3. Billy Strayhorn

um what are we doing it's okay just just listen this is important okay just just you know just sit and chill chill in the sound so uh let me take you back to the year 1934. you're a young black musician incredibly gifted and hardworking you've worked your whole life in the pursuit of music and you know you'll continue on that path until the day you die but you're not a jazz musician you're a classical pianist

billy strahorn was a phenomenal jazz musician composer arranger and known primarily for his close collaboration with duke ellington over nearly three decades people who know jazz which is not me know him from the duke ellington orchestra's theme song take the a train but what a lot of people don't know is that he was trained classically as soon as he could get his hands on a piano and he fully intended to make a career as a classical pianist in the year 1934 at the age of 19 billy performed the greek piano concerto in a minor at his high school graduation his high school music director commented more than 50 years afterwards i never heard a student play that way before or after the orchestra may have been a group of students but billy strayhorn was a professional artist so why do we know him from jazz well billy's friend harry herforth said billy looked into colleges but was discouraged because of his race and could not get the necessary financial aid the very idea of a black concert pianist was considered unthinkable it had nothing to do with billy's considerable talent today we're going to be talking about billy's life and legacy and what it tells us about the divisions of race class and accessibility in music then and now if you wanna find out about classical queers then you're in the right place with alice this is classical queeros a podcast that aims to queer up the classical space by highlighting the voices of queer composers that history forgot my name is alice park my pronouns are she her i am a flute player and a cat mom and i love butter cake from california pizza kitchen butter cake yeah what is what what comprises butter cake i don't know why it's called butter cake because it's not just like like you know how like as a child you're like cheesecake is cake made out of cheese and it's not it's kind of like the same thing it's not cake made out of butter it's just like really good cake but it's like it's like it's closer to like a really sweet bread than a cake in like consistency but it just it's just it's so good and it melts in your mouth that's what i was imagining like a and like a sweet loaf yeah a sweet loaf just like rosie rosie is a sweet lover rosie is she is she's our queen yeah all i'll worship we will all worship her we do um wait what is your name introduce yourself oh my name is shaheed uh pronouns he him his i am a flute player a wish to be cat mom i am not because my apartment does not allow pets and i am really terrible at keeping plants alive oh my god same i've tried so hard with so many um i am currently looking at my snake plant which is like very droopy and the ends are dried and there's probably like several reasons why this happened it's like the probably one of the easier ones to take care of too and um it's not looking so well so you know it's okay some of us just aren't meant for this and but i believe that like you'll find the right plants you know the right plants for me are definitely the fake ones at ikea you gotta do what you gotta do i yeah i um get flowers for sam regularly when i go to trader joe's you know it's like any kind of flowers um and they always die so quickly like roses i know die quickly like anyway like it kind of doesn't matter what you do but um all other flowers succulents like i kill succulents and you're not supposed to be able to do that um so yeah it's it's yeah if you're listening to us and you're good at plants please send us plant tips yeah send us plant tips because we're hopeless hashtag plant tips hashtag queero's plant tips oh my gosh um okay so i'm super excited to talk about billy strayhorn as you heard by my uh masterfully crafted introduction i have to say i was really proud of that that was very good thank you thank you um but first before we do that we have our iconic opening segment what do you say gay oh yeah heck yeah so our question for today is if you could go back in time and tell your baby gay self any one piece of advice what would it be uh i think about this so often i'm always like wow i wish i could go back in time and tell myself not to do that stupid thing i just did or like that stupid thing i did three years ago um i think i think a lot of it would have to be kind of like uh decisions i made like although i kind of like to live i like to think about like no regrets and like everything is for a reason yeah i'm here because of all the decisions i've made and i'm very happy with where i am but i also can't help but feel that there's always like those other like missed opportunities yeah um so like for example um when i was in high schoo when i was going to high school i went to an art school um and i like regretted it very quickly and i went back to my public school which had like a very strong like music program and it's like if i had just done that from the beginning yeah wouldn't have um wasted so much energy on that sort of thing yeah um so like little things like that or like i wish i had applied to an arts a different arts high school where i feel like i would have had more opportunity and um yeah things like that i think are mostly things i think about a lot yeah okay yeah that's that sounds like good advice yeah i'm happy with what i did um but it also is like also like okay one day i'm gonna have kids and i'm gonna like be able to guide them better than i need yeah yeah that i guided myself yeah for me uh you know i came up with this question and i don't know what my answer is really but i guess i would say that if i could go back to my baby gay self i would i would tell her that like it's okay that there's not a lot of people like me or you or her or whatever um and i i would say like it's okay to feel lonely but also remember that you do have a bunch of friends even though they're different from you even though they're straight and whatever and and your sexuality is not your entire identity and that someday like you won't feel this this particular kind of loneliness and it will be okay so just like focus on like being like like you in in all of your in like you know have like a well-rounded personality and not just like gay which is like you know fun and i feel like i i feel like i did that okay but i still felt like sad about a lot of stuff as a baby gay so i i would tell her to like chill basically is my answer

