When Earl returned to Schenley High the next fall, he could outplay any pianist in the school. Concluding that he was “a kind of genius” who had little more to learn from them, Earl recalled, his instructors blessed his decision to leave school to play full-time with Deppe. Over the next few years, the Deppe band toured across Pennsylvania and Ohio and performed for Pittsburgh’s KDKA radio station, marking another of the first occasions that Negro musicians were heard live over the airwaves.
Eventually Hines and Deppe parted ways, and another friend of Aunt Sadie’s, pianist Eubie Blake, encouraged Earl to leave Pittsburgh. “If I catch you here again I’m going to take this cane and wrap it around your head,” Blake said. So when Harry Collins, a club owner on the Hill, announced that he was opening a new nightspot in Chicago, Sadie encouraged Earl to follow him. “If you run into trouble,” she said, “you can always wire home, and I’ll see you get money to come on back.”
A decade later, Earl Hines did come back—as a national star. In 1932, he was booked for an entire week at the Stanley Theatre, the largest concert hall in Pittsburgh. By then Hines had spent four years as the headliner at the Grand Terrace Café, the top “black and tan club” in Chicago, owned by Al Capone and his brother Ralph. He had also forged a musical partnership with Louis Armstrong, who had traveled north from New Orleans to become the toast of Chicago. They had met playing pool at a musicians’ union hall, and Armstrong had invited Hines to record with his Hot Five band. The result was a string of sides for the Okeh label—“Weather Bird,” “West End Blues,” “Tight Like This,” “Two Deuces,” “Beau Koo Jack,” and “Muggles”—that were instantly hailed as among the best jazz performances yet to be captured on records.
In the years after Earl Hines left Pittsburgh, two other exceptional prodigies emerged from its competitive world of young black pianists. At the age of six, a bubbly, dark-skinned girl named Mary Elfrieda Scruggs arrived from Georgia with her older sister Mamie and their mother, Virginia Riser, who had left the girls’ father, a drifter named Joseph Scruggs. Mary Lou, as she was called, had learned her way around a keyboard by the age of four, sitting on the lap of her mother, known as Ginny, as she played a reed organ in their shotgun shack. When the family moved to Pittsburgh, they settled in the East Liberty neighborhood and Ginny married a professional hustler named Fletcher Burley. Burley started taking Mary Lou to gambling dens and pool halls, where she would play the upright in the corner for tips that the two split between them. She became known as “the piano girl of East Liberty” and was in such demand that she could charge a dollar an hour to perform at Saturday hops and at the rent parties, or “chitlin’ struts,” that neighbors threw to collect bill-paying money.
In the early 1920s, another Pittsburgh high school—Westinghouse—became the first in the city, and perhaps in the country, to cost more than $2 million. After issuing a $3 million bond offering to upgrade Pittsburgh’s school system, city officials opted to spend two thirds of it turning the Homewood school into an early version of a magnet academy that could accommodate talented students from across the city. The expansion included erecting a new limestone edifice that spanned a full city block, constructing a 1,200-seat auditorium and flanking the school with an athletic field big enough to host track meets and football games. Like Schenley, Westinghouse also admitted Negro students from its earliest days, and by the end of the decade they included honors students, star athletes, and participants in dozens of after-school clubs.
In ninth grade, Mary Lou Scruggs transferred from her school in East Liberty to Westinghouse. She caught the attention of teachers who took her to hear opera and concert orchestras, to play for University of Pittsburgh faculty, and to perform at the homes of the Mellon family, for whom two of her aunts worked as maids. Mary Lou left Westinghouse in her sophomore year, however, to help support her family. She spent a summer touring with a vaudeville act sponsored by the Theatre Owners Bookers Association, known by its initials TOBA and jokingly referred to as “Tough on Black Asses.” When Fletcher Burley fell ill, Mary Lou went on the road and joined a band called “John Williams and the Syncopators.” At age seventeen, she married the bandleader and took the name by which she would be known from then on: Mary Lou Williams.
