Duke (7 page)

In addition to pampering him, Daisy and J.E., whose own father was a mulatto, gave him the medium-light brown skin that was one of his most recognizable features. In 1944 a reporter for
The New Yorker,
whose editors were sticklers for exactitude, described his color as that of “coffee with a strong dash of cream,” the same shade favored by the hoity-toity Washingtonians of Langston Hughes’s acquaintance. Ellington insisted that there was never “any talk about red people, brown people, black people, or yellow people, or about the differences that existed between them,” in the family home. Such things, however, need not be discussed openly to be understood tacitly. Ellington’s wife and the other women with whom he had long-term romantic relationships were all, like his mother, light-skinned or white, a circumstance unlikely to have been coincidental, any more than it was a coincidence that his closest black friends in later life (as well as most of the few musicians in his band with whom he socialized) tended to be members of his own class.
^‡

Ellington spoke of the “wonderful feeling of security” that he drew from his childhood churchgoing, specifically mentioning it in connection with the way in which Daisy’s praise had caused him to see himself as “very, very special.” He went so far as to say that her belief in his uniqueness had made him fearless, which is absurd: He was a quivering mass of arbitrary, sometimes bizarre superstitions. Mercer believed that they stemmed from his having been overprotected as a boy, which makes sense. Yet it’s just as plain to see that the confident carriage of his maturity was the result of Daisy’s belief that he was born to higher things, and it probably also had something to do with the extent to which his parents had shielded him from life outside the invisible walls of U Street. The Ellingtons, Ruth said, did not discuss “hostile [racial] incidents” in front of their children. “I guess,” she added, “that was their way of protecting us.” Duke’s small world may have been less secure than he admitted—Washington city directories show that his family lived at fourteen different addresses between 1898 and 1921, an indication that J.E.’s fortunes fluctuated erratically—but he does not seem to have learned until later on what less privileged black children knew from the start of their young lives, which was that the color of their skin was enough in and of itself to get them killed, mutilated, or thrown in jail.

Instead of worrying about getting lynched, Duke played with his friends, read Sherlock Holmes and Horatio Alger, sang hymns in church every Sunday morning, and started taking piano lessons at the age of seven from a neighborhood teacher with the splendidly Trollopian name of Marietta Clinkscales. Within a few months, though, he lost interest in music and stopped playing altogether, later telling Barry Ulanov that what little he had learned “slipped away” from him. He was more interested in sports. For a brief time he sold refreshments at the city ballpark in order to watch the Washington Senators play, though he also cultivated a different aptitude: “All through grade school, I had a genuine interest in drawing and painting, and I realized I had a sort of talent for them. My mother and father both encouraged me, and the piano was allowed to fade into the background.”

The piano stayed in the background until the summer of 1913, when Duke went to New Jersey “to get out and try my wings.” He assumed that it would be easy for him to find work, but it wasn’t, and he spent the whole summer washing dishes in a hotel. Though he hated the job, he loved the money he made: “I went back home, not as a penitent, prodigal son, but as a young man on his own with a supply of good clothes and some money saved up.” It was there, too, that he first heard ragtime piano, in the form of a piano-roll version of Luckey Roberts’s “Junk Man Rag” cut by a Philadelphia-based musician named Harvey Brooks. As much as Duke loved money and clothes, he loved “Junk Man Rag” more. “I cannot tell you what that music did to me,” he said. “It was different from the average piano selection. The individuality of the man showed itself in the composition as he played it. I said right then, ‘[T]hat’s how I would like to play a piano, so without being told, everybody would know I was playing.’”

Duke stopped off in Philadelphia on the way home and tracked down Brooks, who shared a few of his “short cuts . . . to successful playing.” Then the awestruck boy returned to Washington, opened up the family piano for the first time in seven years, and started trying to play what he had heard. All at once the passion that Mrs. Clinkscales had been unable to rouse burst into full flower. “I hadn’t been able to get off the ground before,” he wrote long afterward, “but after hearing [Brooks] I said to myself, ‘Man, you’re just going to
have
to do it.’” Soon he started hanging out at Frank Holliday’s poolroom, located next door to the Howard Theatre on T Street, a few short blocks from Ellington’s home. Washington’s ragtime pianists gathered there, and Duke spent hours standing next to the house piano, listening to their varied styles and trying to learn from their example. “It wasn’t very long,” he remembered, “before I could hear a tune and after a few moments I could reproduce it, often adding different variations. Soon I began to play for small dances and house parties.”