yeah yes yeah that's very sweet i love it thank you um i think we all needed to chill as baby gays yeah yeah truly fully just chill and like yeah do you like i know our listeners can't see this but do you like the my lesbian pride flag scarf hanging in the background yes i was looking at it it's so beautiful with like the glow coming from right yeah yeah i like this i never wear it because i just i never have a reason to wear scarves really and it doesn't really go with much of my clothes but i like knowing that i have it it's really it looks great there honestly yeah and maybe i'll just leave it i brought it to like wrap up the microphone and stuff oh okay yeah yeah yeah it looks awesome it looks like it's like adding like lights that is like yeah yeah it's nice i like it yeah anyway we're going to take a break and then after we're going to talk about billy strayhorn if you want to find out about classical queers then you're in the right place with alice and we're back yeah yay so um billy strayhorn he is a jazz dude and i understand that our classical queero's podcast is about classical composers but i feel like it's okay to do him today because he started out as a classical musician with classical training but he was kept out of the world of classical music because of racism because nobody could think of like allowing a black concert pianist to prosper so we were denied like a critical phenomenal voice in the field of classical music and fortunately he was able to like thrive as much as he could in jazz but like you know if classical music were just a little bit better at like being less terrible then you know he would have been in classical music and he was phenomenal really good uh so that's why we're doing him today even though it's about jazz and so listeners you'll have to just bear with me as we go through this because i don't know anything about jazz so if i say something that like doesn't make sense because i'm reading it wrong i just i did my best just barefoot i'm trying i'm trying um we love you jazzers

yeah so uh okay so billy strayhorn was born on november 29 1915. um he wasn't like his parents didn't even name him when he was born because many of their previous babies had died very quickly so they they didn't name him his the name william was officially added to his birth certificate when he was like 10 or 12. wow uh-huh so that's really sad yeah very sad uh he moved around as a lot as a kid but mostly pretty much he grew up in pittsburgh this neighborhood was integrated but not because of like a love of diversity no no no no this was because white landlords wanted to continue to rent out dilapidated properties but they didn't want to deal with the upkeep so they just like left it disgusting and we're like all right black folks you can live here and that's how the neighborhood got integrated so yeah he had a lot of siblings and an alcoholic father in a tiny house so he largely like he kept to himself he loved his mom and he spent a lot of time with her and just like adored her um and he also spent months out of time living with his grandparents and like walking through fields of flowers and just like happy and being alone and stuff as a kid he ended up with a job as a pharmacy delivery boy and he worked enough hours to buy himself a piano so here's a quote from a book called lush life which is a biography about billy strayhorn most of the material i got for this episode is from that book it's a great book um and uh this quote is from billy himself he said of course during all this time i was going to grade school and selling papers as well so i finally bought myself a piano and started to play it i started to study and the more i learned the more i wanted to learn my family was kind of large and so couldn't indulge me in all my wishes so i had to do this for myself it wasn't all that easy but i guess if you want something hard enough it just gets done directly i got that piano so already he's a hard worker baby billy strayhorn is out here doing what he's got to do to get himself a piano and it's great in his music program in high school he was clearly the best one there um here's another quote about the music program in 1927 carl mcvicker a young carnegie tech graduate joined the westinghouse that's the high school faculty as an instrumental music teacher and instituted a music program considered so radical that two teachers left the school over it he accepted and encouraged students of all backgrounds and races to play all instruments that's the radical program wow yeah one of his students said mr mcvicar instilled self-respect in those of us who were his students because he respected us regardless of our background and so billy strayhorn was a a black kid in a in an integrated neighborhood and he was gay so and also this was like the 30s in pittsburgh so you'd think that he like would just be alone and like beaten up all the time but no he had friends he did have friends he hung out with people mostly people he would just make music with um but it's not like uh growing up like that was easy because he did seem different he did seem um more feminine less like typically macho and masculine uh one of his friends mickey screama said he had a hard time it's no wonder he was timid he was in a shell you gotta remember those pittsburghers were tough how can i say this he had a hard time making friends to tell you the truth people used to call him a [ __ ] that's what everybody said the thing is he had bigger fish to fry all he did day and night was concentrate on the only thing he cared about the one thing he wanted to go on doing what he did on the day of our graduation be a classical concert pianist so yeah like he he was not um alone but he he had a goal and he was he was on his way uh he started taking lessons with a prominent teacher in the pittsburgh black community and he was working constantly um and as i mentioned before at his high school graduation he performed the greek piano concerto in a minor he also for this same performance wrote a concerto for percussion in piano which was inspired by gershwin-esque rhythms and uh so he performed both of those i believe that day um so he's just like the best of the best at this point that's amazing yeah yeah he's like a star he knew everything people would say like you know he would just start sit down at a piano and start playing things and people always thought that he just like was playing repertoire like classical repertoire but no it was actually things that he wrote and it just sounded like like he meshed it into like the classical repertoire so well because he he knew it he studied it so hard and he's already only like 19 at this point and he was self he was studying by himself right for the most part yeah he took lessons with somebody but um not all the time because you know to get that piano and take lessons like that's a lot of money so but yeah yeah um he after high school he went to the pittsburgh musical institute for about a year but when his teacher died he left because he didn't think there was anyone else there who could teach him um like no one else was worthy which reminds me of ethel smith at the leipzig conservatory who like left because she was like not good enough um yeah billy was like no there was only one guy who was good enough and now he's gone so i'mma peace out so he's living his life he's after high school he's just working and making music on his own as much as he can um he even uh wrote and was a part of the production of a a musical that they staged at the high school but like for non-high school students it was like adults young 20s adults um and he wrote the music and it was like fantastic everybody loved it so he's done all that but in his early 20s he was introduced to jazz so as you like learned before he um couldn't get into classical music for like conservatories and universities and stuff because nobody wanted a black concert piano player um so when a couple of his friends showed him jazz he fell in love with it um his friend who showed him this art tatum record said what he realized we talked about was that everything he loved about classical music was there in one form or another in jazz and here was a place he could imply himself art tatum was black teddy wilson was black and they were serious musicians like strayhorn saw himself so i think this is so important because not only is like the representation here important where billy was like oh people who look like me and they're working really hard and they're respected so that's something that i am allowed to do you know so you know first of all that second of all they're like i'm sure that you're very well aware of like the difference between how classical music and jazz is like treated by classical musicians like there's this kind of idea that like classical music is better because it's more elite and jazz is for the people and you know the this idea came from racism primarily because it was like rich white people who do classical music and uh any black person who did jazz um yeah uh at least that was like the public image and so we always think of no we don't always think of jazz as like worse but we definitely there's more cultural weight given to classical music versus jazz because of how elite we think it is but like this this quote that i read i think kind of encapsulates two major reasons why it's great because of representation for people of color who get locked out of classical music and for it's like objectively uh very high quality music yeah yeah yeah so uh he gets introduced to jazz and i want to talk so much about billy strahorn and his childhood and upbringing and stuff but we don't have enough time we've already talked for forever so i'm gonna go ahead and skip to the most pivotal moment in his career which is when he meets duke ellington so he met duke ellington through a friend of a friend whose dad owned a club that many jazz guys played at frequently uh and this friend of a friend almost introduced him to count basie but duke ellington was there first so it's crazy just you know how history like could have changed like count basically was going together the next week but the friend was like i might as well just do it tonight right yeah yeah so here's the story of how uh billy met duke ellington uh duke ellington's band had a show and billy watched the show and afterwards came backstage to be introduced and duke ellington was getting his hair done so here's a long quote from the book i introduced billy and we stood there said greenlee duke didn't get up he didn't even open his eyes he just said sit down at the piano and let me hear what you can do strayhorn lowered himself onto the bench with calibrated grace and turned towards ellington who was lying still mr ellington this is the way you played this number on the show strahorn announced and began to perform his host's melancholy ballad sophisticated lady one of a few ellington tunes strayhorn knew from his days with the mad hatters the amazing thing was explained greenlee billy played it exactly like duke had just played it on stage he copied him to perfection ellington stayed silent and prone though his hair work was over now this is the way i would play it continued stray horn changing keys and upping the tempo slightly he shifted into an adaptation greenlee described as pretty hip sounding and further and further out there as he went on at the end of the number strayhorn turned to ellington now standing right behind him glaring at the keyboard over his shoulders well proceeded ellington dramatically as he faced strayhorn eye to eye for the first time ellington gazing down strayhorn peering up can you do that again

