A year later, Gus Greenlee sold the Crawfords to a new owner in Toledo and resigned from the Negro National League. He suffered another blow when his prize boxer, John Henry Lewis, finally got a shot at Joe Louis and went down in the first round, ending his career. But his mouthpiece’s moroseness notwithstanding, Gus Greenlee had achieved much by attempting big things in Pittsburgh. He had made heroes of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. He had reorganized black baseball, revolutionized its marketing, and created the wildly popular “East-West Classic.” And he had gotten the worst but also the best out of Cum Posey, a debt that Posey acknowledged once Greenlee left the league. Over the next decade, Greenlee’s health would steadily decline, but his ambition never would, and before long he would be back, joining Wendell Smith as a key player in the events that changed baseball forever in another ballpark—Ebbets Field, in Brooklyn.
When they finally met and became instant soul mates, one of the first things Billy Strayhorn and Lena Horne talked about was their mutual ties to Pittsburgh.
MUSIC
5
BILLY AND LENA
IN THE FALL OF 1935, a young Courier reporter named Ralph Koger walked into the newsroom carrying an armful of posters. A wiry go-getter whose nickname was “Projoe,” Koger had started working for the paper as a student at Westinghouse High School. In addition to running track, debating, and editing the yearbook, he filed stories to the Courier on events such as the meetings of the local NAACP youth group. Now, just two years after graduating, Koger had taken a second job as publicist for a new theatrical production called Fantastic Rhythm. According to the posters, which Koger posted around the Courier and in stores up and down the Hill, it would be a “Musical Comedy Revue” in the style of Shuffle Along, Broadway’s first all-black extravaganza. The show would feature “50 Beautiful Shapely Girls,” an “All-Star Cast” with the city’s fleetest tap dancer and one of its loveliest cabaret singers, and the popular Moonlight Harbor Band. For the show’s two-night run at Westinghouse High, Koger arranged to sell tickets at the Courier, Ramsey’s Barber Shop, and Lincoln Drug Store—at prices of 26 cents for adults, 16 cents for children, and 47 cents for reserved seats.
More remarkable yet, the composer and lyricist of Fantastic Rhythm was even younger than Koger. Still months away from his twentieth birthday, Billy Strayhorn had only graduated from Westinghouse High School himself the year before, in the class of 1934. As reserved as Koger was outgoing, Strayhorn stood only a few inches over five feet, wore owlish wire-rimmed glasses, and talked in a soft voice that sometimes barely rose above a whisper. But in his four years at Westinghouse, Strayhorn had emerged as the star of the school’s renowned Music Department, a whiz not only at playing the piano but composing original music and arranging scores as well.
For an annual senior class talent contest called “Stunt Week,” Strayhorn had written a collection of songs called “Musical Divorces.” It was so successful that the next year’s class invited him back to compose more numbers. This time Strayhorn outdid himself, creating a twenty-minute skit featuring twenty students and a live band that he called Fantastic Rhythm. The conductor of the Moonlight Harbor Orchestra, a debonair operator known as “Boggy” Fowler, saw the revue and was so impressed that he offered to help turn it into a full-scale production, with professional singers, dancers, and costumes. Once the cast of fifty was chosen, Strayhorn spent four months rehearsing them in his family’s cramped four-room wooden house in a back alley of Homewood, bringing the performers into the house in shifts because the space was so tight.
On the second day of November, a sellout crowd filled Westinghouse High’s 1,200-seat auditorium for the premiere. Although the plot wasn’t much to speak of—a flimsy story about a group of newspaper reporters that served mostly to link song-and-dance numbers—the tunes sparkled with musical sophistication and the lyrics with humorous winks at life in Smoketown. The opening number, “We Are the Reporters,” was a jaunty send-up of office politics at the Courier. A blues number called “Let Nature Take Its Course” spoofed the loose sexual morality of Wiley Avenue. Two love songs, “Something to Live For” and “My Little Brown Book,” were as polished as the ballads heard on the dance floors of the Savoy Ballroom and the Pythian Temple on the Hill. In the finale, the entire cast tap-danced to the show’s title song, a homage to George Gershwin that also suggested the influence of Fletcher Henderson.
