Duke Ellington's Literary Sources

Abstract

of American History is a paperback copy of George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra and an accompanying charming note by a lady who advises, Never do what I have just done: buy someone a book to read and then mark it all to hell with what you take to be important... an act of worst impudence. For, it assumes either (a) guy can't read for himself or (b) your reading of work is only reading.... Forgive me. One wonders whether Ellington did read book. Which leads to other questions: How much a reader was this man who composed music informed by curiously disparate types of literature? To what degree did his literature-based works derive from his private reading and attendant independent conceptualizations? And how and to what extent, if any, did Ellington's friendships and acquaintances with literary people influence his creativity? Certainly he knew such literary artists as Ralph Ellison' and Langston Hughes. He was a personal friend of Albert Murray, a literary authority, aesthetics and culture theorist, and author. It would not be inaccurate to characterize Murray as Ellington's on-call if not resident literary expert and intellectual,2 whom Ellington is reported to have described as the unsquarest person I know.3 Given Ellington's life-long, constant travel and hectic schedule, it would seem that he would have had little time for any reading, even