Duke (8 page)

2

“SOFT AND GUT-BUCKET”

Becoming a Professional, 1917–1926

O
NE OF DUKE
Ellington’s favorite sayings was that luck amounts to “being at the right place at the right time, doing the right thing before the right people. If all four ‘rights’ are in good order, you may count yourself lucky.” He was unusually lucky, then, to have launched his musical career in the same month that the Original Dixieland Jazz Band made its New York debut. Until then New Orleans jazz was essentially unknown outside of the city of its birth and Chicago, where the five players who comprised the ODJB had caused a stir the preceding March. It was, however, nothing compared to the one that greeted their opening at Reisenweber’s 400 Club Room on January 27, 1917. Within hours the word was out that something very new and very hot had come to town, and the quintet’s first Victor recordings, cut on February 26 and rushed into print nine days later, introduced a generation of listeners—and musicians—to the raucous music that would give a name to the coming decade. Other jazzlike music had previously been recorded, but “Livery Stable Blues” and “Dixie Jass Band One-Step” were among the first 78 sides to be cut by jazz musicians from New Orleans, as well as the first whose label described them as jazz (or, rather, “jass”). Newspaper ads in New Orleans called the combined results “positively the greatest dance record ever issued,” and purchasers throughout the country agreed: Victor 18255 is believed to have been one of the earliest popular records to sell a million copies. Its success put an end to what was left of the ragtime craze, for other bands rushed to record in a similar style, and their music became the gold standard in dance halls across America. The Jazz Age had arrived.

Two and a half years later, a promising young bandleader who had served his apprenticeship as a sideman placed an ad in the Washington phone book:

IRRESISTIBLE JASS

FURNISHED TO OUR SELECT PATRONS

The Duke’s Serenaders

COLORED SYNCOPATERS

E.K. ELLINGTON, Mgr.

“Irresistible jass”: The Duke’s Serenaders, c. 1920. Sonny Greer is the drummer, Sterling Conaway the banjo player. The fledgling bandleader specialized in “under-conversation music,” not full-fledged jazz, but few Washingtonians knew the difference, and Ellington profited handsomely from their ignorance

Not that E.K. Ellington, Mgr., was anything like a fully grown jazzman in 1919. Few East Coast musicians were—even the best of the stride pianists were still feeling their way into the new rhythmic language of jazz—and it was not until 1923 that Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet started making the records that taught their contemporaries how to swing. Ellington was a mere purveyor of jazz-scented dance music that was played at parties, some black and others white, by bands that he led or booked. He later described what they played as “under-conversation music,” which sounds about right. Nor were his early clients discriminating about the songs to which they chatted and danced:

All the embassies and big shots in Washington were hiring small bands to play for parties. It didn’t seem to make much difference what band—they just hired a band. . . . I went down to the telephone office and arranged for a Music-for-All-Occasions ad in the telephone book. It was during the war, and there were a lot of people from out of town, war workers, who didn’t know Meyer Davis and Louis Thomas from Duke Ellington. My ad looked just like theirs, and I began to get work. And give it. It got so that I would sometimes send out four or five bands a night, and work in them, too.

Meyer Davis, Ellington’s chief competitor, had just launched his own long career as a society bandleader specializing in “music for exclusive and smart parties.” Like Davis, Ellington made a handsome living dishing out the unexceptionably bland commodity that was (and is) society-band music. In 1966 he told an interviewer that he had brought in $10,000 a year, the equivalent of $123,000 today. “Well, he picked up the piano by ear and now he’s making more money than I am,” J.E. boasted. His son may have been stretching the truth, and part of that sum came from the sign-painting business that he had launched around the time that he became a professional musician: “When customers came for posters to advertise a dance, I would ask them what they were doing about their music. When they wanted to hire a band, I would ask them who’s painting their signs.” But he was still doing well for himself—and for his wife and son.

We know little about Edna Thompson, whom Duke married in 1918 and from whom he parted a decade later. She was interviewed only once, for a profile published in
Ebony
seven years before her death in 1966 in which she spoke tactfully but, it appears, truthfully about their life together. They fell in love, she said, in high school, at a time when he had “just learned the difference between girls and boys.” She played piano herself and wanted to become a music teacher, and she claimed to have taught her dashing boyfriend “how to read music.” Judging by her pictures, Edna was both fair-skinned and pretty. According to Mercer Ellington, “My mother’s folks were from a higher station of black society than my father’s. They were schoolteachers and principals, and they considered all musicians, including Duke Ellington, low-life.” Mercer thought that they would not have married had she not become pregnant. But the children of U Street were taught to do the right thing, so Edna and Edward were wed on July 2, 1918, with the birth of Mercer Kennedy Ellington following eight months later. In 1959 Edna spoke of the early months of their marriage as “hard days.” In addition to painting signs and playing piano with other men’s bands, her new husband was moonlighting as a messenger for the Treasury Department. But like many another teenage father, he was brought up short by what he later called the “tremendous responsibilities” of parenthood. He placed his first ad three months after Mercer was born, and soon he was making enough money to buy a house and a car.

“I’m still hooked”: Edna Thompson, taken around the time that she married Duke Ellington in 1918. Though he left her for good a decade later, the unhappy couple remained legally married for the rest of Edna’s life

Ellington never spoke about Edna to reporters, nor did he publicly acknowledge that they did not divorce after separating. It was not until the
Ebony
interview that most of his later fans became aware of his wife’s existence, and all that she said at the time about their decision to remain legally married was, “I’m still hooked on Ellington. . . . I don’t want a divorce and neither does he.” He must have found it handy to use her existence as an excuse not to marry any of his later girlfriends, though it seems at least as likely that his philandering started early in their marriage. He claimed to have lost his virginity at the age of twelve, and his interest in women grew stronger as he grew older. “I think that what put him into show business in the first place, more than anything else, was that it was a good way to get a girl to sit beside you and admire you as you played the piano,” Mercer wrote in 1978.
^¶
But Ellington’s marriage was a closed book that he chose not to open: Edna, like all the rest of his women, goes unmentioned, even in passing, in
Music Is My Mistress
. In 1955, however, he wrote an unpublished play called
Man with Four Sides
whose protagonists, the Lanes, are a middle-class black couple of a kind familiar on U Street. The wife, Mrs. Martha Washington Penoctbottom Lane, speaks with “proper-type stiltedness” and “governs her little home with all the pomp and grandeur of an empress.” Otho, her husband, is a secret drinker who longs desperately to “escape from the atmosphere / Of this house—which my wife / Dominates completely.” Though Ellington never said as much, it may be that he meant the play as a withering critique of the life from which he extracted himself by leaving Edna.

Had he ever loved her? Or was their marriage an empty vessel of necessity and, later, of convenience? Fanny Holmes, the wife of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., said that Washington is “full of famous men and the women they married when they were young.” Perhaps the Ellingtons were that kind of couple—but we can never know.