Why had Mrs. Clinkscales’s lessons failed to pique the interest of a child who was so sensitive to music that hearing it made him weep? “There was no connection between me and music, until I started fiddling with it myself,” he explained. “As far as anyone teaching me, there was too many rules and regulations, and I just couldn’t be shackled into that. As long as I could sit down and figure it out for myself, then that was all right.” Very likely it was as simple as that: Then and thereafter, Daisy Ellington’s spoiled child would try to do things his way or not at all.

By 1913 the ragtime craze that had swept across the country for a decade and a half was starting to die down, but it had already left its mark on American music. Raglike songs were first published in 1895, and the popularity of Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” which followed in 1899, triggered worldwide interest in the music on which they were based. Even classical composers like Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky turned out pieces that incorporated the heavy melodic syncopation and marchlike “oompah” beat of ragtime. It was a fad, but one with lasting effects: Orchestrated versions of Joplin’s rags soon made their way to New Orleans, where they were taken up by dance bands whose players loosened up their off-center rhythms and seasoned them with the blues, an amalgam that evolved into the music that by 1913 was starting to be called “jazz” (if not in New Orleans, whose musicians stuck to the word
ragtime
for some years to come). Meanwhile, Irving Berlin had written “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in 1911, and the song’s phenomenal popularity helped spread the gospel of ragtime to whites who, following the lead of Vernon and Irene Castle, started one-stepping their way across America’s dance floors. “In 1912 grandmothers of forty tossed away their crutches and took lessons in Tango and the Castle-Walk,” F. Scott Fitzgerald recalled two decades later in “Echoes of the Jazz Age.” The music to which they danced was much the same kind that had sent young Duke Ellington running to the parlor piano.

Much the same—but not exactly. In 1913 a group of East Coast pianists, the best known of whom were Eubie Blake, James P. Johnson, Luckey Roberts, and Willie “the Lion” Smith, was transforming classic ragtime into a more virtuosic style, one that replaced the evenly divided eighth and sixteenth notes of Joplin and his contemporaries with the fluid, tripletized rhythms that would soon be recognized as the trademark of jazz. The fast-moving, wider-ranging accompanying patterns that these men played with their left hands, in which fat midrange chords alternated metronomically with bass notes that dug deeply into the bottom half of the keyboard, caused their style to be dubbed “stride piano.” Some were classically trained, while others were self-taught “ear men” who, unable to read music, worked out their styles by ear. None of them was familiar with New Orleans jazz, which had yet to make its way to the East Coast, and so their playing, heard on record today, has a slight rhythmic stiffness reminiscent of the classic ragtime on which it is based. But it was still different from anything else that the fourteen-year-old Ellington had heard, and he was so transfixed by it that he composed a rag of his own in the spring of 1914, piecing it together note by note at the keyboard. He had a part-time job jerking sodas at a place called the Poodle Dog Café, so he called it “Soda Fountain Rag.”

Not until later did Ellington learn the rudiments of musical notation, and he never wrote down “Soda Fountain Rag” as an adult.
^§
He did, however, play it in public on several occasions, and a few of these performances were recorded, giving us some sense of what the piece may have sounded like when it was new. It’s a pastiche of the musical devices heard in the rags then being released on player-piano rolls, unoriginal but assembled with surprising competence, though the left-hand stride patterns often go askew (Ellington’s right hand was more exact than his left). If the recorded versions of “Soda Fountain Rag” that have come down to us are representative of the piece that he wrote in 1914, less than a year after he first heard Harvey Brooks, then it is impressive how rapidly he assimilated the fundamentals of ragtime piano.