isn't that a nice quote that is a nice quote and so that was pretty much it duke ellington was like this kid is great he's really good at what he does uh he wanted him in his organization but he didn't have a job for him like he had an arranger he had a piano player um all that kind of stuff so he was like all right i'm gonna be gone for a month but i'm gonna think about how to add you into my group and then he like jotted down directions to his apartment in new york and left and then billy didn't hear from him for whoever so a month passed and billy like you know when you are faced with like a decision and you start asking all your friends like should i do this but like i don't really know but like should i do it and the answer is yes but you like ask everyone anyway you mean like our whole relationship yeah yeah like um when i was like should i text sam before we started dating and you were like do it i was like do it i was so aggressive i was like i swear i'm gonna take your phone yeah it's good for you yeah but anyway so billy was doing that with um this duke ellington situation he was like but should i like work for him like i don't even know like i haven't heard from him like is this the thing that i want to do i don't know so eventually he decides yes he's going to and he's like all right i'm just going to go to him so he takes the directions to his apartment in new york and he just goes there and he was like you know what i'm going to impress him and i'm going to write a new jazz chart using the directions to his apartment as the inspiration for the lyrics and that's where we get the a train oh my god yeah so literally he said he like the the tune and the words and stuff came to him faster than the actual train did so this literal iconic piece of jazz music just was like a like almost a whim you know just a whim in the the fancy head of billy strahorn our child genius yeah i didn't i think i didn't mention he was only like 23 when he met duke ellington wow yeah yeah so anyway like going to a flute lesson and being like i'm gonna write a completely new sonata yeah i'll do it and then you get there and you're like listen to this new piece i wrote on the way here yeah i know i can't believe like this this this dude had the audacity to be the best and he just he really did he really did it if you want to find out about classical queers then you're in the right place with alice and we're back so we had a technical difficulty well a few of them uh so oh my god rosie i'm sorry give me a second she just knocked something over rosie

oh my god

rosie rosie girl the kitten wow this cat anyway let me try that again we're back we just had a few technical difficulties and a couple days later here we are again after our break so we're just gonna um pick up back where we were before um master procrastinators yeah hot mess hot mess i don't think we've addressed this before but shaheed and i have a what would you call it like an alter ego or more just like a band or i would oh my god can it please be a band a band okay we have a band it's definitely a band we have a band named hot mess because that's who we are and we've performed at two open mic nights at a bookstore and

