1951, with the firing of Sonny Greer and the almost en masse defections of Tyree Glenn, Al Sears, and his outstanding soloists Lawrence Brown and Johnny Hodges.  Many reasons have been advanced for this debilitating exodus, including musical disagreements, personal squabbles, and simple fatigue from the rigors of a musician’s life.  Producer Norman Granz also confessed playing a role by tempting musicians out of the Ellington fold.[41]

Whatever the impact of all this upon Ellington, the really crucial events of this period happened not within the orchestra, but as a result of social and political pressures from the outside.  Perhaps more than anything else, the political turmoil of America in the early 1950s nearly destroyed Ellington’s career.

 

The rightist offensive which culminated in the McCarthyite hysteria of the 1950s began its momentum in 1947, and its first target was the show-business industry.  The onset of the Cold War was accompanied by the efforts of the U.S. Government go purge the various propaganda media, particularly motion pictures and television, of any dissidence in the face of America’s crusade against communism.   The official investigative bodies were abetted in this endeavor by private individuals who, profiting handsomely from the moral cowardice of the entertainment industry, established an effective blacklist against persons accused of harboring radical sympathies.  The result of this intensive campaign was to paralyze whatever intelligence and creativity existed in entertainment for a decade to come.

The purge produced an extensive list of victims, among whom were many who had been associated with Ellington.  Screenwriter Henry Blankfort, who had produced Jump for Joy a decade earlier, was identified by his own brother as a Communist, was blacklisted through the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1951.  Many of Ellington’s associates from his 1947 Broadway venture, Beggar’s Holiday, were effectively blacklisted from the new medium of television.  As HUAC began to spread its net in the 1950s, it began freely to impugn the names of many persons connected with Russian War Relief, the sponsor of Ellington’s 1943 Carnegie Hall debut.

 

Nineteen fifty-five became a vintage year for the red-baiters and blacklisters upon HUAC’s publication of the first edition of its Cumulative Index to Publications of the Committee on Un-American Activities.  The volume consisted of a long list of names, arranged alphabetically, of those persons mentioned, by way of hearsay or otherwise, in numerous HUAC hearings from 1938 until 1954.  The new names it “exposed” proved a goldmine for the show-business red-baiters; as one historian of the period put it: “Thus Aware Inc. [one of several leading red-hunting companies of the day] and Vincent Hartnett could charge for a report on the radical backgrounds of Gladys Cooper and Duke Ellington, Charles Laughton and Jane Pickens, Xavier Cugat and Bela Bartok, Pavel Tchelitchew and Zero Mostel.”[42]

 

Ellington’s name in the updated version of the Cumulative Index, published in 1968, indicated three “offenses” he had committed against Western civilization.  The first reproduced a lengthy list of show-business sponsors, including Ellington, of a musical benefit for the Artists’ Front to Win the War at Carnegie Hall in 1942.[43]  In the second, his name was dropped by radio and television writer Allen E. Sloane in HUAC testimony concerning an unnamed song lyricist who had “collaborated with Duke Ellington on very, very popular songs,” and who “if not a Commjunist, followed closer to it than anybody could by outright joining the party.”[44]

 

The third, and most interesting, reference was the inclusion of Ellington’s name, among hundreds of others, on a list of supporters of a 1950 document known as the Stockholm Peace Appeal.[45]  The appeal was simply a statement condemning the use of nuclear weapons:

 

 We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples.  We demand strict international control to enforce this measure.

 

We believe that any government which first uses atomic weapons against any other country whatsoever will be committing a crime against humanity and should be dealt with as a war criminal.[46]

 

Drafted in Stockholm in March, 1949, the document became the basis of a campaign launched by the World Peace Congress in April of that year.  The American Communist Party began a drive to collect five million signatures in support of the Stockholm Peace Pledge, including an intensive effort to garner the endorsement of prominent Blacks.  With the onset of the Korean War in June, 1950, the petition ran into frenzied opposition from the mass media.  The Black press joined the general orgy of redbaiting; an editorial from the Pittsburgh Courier was typical:

 

It is unfortunate, in the present frame of mind of most loyal Americans, that a number of Negroes could be induced to endorse this anti-American petition, and it is even more deplorable that a man of the stature of W.E.B. DuBois should agree to serve as head of the Peace Information Center and superintend the gathering of these signatures.