A decade later, another self-taught piano phenomenon began commuting from his home in East Liberty to Westinghouse High in Homewood. Erroll Garner was the baby of a middle-class, music-loving family that worshipped at the St. James AME Church on Euclid Avenue, where both his parents sang in the choir. The Garners had an upright piano and a Victrola in the parlor of their brick row house, and by age three Erroll could put both hands to the keyboard and reproduce tunes he heard on the record player. When his older sisters started studying piano with a teacher named Madge Bowman—one of the most respected in the city, along with Charlotte Catlin and Mary Cardwell Dawson—Erroll would watch them and then re-create everything he had heard as soon as Miss Bowman left. Eventually he took a few lessons from her but stopped because he could play so well by ear that he had no patience for learning how to read music.
When Erroll arrived at Westinghouse High, teachers didn’t quite know what to make of him. He had no mind for academic subjects, and scored so poorly on intelligence tests that he was placed in a remedial reading, writing, and math classes. But he would happily spend hours in the music room, playing the piano from memory and mastering the tuba by ear. He liked to watch the school orchestra rehearse, and one day, as they were preparing for the annual year-end concert, the pianist couldn’t get the hang of a difficult passage. The other students urged the faculty adviser, Carl McVicker, to let Garner have a try, and he improvised a new passage that was so much better than the original that the band adopted it and invited him to share the piano chair.
Of all the talented musicians who attended Westinghouse High in that era, however, Billy Strayhorn stood out. McVicker, the head of the music department, had arrived from a small high school in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1927. A tall, imposing man with a wavy mane of hair, he began teaching jazz as well as traditional music. He organized a swing band in addition to the school orchestra, horrifying some older teachers. McVicker would recall that at first Strayhorn refused to join the swing band, envisioning himself only as a classical pianist. But under McVicker’s tutelage, Billy soon became fascinated with the art of writing and arranging music and composing for jazz instruments.
The department’s other stalwart was Jane Patton Alexander, a stern taskmistress who taught music theory. To drill the principles of harmony into his head, Strayhorn recalled, Miss Alexander made him learn chord progressions over all twelve keys. Billy said that he “hated” the exercise but that it proved “invaluable” once he started to write his own music. Eventually he became so expert at music theory that Miss Alexander would ask Billy to fill in for her whenever she was called away from her classroom.
By his senior year, Billy was first pianist for the Westinghouse school orchestra. For its spring recital, he led the orchestra in Edvard Grieg’s demanding Piano Concerto in A Minor. He was also starting to write his own original music. For his graduation ceremony in the winter of 1934, he wrote and performed an entire “Concerto for Piano and Percussion.” Outside of school, he was also getting his first taste of appearing in front of large public audiences as the pianist for the Orchestra Club, a twenty-five-piece ensemble that Mr. McVicker selected from among his best students to play at hotel banquets and other social functions around Pittsburgh.
After graduating from Westinghouse, Billy spent much of the next two years writing and producing Fantastic Rhythm, his impressive professional debut as a theatrical songwriter and lyricist. But his first love remained classical music. When he was nineteen, the National Association of Negro Musicians held its annual convention in Pittsburgh. The three-day gathering included a morning devoted to performances by young artists, and Strayhorn chose to play a solo piano piece he had rehearsed with Charlotte Catlin. Called “Lotus Land,” it was an impressio
nist tone poem by a minor British composer named Cyril Scott who was sometimes referred to as “the English Debussy.” Continuing to work at Pennfield Drug Store, serving soda and ice cream behind the counter and doing other odd jobs, Strayhorn saved up enough money to enroll in a small private conservatory called the Pittsburgh Music Institute so he could study with its highly regarded director, Charles N. Boyd. But when Boyd died of a heart attack in his second term, Billy dropped out.
In his early twenties now, Billy seemed resigned to the life of a soda jerk by day and a musician for hire by night. He became friendly with two white musicians, a clarinetist and a drummer, and they formed a trio called the Mad Hatters that played Benny Goodman tunes in dance halls around town. He earned extra pocket money writing arrangements for white swing orchestras. But privately, Billy hadn’t given up his ambition to compose his own songs.
In his spare time, Billy began to work on a solo piano piece he called “Life Is Lonely” that combined the Debussy air of “Lotus Land” with blue note inflections. When he later wrote and recorded it under another title, “Lush Life,” it would be seen as a bitter ode to heartbreak, born of Billy’s despair of ever finding happiness as a gay man. What would be less noticed was the song’s evocation of another longing Billy had observed growing up in Pittsburgh: the drive for worldly success that romantic urges can undermine (“Romance is mush, stifling those who strive . . .”).