Despite a torrential rainstorm, another sellout crowd showed up the following night. The show received a rave review in the Courier and generated such enthusiastic word of mouth that Fantastic Rhythm continued to be staged periodically in schools and theaters across western Pennsylvania over the next two years. As the curtain fell on the first two performances, Strayhorn stepped out shyly from the orchestra, where he accompanied Fowler’s band on the piano, to acknowledge the raucous applause for the biggest homegrown theatrical sensation black Pittsburgh had seen in years.
In his youth, his mother called Billy Strayhorn her “miracle baby” because he came so close to death as a newborn. Lillian Young was a dignified, studious only child who grew up in the small town of Mars Hill, North Carolina, and attended a Baptist school for women in Raleigh. At eighteen she met James Strayhorn, the twenty-year-old son of a well-to-do couple in nearby Hillsborough. As moody and restless as Lillian was poised, James had dropped out of school after the eighth grade and begun working for a living. Once they were married, he took Lillian away to Dayton, Ohio, the home of the Wright brothers, where James hoped to get a job in the electricity business.
Over the next three years, Lillian gave birth to a son named James Jr. but lost two other children. So when a fourth child was born with rickets, she superstitiously identified him only as “Baby Boy Strayhorn” on his birth certificate. For months afterward, Lillian massaged the child every night with greasy dishwater to strengthen his crooked limbs. When he was a year old, the family moved again. James had lost his job as a wirepuller and was working as a janitor, and in frustration he took Lillian and their two sons to live with his sister in New Jersey. Four years later, they came west again to the Pittsburgh area, moving from town to town along the Monongahela River as James struggled to hold a steady job. Finally, in 1926, the Strayhorns settled in Homewood, the mixed neighborhood east of the Hill District, in a flimsy wooden house in the alley known as Tiago Street Rear. By now, Baby Boy Strayhorn had a name: his mother called him Bill and to everyone else he was known as Billy.
Having failed at other work, James Strayhorn was laboring as a hod carrier, hauling heavy metal plates covered with plaster to bricklayers on construction sites. He became a nasty drunk, and he was particularly cruel toward his small, introspective second son. When Billy started wearing glasses, his father mocked him, stepping on the spectacles when Billy put them down from reading. Lillian tried to shield her son from his father’s tirades and beatings, but there was only so much she could do. So when Billy was eight, she started sending him over the summer months and during school holidays to stay with her husband’s parents in North Carolina.
A descendant of whiskey distillers who had flourished after the Civil War, Jobe Strayhorn lived with his wife, Lilly, in a large Victorian house in the black section of Hillsborough. They were wealthy enough to own a Victrola, and Lilly delighted in playing recordings for her grandson when he visited. Her most prized possession was a polished upright piano that sat in the parlor. A devout Baptist who played the piano at her church, Lilly passed the evenings filling the parlor with religious music as Billy listened and watched. Eventually he was able to sit down at the keyboard and imitate Lilly’s fingerings to play entire songs by himself. The first song he mastered was “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder,” one of his mother’s favorites.
At age eleven, Billy returned from North Carolina to Pittsburgh with a grand plan: he intended to buy his own piano. To save up for it, he took a job delivering newspapers. One of his routes took him to Shadyside, the predominantly Jewish neighborhood west of Homew
ood, where he dropped off papers at a pharmacy called the Pennfield Drug Store. Seeing how familiar Billy was with addresses in the neighborhood, the druggist began tipping him to make deliveries. Billy proved so adept at that task that the owner gave him clerical chores and let him fill in behind the soda fountain. Before long, Billy had squirreled away enough money to purchase an old player piano that no one else wanted because its roll was broken. He installed the bulky upright in a corner of the Strayhorn shanty on Tioga Street Rear and thrilled his mother by hammering out the spirited chords of “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.”