you're famous yeah we're famous they love us and um it's notoriously terrible like i forget the words constantly to songs that we do anyway so when we say that we're hot mess like we are hot mess we're not a hot mess we're hot mess we are literally hot that's our band name yeah hot mess yeah so yeah it's super on brand for us to record over like several days because we progress i need to do it yeah anyway so picking back up where we left off with billy strahorn uh he just met duke ellington for the first time in duke ellington uh never reached out after he met him for the first time even though he said he wanted to work with him so billy he wrote take the a train he showed up in new york and uh duke ellington and his orchestra were playing a show billy gets brought to the show gets taken backstage and duke ellington is like i was going to get in touch with you and billy says well here i am and that was it and then on billy was just a part of the organization so he got to move to new york which was pretty much all that he wanted you know he got to become like the the new york socialite that he always was really meant to be you know that he wasn't able to be in um in pittsburgh god don't we all want to be new york socialites right oh my god so he goes there um he was originally put up in a room at the y like the ymca which in the 30s was i guess a place where you could live um i don't know anything about the ymca wow but yeah i thought it was just like a gym you know i don't really know there's like more stuff there also but anyway um so he originally gets put up in a room there and duke ellington is paying for his food his board his whatever you know everything he needs um but the room was kind of like not great there was a ton of like common spaces with a bunch of random strangers and it wasn't like a good room and stuff so he spent one night there and the next night he uh basically just moves himself into duke ellington's home so here's how he does it um duke ellington has an apartment like a penthouse apartment with his sister ruth ellington his lover whose name was um i don't remember what her name was but she was there mildred i think um and his son mercer ellington and but duke was usually not there he was often like elsewhere on tour and whatever so uh mercer ellington tells the story he says strayhorn said that he would like to talk because he wanted to know about duke ellington so he came to the house the night after he stayed at the y and had dinner with my aunt and i the result was that he stayed we chatted and played records and all that kind of stuff and when the time came for us to go to bed he we said well i guess we'll go to sleep and i got up to go to my room and strayhorn says well i'll just lay here and ruth went to her room and that was it

he literally just was like i live here now and they were like yeah i know so i i love that a lot he stayed there for almost a whole year um and they just you know they loved it duke ellington was already paying for his um for his everything so it wasn't even like a a big deal um did he just stay like in the like lane living room i think they had an extra room it was a big apartment like okay like they had an extra room in the house in new york the new york city penthouse yeah like oh i guess you can stay in the extra room i know and it's not even like a burden um but yeah so billy tranhorn lived there and they loved it the two ladies who lived there ruth who was actually billy's age not uh she wasn't as old as duke ellington and the um the the lover who's whose name again i'm pretty sure is mildred i don't know why i didn't write that down uh they loved him he like helped out he was smart and kind and polite um yeah so uh when it came to do uh sorry when it came to billy's role in the organization he didn't have any sort of like there was no agreement there was no formal agreement about what his responsibilities were what he was going to be paid all that kind of stuff it was just kind of like you're here and you'll do what i tell you to do when i tell you to do it and billy's like whatever so uh he starts doing work kind of sporadically as duke ellington requests it uh duke ellington would be like hey i need you to arrange these two charts for the group that i've got and then billy would be like all right i need to give it to him the next day and duke ellington was like excellent and this would happen just like kind of like every couple of weeks um but you know things started getting more and more and more um and uh it became clear that billy strayhorn was like really good at his job uh so essentially billy strayhorn was like an arranger composer orchestrator for duke ellington in his band billy strayhorn is the cream of the crop he's so good at what he does and he's happy doing all this work at a really high level and so uh because he's happy doing things that he wants to do it could have been really easy for him to overlook the fact that ellington's name had been added as co-composer to many of the songs that billy strayhorn wrote and that were later recorded so this is the beginning of a long line of duke ellington kind of taking credit for the things that billy strayhorn did um you know so we'll get more on to that later but in the meantime it's time for love so towards uh you know within the first year of billy living in new york um mercer ellington duke's son introduced billy to a friend of his named aaron bridgers um he all he said was that like i don't know i felt like that they should meet but they were both black gay piano players um so i guess he was like

we just gotta go together as people do yeah yeah um they so like in reading about them on the internet you'd think you know people mention billy strayhorn's first like lover or partner or whatever aaron bridgers and you think of them as just like rekluse men but no at the time when they met billy was 24 and aaron was 21. those are babies yeah yeah i'm a baby now that's how old i am i'm a baby they were babies so like they were just two young kids who met in new york and fell in love and it was really sweet they just kind of and they were among the people that they were with just accepted it was kind of like um well billionaire and they're that they're together that's how it is which was super great in you know 1930s uh new york which is you know amazing amazing you love to see it yeah that's awesome yeah and at this point so like very quickly they moved in together um aaron and billy and they joined up in like circles of friends that were primarily like black people and gay people they didn't totally overlap they were straight people they were white people but mostly um other black gay folks and they got to hang out together in like posh fancy clubs that played good music all the time and billy got to start to live like the you know like i said the the new york socialite life he always wanted to do what a dream yeah in the book the author wrote strayhorn didn't so much transform in new york as take form in new york his amorphous youthful idea of urban elon don't know what that word means could finally be made real his sister said he had always had a certain vision of himself but it never had a chance to come out until he went to new york and met the right people and went to the right places then he really came alive

rosie did you hear that hey ted yes okay i'm gonna go let her out real quick pardon me rosie