 

It is true that the overwhelming majority of the world’s people want peace, but they also want freedom; and most of those people able to think know that the peace desired by the USSR is that of the slave pen under the Red Flage…

 

Fortunately the loyalty of colored citizens is so well-known and well-established that a handful of Negro signers to a Moscow-inspired petition will not threaten race relations even   in a time of intense anti-Soviet feeling; but the appearance of widely-known Negro names among the signers is disquieting.[47]

 

The May 31, 1950, issue of the Daily Worker reported Duke Ellington’s endorsement of the Stockholm Peace Appeal and quoted him as saying, “It is quite unimaginable that people should think of using the A-bomb…  It is essential to defend peace.”[48] For some months previously, the Ellington Orchestra had toured Europe.  When he returned to the United States, Ellington denied the authenticity of both the signature and the quotation.  In an interview for a New York daily, he condemned

“Negro leaders …  who signed the World Peace Appeal and who urged their people to do likewise.” The enraged composer and bandleader blew up.  “I threw the guy out when he asked me to sign up.”

 

The record shows that Ellington has singularly avoided any tie-ups with Red-front organizations which often seek out big names as sponsors.  “I never allow these Communists to exploit me,” he said.[49]

 

Throughout the month of August, the Daily Worker continued to repeat its claim that Ellington had signed the petition, despite his denial and a threat to initiate a lawsuit against “those who are trying to defame my name and reputation.”  In its September 30, 1950, issue, the rightist New Leader rushed into print a cover story by Duke Ellington (most likely drafted by his brother-in-law, Daniel James), entitled “No Red Songs for Me.”  An editor’s preface to the article portrayed Ellington’s career as

 

 That of the pure artist, totally unconcerned with political—or even cultural or racial—movements of any kind.  It remained for the Communists to seize upon this utterly apolitical past, and to try to besmirch and exploit it for their own despicable ends.[50]

 

In September, the editorial commentary continued, both the Daily Worker and the literature of the Stockholm movement continued to list Ellington among the signatories.  A New Leader reporter, sent to the Peace Information Center in New York to inquire about the matter was allegedly told by the person in charge that “Using his name was an error on our part,” and that the names of signers received from Paris prior to the Center’s opening had not been checked for authenticity.  It was promised that Ellington’s name would be removed “after we use up the literature in print.”

 

Fulminating against the failure of the “Communist defamers” to correct their errors instantaneously, the editors expressed their sympathy for “the many artists, and others, who are being daily duped and exploited by the Communists and do not know how to fight back,” and hooped that Ellington’s article would “set the perfect example.”

 

According to Ellington’s own account of these events, in the spring of 1950, while in Stockholm, he received a proposed script from Orson Welles for a musical adaptation of Faust.  While in a private dining room of the Grand Hotel, he was interrupted during a work session by a student who asked, “if he could interest me in signing a paper.”  Annoyed, Ellington listened to the man explain that he wanted him to “join with millions of other people in opposing the atom bomb.”  Finding it ludicrous “that people signing a piece of paper could dictate to two nations who have atom bombs,” Ellington claimed that he asked the man to leave, never having seen a piece of paper to sign.  It was upon his return to the United States, he continued, that he first received word that his name was being used on the Stockholm propaganda.

 

What followed was not simply a denial of support for the Stockholm Peace petition, but a total repudiation of the social awareness that had informed his work for over twenty years:

 

 As anyone knows who has followed my career, movements of a political nature—Stockholm movements or Moscow movements—have never been a part of my life.

 

And I never sign petitions.  Not even petitions circulated by bona fide Negro organizations.  Such matters are just not in my line…

 

What burns me up, most of all, is that they have me leading “millions of Negroes” in this thing.  My answer to that is this:  I might be great, but I’m not that great.  I don’t lead anybody but myself.

 

The Communists make out a big case about the way Negroes are treated in America.  But…  there is somebody in every country whom somebody else doesn’t like. Every nation has its minority.  I, personally, fare far better as a member of my minority than any member of any other minority I’ve ever seen in any country.  And I’ve been around quite a few countries in my time, which goes back a long time.