With the cash Billy earned on his paper route and working at Pennfield Drug Store, he went to Volkwein’s Music Store, Pittsburgh’s largest, to buy sheet music and to take piano lessons. In his authoritative biography of Strayhorn, cultural critic David Hajdu would identify his first piano instructor briefly as “Charlotte Catlin, a black teacher associated with Volkwein’s.” But Charlotte Enty Catlin was no ordinary music store teacher. Of the many fine black pianists in Pittsburgh, she was among the most accomplished and most active. Known for the distinctive way she wore her hair—parted in the middle, with large circular braids covering her ears—Catlin was also descended from two of the oldest and most distinguished Negro families in the region.
Charlotte’s father, a contractor, had the given name of “Clever”—perhaps for the energy and intelligence he exuded at birth—and later became known as “Frank.” His American lineage traced back to Tobias Enty, a native of the Bahamas who arrived by boat to Philadelphia in 1783. Tobias Enty I married twice, the second time to a woman identified by family historians as “dark-skinned,” indicating that she was either black or mulatto. He fought in the War of 1812 and was rewarded with a plot of land in Schuyler County, north of Philadelphia. One of his sons, Peter Enty, set off to make his fortune as an engineer and miner in the coal and ore-rich hills of Western Pennsylvania and had sixteen children of his own, one of whom was Charlotte’s grandfather, Tobias Enty II.
Charlotte’s mother’s family story also dated back the 1780s. Born Mary Jane Little, she was said to be descended from a white slave owner from Virginia named William Little who had inherited land from George Washington’s brother. One of William’s slave offspring, James Edward Little, either escaped or was freed and made his way to the Georgetown area of Washington, D.C., by the mid-1850s. James Edward fought in a colored unit of the Union Army during the Civil War and moved to Pittsburgh after his discharge. A hard-drinking brawler of a stevedore in the postwar years, he eventually became a minister, married a widow from Virginia, and had four children with her, one of whom was Mary Jane. The family moved onto Tioga Street in Homewood—just steps from the back alley where Billy Strayhorn’s family settled—and Reverend Little helped found the Homewood AME Zion Church and arrange for the construction of its sanctuary on the corner of Tioga and Dunfermline Streets.
Along with industry and faith, the Little family was known for its musical prowess. Charlotte’s uncle, George Little, served as organist for the Homewood AME Zion Church, and later gave the first live musical performance on KDKA, America’s oldest broadcast radio station, born out of George Westinghouse’s patents for transmitters and receivers. By the age of twelve, Charlotte’s mother was playing the organ at the Bethel AME Church, the oldest in the Hill District. By her early twenties, Charlotte herself was beginning a career as a soloist and accompanist in black churches across the city, at the Carnegie Recital Hall and other prestigious concert venues, and in the homes of white aristocrats from Pointe Breeze to Allegheny City on the North Side.
The man Charlotte married, Charles Catlin, had never finished high school but had a secure and well-paying job for a black man of his time, as a custodian for the city post office. Charlotte herself earned a BS in Music from Carnegie Tech, and went on to take postgraduate instruction on the pipe organ. In her early twenties, she met with seven other local graduates at the Centre Avenue YMCA on the Hill and founded the Pittsburgh chapter of the black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. Catlin became a regular at the Loendi Club and a close friend and bridge partner of the grande dames of the Courier—Jesse Vann, Daisy Lampkin, and Julia Bumry Jones. By the time Billy Strayhorn was taking lessons from her, she had moved with her husband and parents to a home on Monticello Street, a block away from the Vanns. Billy would continue to study with Charlotte until he was nineteen. During that time, she was in a position to expose him not only to an ever-widening musical repertoire but also to the lifestyle of Pittsburgh’s “blue vein society,” as the well-to-do and mostly light-skinned residents of enclaves such as the Upper Hill and Homewood were sometimes called.