rosie rosarito rosalia so uh anyway uh back to billy thanks rosie for the the the the interlude um you know working with duke ellington made billy safe you know and part of the reason he was able to be so free and so fully himself in new york was because he knew that he had like somebody like duke ellington who was famous and and well known well loved and respected on his side all the time uh once again according to the book uh this support was priceless to stray horn according to his intimates particularly after his frustrations with prejudice during his early career in pittsburgh with duke billy said he had security remarked george greenlee duke didn't question his manliness it wasn't like that for him back home so and this is you know you know that's just priceless especially at the time and even now something like that now is just so important um yeah you know what this is like also i feel like this is such a safe place because this is the second episode now that we've had this sort of conversation where like someone was safe within their their music and like i i feel like that's so true for a lot of artists like when they are like really within their art like people don't care like about um you know anything about their identity i mean they do obviously they do care but it's more like it's not important as as much as their art like their art um overcomes like it like dominates any prejudice that is there yeah i don't care who you are yeah you can play yeah that's what i admire about you yeah definitely i it's it's really beautiful you know and i that's one of the many reasons why music is so important now we got to keep it yeah yeah i like i think i've definitely felt that way as well like secure like when i'm around like other musicians like oh i feel comfortable here like i feel i don't feel insecure about like my identity because i feel like i'm being questioned when i'm around those certain environments yeah yeah oh that's so beautiful uh the book also said this billy could have pursued a career on his own he had the talent to become rich and famous but he'd have to be less than honest about his sexual orientation or he could work behind the scenes for duke and be open about being gay yeah again it's like he had more of a an ultimatum i guess at the time um than you and i you or i do but um i feel like for the most part he really flourished he really had more freedom than a lot of people did which is so beautiful and so that is yeah and it's really it makes me feel so happy that some like a per a black gay man which even today is some like somebody who is just not respected enough by the law by society a black gay man in the 1930s was given the freedom the the like financial freedom the artistic freedom the personal freedom to be exactly who he was and do the work that he wanted to do at such a high level it just makes me so happy like thinking about billy strayhorn just like going around nightclubs and like singing and playing for his friends you know yeah you know just being free and being happy just making peace yeah it makes me so happy it's very heartwarming and makes me feel very happy as well yeah yeah yeah so anyway uh as for the relationship between the composer and arranger um as duke ellington to billy strayhorn strayhorn himself said that ellington's only piece of advice was unfettering his first last and only formal instruction for me was embodied in one word observe the two of them would rarely discuss projects in detail ruth ellington duke's sister said and i'd love this quote you'll see i'd see billy walk into duke's dressing room and duke would say oh billy i want you to finish this thing for me just like that i want you to finish this thing for me and billy would sit and stare into his eyes for about 10 minutes and duke would stare back and then billy would say okay and they wouldn't even exchange a word they'd just look into each other's eyes and billy would go out and write what duke wanted wha what right isn't that so wild just imagine that you know you're sitting in your apartment you're ruth ellington and then duke walks in is like billy i want you to write this thing for me and billy says

okay and then he doesn't can't stand it um as an artist and as a person uh according to the book duke ellington resisted completion as long as something is unfinished he said rosie he said oh my god as long as something is unfinished there's always that little feeling of insecurity and a feeling of insecurity is absolutely necessary unless you're so rich it doesn't matter according to the book with strayhorn on hand ellington can keep that insecurity and gain the security of knowing that something he dropped could not only be finished but possibly improved and so why do we say improved well billy strayhorn was somebody who not only could mimic duke ellington's style completely like he could totally chameleon himself into it but he also had his own style and like when he decided he wanted to use it he did completely and it was he had his own voice and it showed every time he wanted it to um here's this quote from a friend of his from from pittsburgh who was talking about like what made his music so good uh strayhorn went through a lot of [ __ ] in his life from his father right on through school the kids calling him a [ __ ] you know he kept it all in and put on a big front that everything was fine nothing bothered him then he sat down and all his feelings came out in the music that's what made his stuff so incredible and different from dukes it was great music like dukes was and it was so full of dark feeling so he wasn't just an assistant or their writing and arranging companion as ellington referred to him on stage he was a critical part of the equation here's another quote i'm just going to be reading quotes all day the misconception was that ellington put strayhorn there because billy knew what duke would do the truth was the opposite ellington put billy there to do what billy wanted because duke knew that whatever billy did would be great however resentment slowly began to build because duke ellington was taking all the credit for a lot of billy strayhorn's work uh here's a couple examples of this uh billy strayhorn and this other random dude had collaborated on a 44 page booklet on duke ellington's instrumental approach which was called duke ellington piano method for blues and the only author that was credited was duke ellington who didn't actually do it um wow yeah and then a bunch of other like i read a list of a bunch of songs that billy strayhorn wrote that the uh composer was listed as duke ellington only sometimes duke ellington's name was added to things that billy did so who had both of them even though duke didn't do anything and it was it was really uh you know it just happened all the time um what was interesting about this there's a few things that's interesting about this um one is that it's a complicated situation because billy stranghorn did not receive the royalties for all these songs that he wasn't credited on however duke ellington published all these through his own company which he gave billy a significant share of stocks in so billy was making money from all of the compositions basically um but not like specifically the ones from himself rosie she's also upset about copyright infringement i'm gonna go let her out rosie