 

Sure, the situation of the Negro isn’t what it should be.  I think I know that better than the Communists.  But the position of the Negro in America and the position of the Communists are no more related to each other than “The Blessed” and “The Damned.”

 

I’ve never been interested in politics in my whole life, and I don’t pretend to know anything about international affairs.  The only “communism” I know is that of Jesus Christ.  I don’t know any other.

 

As for war, during the last war I had a radio program every Saturday which sold bonds for the United States Treasury for the purpose of helping to defeat Germany, Japan and Italy.  In the next war—if there is one, God  

 

The issue of whether or not Ellington actually signed the Stockholm petition has long since been forgotten and, like the other phobias of its time, is of little importance.  What remains is a statement as self-abasing as any confession wrung by a congressional tribunal.  It clearly suggests that the political fear which seized the entire entertainment industry in the early 1950s was a factor in the decline of the Ellington organization.  At the very least, one must wonder how purely coincidental was the desertion, within a matter of months, of so many of his sidemen.

 

It might also be instructive to question the motives of those jazz critics who, for many years after this episode, attempted to destroy Ellington’s career.  It was a credit to Ellington’s courage that he persevered in spite of all the calumny, adding such modernists to the band as Paul Gonsalves, Clark Terry and Louis Bellson.  The jazz press, however, continually portrayed Ellington as a relic from the past.  In 1951 a Down Beat writer went so far as to call for Ellington’s retirement, and two years later Ralph Gleason lamented, “One of the favorite indoor sports of jazz aficionados in recent years has been to complain about the Ellington band.”[51]  In 1958 the influential French critic Andre Hodier judged Ellington to be “creatively dead,” and even as late as 1963 Gleason was able to point out “plenty of examples in jazz of educated and articulate cannibals whose main purpose regardless of their posture, is to chop down and devour great artists like Erroll Garner and Duke Ellington.”[52]

 

The African-American press, which for some years had cooled noticeably toward Ellington, suddenly erupted against him in the late fall of 1951.  A parade of shrill headlines, which continued for months, was initiated by the appearance of an interview with Ellington by Otis N. Thompson in the November 10 St. Louis Argus.  Thompson’s interview was titled “’We Ain’t Ready,’ Duke Declares,” and in the version circulated by the Associated Negro Press to Black papers around the country, is here reproduced:

 

Declaring with pointed emphasis, “We ain’t ready yet,” duke Ellington, world famed orchestra leader, declared last weekend that the fighting being carried on by some Negroes in an effort to gain integration is a “silly thing.”  Said the Duke, with reference to segregation, ”It’s something nothing can be done about.”

 

The remarks were made in Ellington’s dressing room backstage at Convention Hall [St. Louis] during the intermission at the matinee performance of the “Biggest Show of ’51.”  The Duke was approached for a statement about the incident in Atlanta when Negroes learned a few minutes before curtain time that they would have to use a side door to Municipal Auditorium there to see the “Big Show.”  Atlanta citizens were highly indignant and many walked away.

 

It was Ellington’s expressed opinion that “This thing about Negroes sitting anywhere they want to,” is so much bunk.  He used stronger language to get his point over and much of his suavity seen from an audience was lost as he intimated that Negroes knew the law and might as well stay in their place.

 

“What does it get us?”  If you go South, don’t you have to sit in the rear of the street car?”

 

According to Duke the fighting being carried on by some people is getting us nowhere.  He could see no particular progress over the last few years and question the “good it’s doing us” to get one or two people in a few white schools or certain jobs.

 

Several times during the conversation he referred to “those people” but would call no names.  He did mention the Richmond, Va., incident when the Richmond NAACP picketed the Mosque theatre where he played to a segregated audience.  The same thing happened to Marian Anderson and it was Duke’s impression that it didn’t make much sense in light of the fact that segregation laws existed there.

 

“Besides, who’s eligible to boycott Marian Anderson?” he asked.  As he prepared to return to the stage he said, “No, we ain’t ready yet…  Get together one hundred million dollars and then we can do something…”[53]

 

The newspaper which made the most noise of all was probably the Baltimore Afro-American, which levelled two blasts at Ellington in its issue of December 1, 1951.  The first of these, an editorial headlined “Duke Ellington’s Views on Jim Crow Shock Nation,” printed quotations from the Thompson interview and expressed disbelief that this was “the same Duke Ellington” who, on behalf of the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, had in 1944 described that evil as “the most important issue since Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.”  The article concluded that “the civil rights battle was getting “under [Ellington’s] skin,” that he had “deserted the ranks of those fighting for first class citizenship.”

