Mercer Ellington became, in 1979, one of my staunchest allies. Research led me to an interview with him between sets at a performance at the ParkWest, on the North Side of Chicago. I felt it had been a good interview (it later became an appendix to my thesis), but I had a stroke of good luck that night: A man who had overheard the conversation approached me and offer to sell his Ellington record collection at a very tempting price. I wound up buying only half of it, and I chose to take the oldies from before the Second World War. One of my purchases was a three-record Columbia box set called The Ellington Era. It was a compilation of the work Ellington had recorded for the label, and it became the cornerstone of my record collection. It also contained a beautiful booklet with fine essays by Stanley Dance and Leonard Feather.
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| Cootie Williams |
Printed below is a transcript of an interview with Mercer Ellington I conducted on 22 July, 1979, at the Four Seasons nightclub on the North Side of Chicago. He opened many doors for me in the 1980s and ‘90s, and I visited him whenever the Duke Ellington Orchestra played in the Chicago area, and a couple of times at his apartment in New York.
I want to ask you about your father's relationship with Irving Mills. The credit on the compositions that Mills took: Were they always given rightfully to Mills?
Well, it was the practice of publishers in those days. If they were somewhere, as Duke Ellington said, and you wanted to get somewhere, you had to make a deal with somebody to get your first tunes out. Today it hasn't changed too much. You get paid for yesterday's ball game. You write your song last year, and then they recognize you as a great composer this year, and that's when you get an advance on what you want to do.
I know your father never said anything publicly against Mills. Did you ever hear him say anything in private?
My feeling is that his relationship with Sidney [Mills, Irving's son] and to Irving was that it was a great place to get an education. Actually, he learned two things-- well, many things, I guess-- while he was growing up in music. And one of them was the business end he learned from Irving, and also many rules of being a showman, and so forth.
I know that many times in the Black press he was criticized for his relationship with Mills. Did that bother him at all?
Well, he was criticized for other things than that in the Black Press. In many cases, whatever was said was generally taken out of context. At one point, he made a statement that said, "We ain't ready," and they said that Duke Ellington thought that Negroes-- or Blacks as the new expression is-- just weren't intelligent enough to get freedom. What he meant was that they weren't financially strong enough to take their legal suits up to the Supreme Court. Never took but that part of the one question, made a whole big deal out of it, and it took them maybe a year and a half to get over the propaganda. I'm not saying this to deride the Black press, or any other press. But, I mean, you're going to get hustlers, regardless of whether it's the white press or the Black press. Somebody that has no name, and he tricks on a giant to get himself into the limelight. And I think this is what happened in most of these instances. Through the years, some fifty years of being on the road, I don't think you can grab anybody who's really worth his salt in the industry to come up and really say something that's derogatory about Ellington or his thoughts.
What were his reasons, as far as you know, for leaving Mills and going with William Morris in 1939?
He grew up! I mean he decided... You have it today. You get a group like the Beatles, or whoever; they get to a point where they can sell millions of records. They buy their own contracts back, and they go on their own. And that's precisely just about what happened in those days.You see, it wasn't always a one hundred per cent deal. Pop owned fifty per cent of Mills Music, and Mills owned fifty per cent of Duke Ellington's band. At a time when both of them were apparently equal, they traded. That's pretty much that the relation grew. And at the time when he was passing away, they had a conversation with each other for about forty-five minutes. So if you think that there'd be a time when he'd have negative thoughts about Irving, it would have been at the end of his life, particularly since he knew it was.
I know that on the publication of his autobiography, it's said by one of your father's biographers, that Mills was calling up your father's friends, anxious about what your father would say about him.
Well, you have to bear in mind that Mills, Irving, was as much of a genius in his field as Ellington was in music. When that band traveled in those days, he'd get to a place; the college band would be there to greet the train. They'd march him around to the hotel. That alone gave him a new importance, of being in a spot where people would say, "I've got to go to the dance tonight, or whatever. Irving was responsible for his being in the Cotton Club, which was the break place of one of the new babies, radio. And, as a result, at a time when everybody else was practically unknown-- and there were great orchestras like Fletcher Henderson, and the rest of them-- he was being broadcast coast to coast and gaining tremendous recognition from it.
I get the impression that your father was very much concerned with his public image. Can you say anything about the role of Ned Williams and Joe Morgen in promoting him and putting this image forward?
My father had great respect for people who might be classified as "carney men." You know, a person who could take something and then ballyhoo it and make it so very important. And for this reason, this is one of the things that made him have such respect for Irving, as well, and also for anyone else who proclaimed to the public that this was a great man coming before it. With each of these people, he admired the fact that they were almost as much ham as he was!
Was Cress Courtney also important in that respect?