rosie

be free young one rosetta stone rosario okay i'm back do you think that rosie is too much of interest too much of an interruption or should i just leave her in no she's absolutely a co-host okay you're right she's the third host of classical queers yes yeah she is classical she is the classical queero um so anyway yeah so it was complicated for that reason and it was also complicated because duke ellington had experienced the same thing that he was doing to billy strayhorn um according to the novel publishing mogul irving mills took credit for co-composing or writing lyrics and took the related royalties for more than 50 ellington works fortunately for ellington no one really thought mills wrote anything strayhorn's case was more complex since his responsibilities in the ellington organization included aiding ellington in both refining and completing works clearly conceived as ellington music so like it just baffles it baffles me that duke ellington did that but at the same time you know he paid for everything that billy needed and gave him all this extra money as shares in his company his publishing company so it's kind of like like he took care of him he made sure that he didn't want for anything but this one particular thing was you know lacking and the problem that billy had with duke ellington taking all this credit wasn't a financial problem or a legal problem it was a personal artistic problem because if duke ellington had all the the the copyrights and the royalties for all these songs that billy wrote then what independence did he have you know he felt like you know he didn't have the rights to his songs and like he didn't care about the credit really it wasn't about like other people knowing it was more about like like having the the uh the what's the word the agency to do things on his own so like if it weren't for duke ellington billy wouldn't have any of this you know so it was a whole thing some more examples of uh uh how duke ellington got credit for things billy did there was a like a broadway-esque show i actually don't remember if this one was on broadway itself that duke ellington signed on to like work on but billy did most of the work um and here are two reviews this one is from the new york world telegrams uh he said mr ellington's score is a generous outpouring of his individual talent filled with the spirit and the warmth of his music the pulsing beat of his rhythms the strength and the refreshing colors of his modern harmonies not a word about billy and the new york times said mr ellington has been dashing off songs with remarkable virtuosity no conventional composer he has not written a pattern of song hits to be lifted out of their context but rather an integral musical composition that carries the old gay picaresque yarn through its dark modern setting and the only mention of billy in the program for this show said orchestrations under the personal supervision of billy strayhorn meanwhile he actually like wrote most of the songs himself with little to no uh assistance from duke ellington himself and so this this thing just happened all the time uh it's like ratatouille like ratatouille yeah because like remy's like doing all the cooking oh my god but

