Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight is a composer, arranger, and musician. He composed one of the most famous jazz songs in history, while many have never heard of his name. Today's Out Spotlight is Billy Strayhorn.

Billy Strayhorn was born on November 29, 1915, in Dayton, Ohio, the fourth of nine children. Very sickly at birth and born into a poor family, he was expected the same fate as four of his siblings, that is not to survive, but luck for American music he did. His family soon moved to the Homewood section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania when he was a young boy.

As a child, he was shielded from an abusive father by his mother, Lillian, who s sent her gifted son away for extended visits to family in North Carolina to escape from the abuse. It was there where his grandmother taught him to play piano. In an interview, he said that his grandmother was his primary influence during the first ten years of his life. He first became interested in music while living with her, playing hymns on her piano, and playing records on her Victrola record player.

Strayhorn was largely self-educated and so interested in intellectual pursuits that one of his childhood nicknames was “Dictionary.” Growing up, he had his own newspaper route and worked as a soda jerk and delivery boy for the local drugstore, to save up enough money to buy his own piano.

In Pittsburgh, he studied classical music for a time at the Pittsburgh Music Institute, writing a high school musical, forming a musical trio that played daily on a local radio station, and, while still in his teens, composing (with lyrics) the songs "Life Is Lonely" (later renamed "Lush Life"), "My Little Brown Book", and "Something to Live For".

On March 1, 1934, and barely five-foot-tall teenager, took center stage at the Westinghouse High School auditorium, where he was the only black musician in the 25-player orchestra and the featured soloist performing Grieg’s “Piano Concerto in A Minor." The following year, he wrote the scenes and the music and lyrics for a Cole Porter-inspired musical revue called Fantastic Rhythm. The musical played at black theaters throughout western Pennsylvania for several years, and attracting top-notch talent, including singer Billy Eckstine and pianist Errol Garner.

In 1938, at the age of 23, he met the 39-year-old Duke Ellington, who was performing in Pittsburgh's Crawford Grill. Here he first told, and then showed, the band leader how he would have arranged one of Duke's own pieces. Ellington was so impressed he invited other band members to hear Strayhorn. At the end of the visit, he arranged for Strayhorn to meet him when the band returned to New York. A few months later, Strayhorn was writing arrangements for Ellington's orchestral music and living openly as a gay man, a rare feat for an African American man during that time.

Shortly before Ellington went on his second European tour with his orchestra, from March to May 1939, Ellington announced to his sister Ruth and son Mercer Ellington, that Strayhorn "is staying with us." Through Mercer, Strayhorn met his first partner, African-American musician Aaron Bridgers. By the end of his first year in New York, however, Strayhorn had arranged a new living situation: he moved in with a musician named Aaron Bridgers. Strayhorn and Bridgers were anything but secretive about their relationship, and Strayhorn's homosexuality became well known in the black musical community.

As an out gay black man in the first half of the twentieth century, Strayhorn was unusual indeed--especially considering that no other jazzmen were openly gay. But unconcerned about appearances, Strayhorn refused to don a façade of heterosexuality. He and Bridgers were together until Bridgers moved to Paris in 1947.

Over the next 29 years, Strayhorn made an inestimable contribution to American songwriting and culture—all while working without a contract. His presence allowed Ellington to increase his workload and expand his artistic palette. Strayhorn worked as a composer and collaborator, and also served as Ellington's "guarantor," assuring that the Ellington Orchestra’s music was top notch. But it took a bitter music industry battle to allow Strayhorn’s genius to emerge.

In a highly publicized dispute over composing royalties in late 1940, ASCAP, the music licensing organization, forbid its members from broadcasting any songs over the radio. One of ASCAP’S most celebrated composers, Duke Ellington needed radio broadcasts to promote record sales, which in turn paid his orchestra’s salaries. But as of January 1, 1941, Ellington’s music was banned from the air, even as he was about to broadcast live from a Los Angeles nightclub.

During a hurried cross-country train ride to join Ellington in Los Angeles, Strayhorn, not a member of ASCAP, got almost no sleep for six straight days, writing song after song after song. His prolific, engaging new work kept the Ellington Orchestra afloat for months. And when it was time for a new radio theme—Ellington’s own “Sepia Panorama” was still forbidden on the airwaves—Ellington chose Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train,” premiering it in early 1941.

Jazz legend Quincy Jones said of the song, “ 'Take the ‘A’ Train' was the Holy Grail. It identifies a population, it identifies a lifestyle because it’s the Harlem Renaissance. It’s unbelievable. It covers everything—and it says it all in 32 bars."

While he was helping Ellington expand the orchestra’s musical vocabulary and composing a string of hit songs, they were also were working on a pioneering musical event. Taking advantage of Strayhorn’s feel for musical theater, Ellington worked with him to co-write the groundbreaking musical, "Jump for Joy", which opened in Los Angeles in 1941. It was daring and risky for the times, the show masqueraded as a musical review and featured an all-black cast. "Jump for Joy" was, in fact, a social satire that fiercely attacked racism.

For Ellington, hiring Strayhorn launched an one of the productive recording period, and for many critics, the most significant and creative phase of Ellington's career. As Ellington described him, "Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brain waves in his head, and his in mine."

From the early 1940s on, his training in classical and long-form music became central and indispensable to the orchestra. The collaborations became longer, more complex suites and, in 1943, the first of these works, “Black, Brown and Beige,” an unprecedented 43-minute jazz work, in Carnegie Hall. Most people assume that it was Ellington who was responsible for these new innovations, but it was Strayhorn, who was, at the very least, co-composer of most the ambitious new works.

Ellington did publicly note the importance of his talent. Ellington liked to joke onstage, “Strayhorn does a lot of the work but I get to take the bows!” and this closer to the truth than many suspected.Not only was he the sole composer of Ellington's signature piece, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” but he also wrote other defining works, including “Passion Flower,” “Lush Life,” and “Chelsea Bridge,” and co-wrote “Satin Doll” and “Such Sweet Thunder.”

In the early 1950s, tired of playing second fiddle, Strayhorn left Ellington to pursue his own interests. Even after rejoining Ellington several years later, he concluded that his musical contributions were still not sufficiently acknowledged in public.

A man of passionate beliefs, he became a committed civil rights advocate and was a close friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1963, he arranged and conducted the Ellington Orchestra in “King Fought the Battle of 'Bam” for the historical revue My People, dedicated to Dr. King.

His strong character left an impression on many who met him. He had a major influence on the career of Lena Horne, who wanted to marry him and considers him to have been the love of her life. Strayhorn used his classical background in guiding her singing technique. They eventually recorded songs together.

Strayhorn was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 1964, which eventually caused his death in 1967. Finally succumbing in the early morning on May 31, 1967, in the company of his partner, Bill Grove and not as it was often falsely reported in the arms of Lena Horne. His ashes were scattered in the Hudson River by a gathering of his closest friends.

While in hospital, he had submitted his final composition to Ellington. "Blood Count", which was used as the first track to Ellington's memorial album for Strayhorn, "…And His Mother Called Him Bill". The record was recorded several months after Strayhorn's death. The last track of the album is a spontaneous solo version of "Lotus Blossom" performed by Ellington, who just sat at the piano and played for his friend while the band packed up after the formal end of the recording session (they can be heard in the background).

Although Billy Strayhorn’s distinguished songs, arrangements and virtuosity at the piano gave him status among musicians, few others realized what he had achieved for Ellington as his tireless co-writer and arranger. And even fewer still appreciated that this man had created some of the most important and enduring American music of the 20th century.

Something inside me changed when I saw Ellington onstage
—like I hadn’t been living life 'til then. —Billy Strayhorn