Absolutely. I'll tell you one of the things he really appreciated in Mills, Cress Courtney, and also William Morris. In those days, they had a tendency to categorize show-business. I mean, for instance, you've got people who make the great breakthroughs, you've got Black millionaires like James Brown and so forth. But in those days, you just didn't get that price, and Irving was one of the first to demand that he get the same consideration as the big white acts. The same thing with Cress Courtney. Cress Courtney came on the scene and doubled and tripled the money that he made in one-nighters. As time went on,, it put him on a level in show business he wouldn't normally have gotten to.
I want to take you back to the year 1943, which was the year of his first Carnegie Hall Concert.
Presentation of Black, Brown and Beige?
Right. It was a benefit for the Russian War Relief. To your recollection, can you remember any of the names of those people who were on that Committee? I've had trouble finding out exactly who was the Russian War Relief.
I'm glad you told me who the people were who sponsored it!
Okay, back a little further to Jump for Joy in 1941. Did your father have any association with any kind of radicalism in Hollywood in those days?
Well, there was plenty of it there, particularly Communism. As a result of Jump for Joy, they considered the show-not necessarily Duke Ellington, but the show-a pretty radical experience, because they had numbers in there like "I Need a Passport from Georgia," and "Jump for Joy" itself derided the South for many things that happened there. Like they were talking about Uncle Tom's Cabin and how things have changed, and they'd made it a drive-in. There were many outspoken comments about the disadvantage of being in the South for Blacks. During the run of the show, and I was there, we had something like five or six bomb threats from people who threatened to do something or harm people in the show. When it closed, it closed to a standing-room. only house.
Yet you say in your book that your father was very much anticommunist. Did he have any kind of mixed feelings about Paul Robeson, for example?
No. You know why he was anticommunist? Because he was so religious, and anything that downed religion had to be wrong. And I have no way to feel that that was not a correct way of thinking. Aside fro that, he liked the idea of one day becoming rich, he hoped. He liked the idea-- that as a young man, he went in the back door of the White House to visit his father; eventually, he was invited in the front door. So he liked the idea of being someplace where this was possible, where he could have the opportunities to achieve it. I think particularly, after our tour in Russia-- though he never made a comment about it-- he felt that the day we arrived in Copenhagen, it was the greatest was a breath of fresh air that he'd had in a long time.
I know that on his tours, and at other times in his life, he was always put in the position of having to defend the United States' policy toward Black people. Did he ever fell the government was using him, in Dakar or other places on his tours would talk to him about it?
I figure-- I feel the same way. When we went to Black countries, he was being used as a diplomat, to cement social relations. When we were sent to Iron Curtain countries, we were sent there to counteract the propaganda that the Black man in the United States was downtrodden. And it was an after-example of how a person could be Black and could still become successful, and also to show that there was more than one type of person, and that not everybody who's a Black who got up there on a soapbox and made speeches on adamancy and militancy; but there was somebody who could be genteel and still persuasive.
But that patriotism of his, you feel, was really heartfelt, was a hundred per cent?
Yes. But he was an objective person. I mean that he knew that some time or other, when he was on a Pullman in the South, someone was liable to call him "George" or something like that, and he'd get very angry about it. But by the same token, he also could be heard in conversation to admire the South for its frankness, because in the North there was an equal feeling which was always underlined, and you never knew if you were or weren't in the presence of it. So it was a thing that was with us then, and in a sense it's with us now.
Did he feel kind of caught by surprise by what was happening in the'60s in this country, with the freedom-rides and the sit-ins? Did he feel out of his element?
No, it isn't that. He became very careful, because I think the most trouble he ever got into racially came as a result of the discussion he had with his own people, the very incident I was telling you about: he made the statement that Blacks weren't ready. So he felt that if he made4 normal, general statements-- there's no words. If you look at articles and interviews that he had, I'd say, easily some thirty years before he passed away, you'll find that it's very difficult to take things out of context and turn them into a negative capacity. I think this is what he had in mind more than anything else, when he went through interviews, unless he felt he was being interviews by a person who had great intelligence and great respect for him.
Was that another factor in his break with Mills, perhaps? I've noted in some of my reading that a friend of his, Edmund Anderson, was pressuring him to go onto the concert stage, and that Mills was holding him back, and was not too keen on his making a "social significance thrust," in your father's own words.
Well, Edmund Anderson, I think, has a tendency to pour lustre on himself by stating that he was so close to Ellington in certain relationships, which he wasn't. I mean, he was associated with him, and Ellington had a friendly attitude toward him. As far as knowing about him inside and personally, he knew nothing. This goes for many people who have written books about Ellington. It went for a book that was written several years back, one of the first biographies that was made. It was Barry Ulanov who wrote the book. And Barry professed the knowledge of Ellington from the inside, and put things in the book that he expressly did not want to be there, and also some things that were not true. One f the guys who made a very derogatory comment about my book, and stated that he knew Duke Ellington better than I do: the only one somebody could have done that was to have slept with him, and he was not one of his women!