oh my god so remy is billy strayhorn and linguine is duke ellington

it's like the same thing right like oh let me take you in like you weren't respected at your old house there was a grandma trying to shoot there's a grandmother you know you can live here you can use my ingredients oh my god i think you're right because like at first um linguine is like he's there to help the rat but also the rat his name is remy oh my god he's there to help remy but then afterwards he gets selfish and he doesn't want to like like let anybody know that it's not him doing the work whoa i can't believe ratatouille stole from the real life of billy strahorn it's literally ratatouille wow okay i i'm actually shook so um anyway what i was gonna say is uh there was a lot about in you know often these things would happen where they would collaborate on things but only duke ellington's name would be on the bill and some of the reason is that like duke ellington and billy strayhorn wouldn't sell because duke ellington was the name and nobody knew who billy billy trayhorn was so in order to get things to sell like it's a you know they kind of did what they had to do and both duke and billy they knew that and it didn't seem to be a problem for a while but you know after 20 years of this it's it did um yeah i imagine it'll get old yeah it's so it did start to get old at the opening night party of this show that i told you the reviews for um here's a quote from friend oliver smith who was around i think he was in the show he said billy didn't say boo about duke or how the credits would read the whole time but on opening night on broadway there's a grand gala party duke was there in all his splendor receiving his public ellington moved among the first nighters in a disembodied glide that impressed the dances the dancers he acknowledged others with only a slow beginning of a nod of the head and never appeared to move the rest of his body apparently powered by something outside himself billy said to me let's get out of here i said but the party's just starting and he said not for me it isn't i told him no i really should stay and he walked away and out of the theater alone so that was the first time that people noticed that he started to have an issue with duke ellington taking credit for the things that he did soon afterwards uh a good friend of his lena horn a singer who was like low-key to high key in love with billy but knew that he was gay and didn't like push it but she loved him so much she got married no no no no it's okay it turns out fine she uh got married to another guy who was just like him but white and uh so billy met him and he was hanging out with them a lot especially because billy's partner aaron at this point had moved to paris and was staying there for the foreseeable future and so it was pretty ambiguous about if they broke up or if they were long distance but it was you know it was still pretty sad um so let's just consider them broken up at this point i guess this is like the uh mid 40s early 50s around there um so the guy that his friend lena horn married his name was hayton that was his last name he this guy hayden had been exploring the prospect of developing his own music production and publishing company and had asked strayhorn about his agreement with ellington and then he finds out that they didn't have an agreement and billy had no idea how much his arrangements and compositions might be worth on the open market and he told billy to be more attentive to the business side of his career with ellington according to mercer ellington that was the beginning of problems with strayhorn lena and hayden really took him under their wing and because aaron was away in paris they got a lot more of his attention than pop his dad duke ellington we didn't see very much of strayhorn for a while and uh at this time also billy had a piece that he loved he wrote a song called lush life of like way early in his career while he was still in pittsburgh and he never published it he never performed it he only played it at little parties um but uh by pure coincidence he happened to be playing in a recording studio when nat king cole walked in and he was like i want to do that so a while later he he releases it he releases billy's song lush life which was like his baby you know this song but this guy pete rugalow wrote the orchestral arrangement of the cover and took huge liberties with it he just like turned it around messed it up changed lyrics so that they didn't even make sense and messed up the harmony uh billy called aaron bridgers all the way out in paris and was very upset with it aaron had never seen him this upset before or after but he also thinks that it probably affected him more than it would have earlier in his life because he was already upset about duke ellington taking credit for his work if that makes sense um so around this time billy gets sent to paris to work on a another like broadway-esque production uh under duke ellington's name but it ended up being a real hot mess like not a shaheed and alice hot mess but like a hot mess and it was awful and all the music that billy worked so hard on just kept pushed kept getting pushed to the side until he was just like miserable in a corner um so he leaves that he's feeling awful he also had seen aaron um again in paris but aaron was like getting set up to stay permanently so it was must have been like a a kind of a goodbye um but he started going to these things called nail salon sessions so what that is is there started to be this like inner circle of artists in new york who were primarily black but uh not everybody who just like they knew each other and they would just all gather at the home of these people whose last name was neil um and they called it the neil salon because they were being fancy and they would just like host each other and discuss their art um in their various forms it was super cool people like ertha kitt and john cage would show up and just like hang out um and because it was so wholesome it was like it was just a bunch of people trying to support each other one of the nils in fact said we were all daring to try to have careers in an arena where everything was structured against the possibility of having a career so it was super like wholesome and good for not just billy but everybody there to have a bunch of people there who were trying to do the same thing to try to work really hard even though like white capitalism doesn't want that they don't want successful black people and all that jazz oh my god jazz um and so billy gained a lot more self-confidence from going to these sessions he said to himself afterwards you know what there are some things i want to do for myself for a change i think i'm going to do them so he really did after about 14 years of duetting with ellington figuratively literally publicly or secretly billy strayhorn made his first steps out of ellington's sphere of influence in mid 1953 so they met in the early night sorry in the late 1930s and in 1953 is when billy strayhorn decides he's going to do something for himself now unfortunately i'm not going to talk about any of that because we don't have enough time and billy strayhorn lived a rich life so i'm going to skip forward about a decade um just know that in the 50s he did go out and do projects for himself that were like you know all right received um but ultimately he did stay with duke ellington in his orchestra and in interviews afterwards um and especially after these copyright debacles billy never said anything bad about duke ellington he only praised his artistic talents and you know he's like he's a good guy and we'll just leave it at that so in the 60s billy met dr martin luther king jr through some friends and this is great we love that um they'd talk about civil rights passionately for ages at parties together they just sit in the kitchen and just like look at each other and just like like keep going and going and going and going about like civil rights and they were just so like in it and billy was super involved in the civil rights movement he helped organize and march and fight and he was just really passionate about it he also had a lot of empathy for many sides um lena horn his friend who married that other guy who helped him with the copyright stuff um her husband was white but she was black and black people often thought she was too white kind of because of that and kind of how she kind of uh conducted herself so she was really quiet about civil rights things but it was billy who encouraged her to begin speaking out she said billy was the source of my consciousness raising not about being black but about being me i had to learn to accept myself first and that's what billy helped me to do he knew that i had to expose myself he knew i had to be unafraid so bolstered by strayhorn lena decided to undertake her first initiative of public acclimation for black rights early in 1963. said he'd go with me and he helped me make the plans so yeah he took her to this um to this huge protest in jackson mississippi and they asked her to sing and she was like i don't know and he just said yes for her and he taught her everything she needed to know and he squeezed her hand before she walked on stage and then she sang amazing grace for 2 000 people and it was amazing um and this time period was so good for him because he like you know loved having a really really worthy important cause to fight for and you know i love hearing about this because not only is he uh like a great person and musician but he's also like passionate about other people and about the cause and about civil rights which is like ethel smythe our good friend from two episodes ago she was out here living her life being the the best at being a victorian lesbian composer and she was also fighting for the right for women to vote uh so we love to see people fighting for for for people yeah did i put that better maybe but yeah so in late 1963 duke ellington and his orchestra were sent by president kennedy to tour the near and middle east as a sort of diplomacy tour thing um while in performing in baghdad a military coup began and bombs started raining down on a government building only a few hundred yards from the concert whoa so they all were told to go shelter and place in their hotel room and they're like freaking out but they're okay but basically they kind of get used to this kind of thing this kind of unrest later in turkey they're at a diplomatic dinner when someone runs in and shouts the president's been shot and they're like everyone's getting shot it's fine and he's like no no our president has been shot so that was the day that president john f kennedy was assassinated so the tour is cancelled immediately and everyone goes home duke ellington who was a uh self-proclaimed hypochondriac he apparently did not deal well with death his own or anyone else's so he just he did not deal well with uh kennedy's assassination at all he just like didn't he didn't deal with he just was like okay i'm gonna put this in a box and never look at it um and this is foreshadowing uh what was that sound my mouth just made did you hear that i did was it weird it was weird it didn't sound like it came from you it sounded like it came from the back of the room it felt like it came from somewhere else that was weird um anyway so in early 1964 billy is diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus it was a close friend of his a doctor who diagnosed him and when he told billy billy seemed resigned and just kind of ready to accept it duke ellington however was not okay when his doctor when the doctor called duke ellington he said what kind of doctor are you why didn't you see this coming do you know what you're saying he just wasn't okay which is you know wild but it really shows you how important billy was to duke ellington they were really like deeply important to each other we don't know how duke and billy talked about it together though how they reacted to one another that's just something that we'll never find out uh in the last few years of his life billy got a lot more serious in his work in his personal life there was a lot less laughter uh and he tolerated a lot of a lot less you know things he didn't want so he pretty much just did what he wanted to do whether it was like a project or something he wanted to learn or people he wanted to hang out with and he didn't really do anything else uh later in that year of 1964 billy began a relationship with a white man named bill grove who was very quiet and very meticulous and close friends said that uh this guy bill grove was pretty much just what billy needed at the time somebody who was quiet and would listen to the things that billy said soon afterwards he was offered an opportunity to play a solo concert for the first time like pretty much ever um by a society of duke ellington fanatics but he was like i don't know i mean why would anyone come to see me they just want to hear duke ellington they don't want to hear me who am i but they reassured him that they're like no no we love you like people love you especially people who know and understand duke ellington like you are loved and respected we love you the things that you do and eventually he was like you know what okay i'll do it and he planned a program full of his own compositions and it was a huge hit and people really like saw that he wasn't just a duke ellington clone or chameleon he was billy strayhorn his condition worsened over the next few years he got sicker and sicker and his friends started just taking care of him and taking him on like last trips uh while bailey was in the hospital at one point duke ellington put together a musical gift for him including like tape recordings of uh a bunch of friends including piano players from french from france