 

On the same page appeared an article alleging that “in most cases when Duke ‘came to the aid of colored people’ through such organizations as the NAACP, it was Duke and not the NAACP or colored people who usually ended up with the most aid.”  Citing a benefit performance Ellington had given for the NAACP the previous January, the article labelled Ellington’s reported donation of $13,000 to the civil rights organization a lie:  the NAACP received only $1,500 after expenses, the story read, while Ellington received “a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of publicity and good will in the nation’s capital of show business.”  (In fact, a letter from Henry Lee Moon, NAACP Publicity Director, in the December 15, 1951 Afro-American, set the net profit of the organization at $3,129,89, to which Ellington promised an additional contribution of $3,000.)  Never before had such vile epithets been seen in print against Ellington:

 

…Since he is booked through a white agency, and most of the places in which he is booked are controlled by white people, he speaks like these white people want him to speak, without considering that what he might say may be like sticking a knife into the ribs of the colored people who made him.

 

And believe you me, colored people “made” all the top colored performers today, whether they will admit it or not

 

After reading Duke’s statement that “We aren’t ready,” one can only conclude that Duke, like so many others of our great artists, has succumbed to the theory that it is better to live on his knees in show business than to die on his feet in a job where he can work and maintain his self-respect and that of his people.

 

And like a dying man clutching at a straw, when he is told that his people are going on ahead without him if he clings to that theory, he stews in his own juice and cries: “We ain’t ready.”[54]

 

In the ensuing weeks, the Afro-American printed a deluge of correspondence from its readers denouncing Ellington.  Not until December 15, two weeks after the appearance of the original charges, did the paper give Ellington a chance to reply.  The rebuttal, in the form of an ANP release dated December 3, was run on the front page alongside a column giving the final word to Argus reporter Otis Thompson, who continued to insist upon the accuracy of the interview that started the furor.

 

In response to the “We ain’t ready” statement attributed to him, Ellington wrote, “I categorically deny having made any such statement,” and further asserted that “what has been published is the exact opposite of what I actually said.”  With reference to the NAACP boycott of Marian Andersson, he admitted having told Thompson

 

that I thought it was too bad that Southern colored people picketed only colored artists, but never protested when white artists came down to play to segregated audiences.  Since Southern colored people live in segregated conditions all year round, I continued, why do they wait for colored artists to come before putting on the demonstrations?

 

 

 

To the charge that he had called the civil rights movement “a silly thing,” and that “colored people were making no headway,” Ellington explained that he had meant “that colored people are not doing all they can to abolish segregation, and that much more can be done.”  He repeated his contention that “breaking down…  segregation is a full-time job” which “requires the full-time services of many more leaders than we have,” and that efforts ought to be made to amass a fund of 100 million dollars to sponsor “new legislation in every state” in order to abolish segregation.  Regarding the incident in Atlanta, Ellington insisted that legal contracts over which he had no control forced him to play to a segregated audience, and that “Refusal on my part to honor them…  would bring on suits for breach of contract, as well as other reprisals, the effect of which   would have been to put me out of the band business.”

 

While the accuracy of various points raised in his statement remains questionable, there is no doubt that Ellington felt deeply wounded by the allegation that he had turned his back upon Black people.  With genuine indignation he concluded,

First, it saddens me that the AFRO, with which I have always had friendly relations, did not accord me the courtesy of trying to get in touch with me or with any of my representatives, to check the facts or ask me for a statement of any kind…

 

Second, it saddens me also that people have rushed into print with things that conflict with my whole past record.  In my nearly thirty years in public life, no one has ever impugned my devotion to the fight for first-class citizenship.

 

Even my critics admit that I have given generously of my time, energy and talents to that fight.  If they think I have now gone back on all that, they don’t know me.  I am not the sort who makes speeches—or even statements of this kind.  Instead, as always, I stand on what I have done and will continue to do.