In 1965, of course, the Pulitzer Prize Committee rejected you father's nomination for an award in music. I realize, by his public statements, he kind of tossed it off. Did he feel that rejection very deeply? Was it a very important award to him?
No, I don't think so. Of course he would love to have been presented the Pulitzer Prize. But it didn't enrage him nearly as much as the early years when Howard University turned down an honorary degree to him.
I note they didn't give him a degree until 1971, well after all the white universities.
Right. And in those days, it had been successive at each year that he deserved it, and all those years they turned it down.
Among all those hundreds of awards that he got, which ones would you say he considered the most important?
The Legion of Honor from France. The Spingarn medal. And also the medal that he got from the White House.
You mention in your book that there was a kind of paranoia about the man. You recall, I think it was the term you used, communists or homosexuals, or or whoever was trying to get in the way of his career. Was this something that grew more pronounced late in his life, or do you feel he felt from even his early career that there were conspiracies?
I think it became more pronounced in his life, as it probably is developing in me at this point! I know what it is, and I think we all go through it, whoever's in entertainment. Sometimes maybe it's because you want to rationalize to yourself why you're not making as much progress as you think you should. Or because there are certain breakthroughs that you don't achieve, because you're too knowledgeable. You don't give up what you'd give up as a novice, and as a result, you don't get that much push behind you by certain people who have better interest. We fought for years to own the name of Duke Ellington, Incorporated. To own it completely, and of course we do. The idea is, if I went out and made a deal with somebody for fifty per cent that I'd be getting then would be much more than I'm making now! But somehow there's a pride or a tradition that you want to hold to. It's like a man who starts a department store: he doesn't want his children after him to take the department store and sell it out and sell him down the river. It took him years to build it, and why give it away? I think it's this knowledge. It's like, the worst person to put in the army is the guy who's been there for twenty years and goes out and comes back because he knows too much about how to get around and catch up with who's doing wrong, and so forth. So as a result, many times you have a person who is, like they say, too smart for himself, because he doesn't take chances or he wants absolute guarantees before he moves a foot; and as a result, if you can't take a chance on yourself, a lot of people don't feel like they should take a chance on you, either.
But I realize that the great part of entertainment now is investment. I mean, a new star is created because three or four big people get together and they say, "Okay, let's put up $200,000 apiece to promote this name, because there's a great talent." If you're coming along, and you don't have that kind of promotion, you're working at a disadvantage. so, basically, this is not what I refer to when I say that it's a matter of conspiracy. But I'll always remember, in some religious material somewhere along the line, it says you have to watch out for the fallen enemies of your father who got back up, and these are the people I face from day to day.
In your capacity as band manager while your father was still alive, you seemed to really emphasize the discord within the orchestra. Do you feel that that was exaggerated, or was there really quite a falling out?
Just like I mentioned, Cootie Williams and Cat Anderson: we'd call them bookends, because they kept their backs toward each other during performances and never spoke a word to each other when they came off. They just hated each other's guts, and there were several people in the band who really did not like Ellington himself. They hated each other, but they had to admire the talent that existed in the person who sat next to them. The reason I don't go further on that subject about the dislikes and likes of who was involved, is because many of those people are alive. Cat and Cootie, I mean, I'm close to, so I can talk about them if I want to. It's like family. But some of the other guys, they're around, and you just don't do it.
But somewhere along the line in the history of the band, it just ceased to be a cooperative venture, where everybody was in it together?
It's a troupe of ballerinas. Each one is born to be her own star. And in this thing, they feel it's temporary in order to coexist. But each one has in mind becoming his own individual talent. And I think, as the years went by, instead of the camaraderie developing because they stayed with Ellington so long, they had passed by their own opportunities, and they blamed it on him, and detested him for keeping them there.
Yet when they left the band, they rarely found themselves admired as they were when they were in the band.
Yes. It was a platform he'd prepared for them.
One final question I want to ask you, regarding publishers from the '40s onward. Tempo music in 1940, is that right?
Yes, Actually, Duke Ellington set the company and gave it to her [Ruth Ellington, his sister] to run, because the company would never have gotten to first base, if it didn't have the band as a vehicle to come up with the hits. And almost immediately, one year, Tempo broke through with three big hits in a row: "Perdido,' "Take the 'A' Train," and "Flamingo."At the same time, he was being published by
Robbins, right?
No, the Robbins contract had ceased by that point.
I see. So, it was Tempo all through the '40s and 50s?
Yes, and once in a while, he'd make a separate deal with someone, like something special he might record, and do a song and share the rights with. Somebody like [Sid] Kuller. or maybe Johnny Mercer, or whatever, and once in a while you'd see that. But there had to be something very special about it.
But basically, ever since 1940, it's been Tempo, unless he went outside with a collaborator?
Yes. He felt he didn't get any promotion unless he did it himself, so why give to somebody else what yourself?
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