including piano players from paris um some of whom were aaron bridgers billy's first love and claude bowling so there's a little hashtag flute fact um

anyway in the early morning of may 31 1967 billy strayhorn died at the age of 51 with bill grove by his side duke ellington when he found out he just cried and cried and cried that's what happened he wasn't okay um and understandably so billy strayhorn was a remarkable influence on him uh in fact uh during the last few years of billy's life uh duke ellington's music started becoming a little bit more religious and a big part of that was that duke ellington had to he was faced with mortality in in the form of billy his friend dying and he was like oh my god how could this happen to billy and then he was like oh my god this could happen to me and so that turned his entire musical path towards something different so in that way and in many many other ways billy strayhorn was one of the biggest influences on duke ellington as a man and as a musician a year after his death uh friends scattered his ashes in a river nearby in new york duke ellington silently watched from a distance and it was appropriate that he would honor strayhorn in anonymity the way that he often honored strayhorn himself in his real life so yeah that's that's it that's the life of billy strahorn i wish we could have talked about so many more things i loved the book that i read it's called lush life no sorry it's called a lush life and that's where i got pretty much all the information because the internet is not helpful when it comes to to composers who are not that well-known um but yeah so billy strayhorn know the name appreciate the name we love him wow yeah thank you for for uh sharing that knowledge with us yeah so much so much interesting thing i had no idea about any of this like yeah yeah i knew the name you know i associated it with ellington yeah and i was like oh yeah the dude that worked with ellington yeah but yeah he was you know he had a whole life and it was just phenomenal and i really respect him uh and i'm so glad that i know more about him uh recommended listenings would include like most of songs that we know as duke ellington tunes uh like take the a train um chelsea bridge is by billy strayhorn uh all heart is something that they did with uh ella fitzgerald uh you know billy strayhorn wrote so many things and he also read a lot of things that we're just never gonna see because the the music was just not saved over time uh like a lot of the musicals that he did and uh other musical reviews and just so much he was incredibly prolific like we talk about haydn writing 110 symphonies but nobody talks about billy strayhorn who just would write things overnight and it already be perfect he was somebody who understood every part of a rehearsal and could change things in the music to make it easier for everyone else because he just already understood everybody's strengths and weaknesses like right off the bat and he never made anybody he was referr he was rehearsing with feel uncomfortable because he like he knew them he understood them he valued them and he treated them with respect hmm yeah so i love billy stranghorn there i said it we all do here we all love classical queeros you me and rosie we all love billy strayhorn and our listeners did we ever come up with a listener name i think queero's is queero's an okay listener name yeah like our well i mean it's like it's confusing because it's the name of the people we we talk about and it's also our listeners but i feel like it's fine like if i were listening to this i would want to be called a queero right if you were a straight woman i would never be a straight woman don't even say that that's true yeah um yeah yeah i'm really glad i learned about billy strayhorn yeah and i'm really happy i really liked learning about how like he fit in really well within his like group in new york city and how he like found love yeah it was like you know comfortable like that is nice yeah i wouldn't have expected that right from the time yeah yeah he died in 1967 and like we don't associate gay people or black people having any sort of rights from the times before that so it's remarkably refreshing to read a story where he wasn't just like faced with persecution his entire life yeah you know and that's why i think representation is so important because if we think that you know people of color queer people if the only option for us that we've seen historically is uh persecution and and uh ostracization then it's hard to believe that we're allowed to have freedom now you know so yeah it just his story just makes me so happy in a level that i don't know how to describe really i love it yeah well i guess that's our episode um that's the episode uh make sure to follow us on instagram at classical queeros or twitter at classicalqueerro and um make sure to uh to support your local gays and your local gays of color especially and um yeah support queer black artist please yeah and uh is there anything else um and catch our next episode yeah and catch our next episode

okay bye bye if you wanna find out about rosie's poops then you're in the right place in alice's room