By studying with Charlotte Catlin, Strayhorn also became connected to a musical tradition that stretched back for a century in black Pittsburgh and was unique for its blend of classical, religious, and jazz influences. Like the Catlin and Little families, many of the city’s earliest Negro settlers had been freed or former house slaves who came from northern and eastern regions of the Old South where there was a long tradition of blacks learning to read sheet music and play classical instruments. By the turn of the century, Pittsburgh boasted two Negro classical orchestras. At the city’s many black churches, choir members banded together in groups of “jubilee singers” that performed for black and white audiences alike. One of the most successful of those groups was formed by a talented young migrant from North Carolina, Mary Cardwell Dawson, who later went on to found America’s first Negro opera company in Homewood.
Of all the classic instruments, none was more revered by the early migrants than the piano. Every year, the social calendar of the “Old Pittsburgher” elite was full of piano recitals at the Loendi Club and the many Baptist and AME churches around town. Then, shortly after World War I, a man arrived on a steamboat from New Orleans and began to teach Pittsburgh musicians how to blend classical music with ragtime jazz. A slender, balding gentleman who drank his gin from a water glass, Fate Marable would install himself for the winter at the nightclubs of the Hill and tutor anyone willing to accept his methods. Those included learning to read music and practicing Bach and Beethoven as well as Jelly Roll Morton. (Among Marable’s disciples was Louis Armstrong, who played in his riverboat band as a teenager. However, it was said that Marable initially turned Armstrong away until he learned to read sheet music.)
As the Great Migration gathered force, pianos became status symbols for new arrivals as well. In Duquesne, a steel town south of Pittsburgh, a coal dock foreman named James Hines bought a parlor organ for his wife. She taught their three-year-old son, Earl, to play a few notes, and he caught on so quickly that they traded in the organ for a piano so that he could take lessons. When Earl mastered everything a kindly Negro lady from the town of McKeesport had to teach him, his father arranged for him to take lessons from a German immigrant named Von Holz, a taskmaster who demanded that Earl learn to read music and practice Czerny exercises and Chopin etudes.
When Earl reached high school age, his father was determined to give him the best musical education available, so he set his sights on a new school that was the talk of Pittsburgh. Opened in 1916, Schenley High School had cost a million and a half dollars to build, more than any public secondary school in America up to that point. It was located in Oakland, east of the Hill, on a large plot of land donated by Mary Schenley, the heir to a Pittsburgh real estate fortune. Designed in the shape of a triangle by one of the city’s top architects, Edward Stotz, the school’s Indiana limestone facade stood four stories tall and spanned over 150 yards. It had 180 rooms, including 40 classrooms, 11 science labs, 2 gyms, a 1,600-seat auditorium, and 2 music rooms.
Schenley High admitted a small number of black students every year, roughly a tenth of every grade. James Hines had a sister-in-law who lived in East Liberty, so he sent Earl to live with her so that he could attend Schenley. For the next two years Earl studied classical music in school, while his Aunt Sadie’s friends introduced him to jazz. One of her admirers was Lois
Deppe, Pittsburgh’s best-known crooner. Hearing that Earl could play the piano, Deppe handed him the sheet music to a new Irving Berlin tune, “I’ll See You in C-U-B-A.” When Earl played the song flawlessly by sight, an astonished Deppe asked Sadie’s permission to let the youngster spend the summer playing with his band at the Leader House, Gus Greenlee’s speakeasy on the Hill.
For Earl, the summer at the Leader House was an education in more ways than one. He learned to hustle pool, to smoke cigars, and to keep company with Wylie Avenue streetwalkers. But he also continued to seek knowledge from older musicians, spending much of his $12-a-week salary on gin, beer, and Camel cigarettes that he traded for lessons. One pianist taught Earl the slide piano trick of stretching the left hand to play “tenths,” or chords spanning two octaves, with a thumb and pinkie finger. Another showed him how to play melodies in between, using his middle fingers. Soon Earl was playing tenths, tremolos, and melodies all at once, creating a thunderous sound on his upright piano that carried over Deppe’s megaphone and the other instruments in the band. He called it his “trumpet style.”
Smoketown Page 15