In those days it was common for middle-class black parents to react with horror if their children took an interest in ragtime. Not J.E. As Ellington recalled, “My father said something about playing that old ragtime music, or something like that, but I never had no real resistance against what I was doing.” The difference, however, may have been that Duke—or his parents—saw music as a hobby, not a vocation. Instead of enrolling in Dunbar High School, which had a good music department, he went instead to Samuel H. Armstrong Technical High School, a vocational school for blacks that had opened in 1902, where he studied to become a commercial artist. Armstrong was several notches lower than Dunbar on black Washington’s totem pole of caste, and its students, according to Mercer Ellington, were “practically regarded as incorrigible.” But Duke had talent as an artist, enough to win an NAACP-sponsored scholarship to New York’s Pratt Institute. “What I was getting out of music then seemed like a gift or a bonus,” he said, “and I didn’t realize that that was where my future lay.” At that point, though, it was the present that mattered more. In 1916 he played his first professional gig, and soon he was getting enough work to make him think twice about becoming a full-time artist. He decided that it made more sense to divide his time between playing music and painting signs, with the emphasis increasingly going to music.

That left no time for homework, and Duke’s grades at Armstrong were fair to poor (average in English, history, and math, much worse in the sciences and—interestingly—music). Somewhere along the way his sense of destiny became so strong that he decided to stop wasting his time on formal studies of any kind. Bernice Wiggins, his first cousin, later spoke of a visit to the Ellington home during which he unveiled his rosy vision of the future to his mother:

I never will forget . . . he came in one evening and he said, “Mother, dear,” and she turned around and looked at him and he always would come in and kiss her on both side of the cheeks and she says, “What have you been up to today?” as a mother would. He said, “Mother, your son is going to be one of the great musicians in the world.” He says, “Someday . . . I’m gonna be bowin’ before the kings and queens.” And Aunt Daisy used to say, “The boy’s talking foolish.”

But Daisy was probably too busy caring for Ruth, her second child, who was born in 1915, to worry overmuch about Duke’s future, and in any case she seems never to have swerved at any time from the iron conviction that her precious little son, being blessed, would succeed at whatever he put his mind to doing. So he was left to his own devices, and in February of 1917 he dropped out of school, never to return.

The patterns of Ellington’s life and personality were now set, and they bore a family resemblance to the shape of life on U Street. The hours that he had spent rubbing shoulders with ragtime pianists, Pullman porters, petty thieves, and card sharps in Frank Holliday’s poolroom had introduced him to a way of living far removed from the middle-class world into which he had been born. To the end of his life he recalled with relish the lessons he learned there: “Interns used to come in, who could cure colds. And handwriting experts who would enjoy copying somebody’s signature on a check, go out and
cash
it, and bring back the money to show the cats in the poolroom what
artists
they were. They didn’t need the money. They did it for the kicks. . . . At heart, they were all great artists.”

Yet Ellington never turned his back on the other lessons that he learned from J.E., Daisy, and their neighbors. He regarded them as identically valid, just as he learned as much from listening to “the schooled musicians who had been to the conservatory” as he did from the untrained pianists whose methods he emulated: “Everybody seemed to get something out of the other’s playing—the ear cats loved what the schooled guys did, and the schooled guys, with fascination, would try what the ear cats were doing.” It did not occur to him that his own elegant carriage was inconsistent with his racial identity, any more than that the authenticity of his music might somehow be compromised by its urbanity. That, he knew, bespoke a constrictingly narrow notion of “blackness.” He took seriously the code of bourgeois manners to which his parents had introduced him, and though he shook off its tenets in adulthood, there was never a time when he failed to maintain the appearance of respectability. Throughout his life he pointed out that Harlem “has always had more churches than cabarets.” Moreover, the composer of
Black, Brown and Beige
needed no one to remind him that his people came in all shades. “Once I asked him what he considered a typical Negro piece among his compositions,” a white friend recalled. “He paused a moment before he came up with ‘In a Sentimental Mood.’ I protested a bit and said I thought that was a very sophisticated white kind of song and people were usually surprised when they learned it was by him. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s because you don’t
know
what it’s like to be a Negro.’” At no time did he question his own knowledge of what it was like, or his ability to turn that knowledge into music that gave voice to his people’s anguish—and aspiration.