 

The public can rest assured that Duke Ellington, and every member of his organization, will always be in the forefront of any effort to combat segregation or any other form of racial or human injustice in the North or the South, in America or in any other country.[55]

 

The significance of this episode lies not in whether Ellington actually made the statements attributed to him, or even in what he may have meant by them if he were quoted accurately.  It is entirely possible that Ellington, momentarily angered by what he considered recklessness on the part of civil rights groups, would have expressed such sentiments.  Certainly, they were compatible with his aristocratic temperament and an archaic political philosophy which distrusted mass movements of any kind, particularly when they interfered with his ability to earn a living.  His attitude was clearly that of another, older generation of African-Americans, and it was perhaps for this reason that he had fallen out of favor with those who were pursuing the strategy of direct action.

 

In fairness to Ellington, it must be admitted that singling him out in such a fashion for a few off-the-cuff remarks he had made during an intermission, was an act of demagoguery and political opportunism.  It was the height of hypocrisy for Claude Barnett, the man responsible for publicizing the “we ain’t ready” story in the first place, to send a letter of consolation to Ellington:

 

Dear Duke:

 

Permit me to congratulate you upon your statement.  It was a clear, reasonable and effective document.

 

The position of the artist who finds himself hoisted upon the petard of the enthusiastic supporters of “down with segregation” is unfortunate.  He does not want segregation any more than those who howl do.  Indeed many of them have been entirely content with their lot in the past and don’t stop to try to work out some reasonable plan which will salvage the dignity of the artist and protect him financially as well.

 

I am glad you sent us the statement and we did the best we could by it.[56]

 

It would be years before the official representatives of African-American society would attempt a reconciliation with Ellington, and never again would there be the sort of cordiality that characterized his relations with the Black press in the 1930s.  The Claude Barnett file, in the archives of the Chicago Historical Society contains no further correspondence with Ellington after 1951.

 

In any event, the climb upward from this low point in his career was long and arduous.  Happily, 1952 marked the silver jubilee of Ellington’s show-business career, and many tributes from the entertainment world were soon forthcoming.  Early that year at Chicago’s Regal Theatre a committee of distinguished Americans honored him for his “outstanding contribution to world culture” and “significant worth to and championship of his race.”  Ellington was presented with a silver cigarette case inscribed with the names of Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Lena Horne, Nat “King” Cole, Mahalia Jackson, Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine, which was presented on behalf of the committee by Alfred A. Duckett, the former Chicago Defender music critic who was now the managing editor of Tan Confessions.[57]

 

The November 5 issue of Down Beat, devoted to the celebration of Ellington’s twenty-five years in the band profession, included articles by Billy Strayhorn, Leonard Feather, Irving Mills, Ned Williams and Ellington himself, each reminiscing upon some aspect of the maestro’s past glory.  It was, by and large, a rather routine show-business salute; the names of numerous celebrities appeared along with their favorites among Ellington’s records, and the entire issue had something of the quality of an obituary   for a famous person.

 

In December, another Duke Ellington salute was held in Chicago.  He received an award from the National University of Music, which established a scholarship in his name.  The festivities included a luncheon at the Johnson Publishing Company, which honored Ellington with lifetime subscriptions to Jet and Ebony, and a Silver Jubilee party held on the city’s West Side.[58]

 

To week television series starring Sarah Vaughan, he became embroiled in a battle with network executives over issues of what he called “independence” and “freedom from censorship,” forcing the cancellation of his plans for a television musical and an all-Negro revue.[59]

 

The early 1950s were also years of management conflicts, particularly with Norman Granz, with whom Ellington had never been on the best of terms.  Recording contracts were obtained with considerable difficulty and the various labels on which the orchestra recorded sometimes demanded stipulations to which Ellington was unaccustomed, concerning the type of music to be played.  After the expiration of his contract with Victor in 1945, Ellington recorded for a short period with the small label Musicraft (when the company folded, Ellington, as a major investor, lost a considerable sum of money), and with Mercer Records, a disastrous venture owned jointly by his son Mercer and Leonard Feather.  In Mercer’s opinion, “Having gone into the record business as a competitor with the majors didn’t do Ellington any good, and it was some time before he got back into their good graces.”[60]

 

 The Duke Ellington Orchestra was virtually the sole survivor of the trend in jazz that decimated that decimated the 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]