At the time, Billy had no intention of recording the song. He viewed it as a little something he played for his friends, or when performing in quiet moments in nightspots around the city. One of those places was a small club tucked in the corner of a big Victorian house on Apple Street, not far from the Strayhorn home in Homewood. By day, the house was taken over by Mary Cardwell Dawson, the jubilee singer who ran a music school that she would later expand into the National Negro Opera Company. But by night, it was known as “the Mystery Mansion,” a club that was rented out for special occasions and also served as a quiet destination for patrons who weren’t ready to go home after the bars on Wylie Avenue closed, the sort of place where a young pianist could soothe the melancholy of lonely hearts under the influence of “too many through the day twelve o’clock tales.”
Like everyone who worked there, Billy knew that the owner of the Mystery House was Woogie Harris, the top man in Gus Greenlee’s gambling empire. What he didn’t know yet was how Gus Greenlee would help change his life, or that he would one day become best friends with another musical prodigy who had just moved to the Hill to live with her father, also a key lieutenant in Big Red’s numbers operation.
• • •
TEDDY HORNE WAS AN unlikely racketeer. He had moved to Pittsburgh from New York City, where his parents belonged to the light-skinned black upper crust. His father, Edwin Horn, was a Native American mulatto—half-British, half-Blackfoot—who had been raised in Indiana and become a successful journalist and storeowner in Tennessee. His mother, Cora Calhoun, was the eldest daughter of a former butler to the white Southern Calhoun dynasty who after the Civil War started his own businesses in Georgia and Alabama. After meeting in Birmingham, Edwin and Cora had come north to escape Jim Crow. They added an “e” to the end of their name for extra refinement, and moved to the then comfortably middle-class Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Through connections with Tammany Hall, Edwin got work as a fire inspector, and Cora became a full-time volunteer for the NAACP, the Urban League, and other worthy causes.
The Hornes of Brooklyn had four sons. The eldest, Erroll, enlisted with the Buffalo Soldiers in World War I and died of influenza at the front. The third, Frank, was an eye doctor and part-time poet who got a job in FDR’s second administration. The youngest, Burke, served as an Army sergeant during World War II and was briefly engaged to the first Negro woman accepted into the Navy’s female volunteer WAVES program.
Of the four, the second, Edwin Jr., known as “Teddy,” was the most handsome—and the most rebellious. Before the age of nine, he had talked his way into a job as a page at the Astor Hotel in Manhattan. As a teen, he gambled with Dutch Schultz’s henchmen in Harlem and was rumored to have made money on the Black Sox fix. To his parents’ dismay, he skipped college and instead married Edna Scrotton, another fair-skinned, middle-class Brooklynite who had her own unconventional dreams of becoming an actress. But the impetuous union lasted only a few years, just long enough for Edna to give birth to a baby girl, an event her father missed for a high-stakes card game.
The baby was named Lena, after Cora’s beautiful younger sister. Like her great-aunt, she had soft ringlets, high cheekbones, and bright, wide-set eyes. But with divorced and undependable parents, she was fated to endure a lonely, itinerant childhood. First she was left in the care of her strict grandmother and kindly grandfather in Brooklyn. Then her mother snatched Lena away and took her on the road while Edna tried to make a living on the stage. When that became impossible, Lena was sent to live with her uncle Frank, at the time a dean at a Negro academy in the South.
Throughout these early years, Lena’s father remained a dashing but mysterious figure. Teddy Horne had moved west, she knew, but for years she wouldn’t see him. Then he would suddenly pop up out of nowhere—to attend a prizefight in New York, or on a road trip in a gleaming Pierce-Arrow convertible. Mostly, Lena knew her father by the expensive gifts he sent her at Christmastime: a winter fur coat, or a giant “Mama” doll from the Effanbee company.
In fact, Teddy Horne had fled to Seattle, where he married a second wife named Irene. From there they moved to Chicago, then to Detroit, before eventually settling in Pittsburgh. To some, it might have seemed an oddly provincial choice given everything Teddy had going for him: his elite pedigree, his New York worldliness, his easy charm and the angular good looks of a darker-skinned Fredric March. But Teddy found he could make good money in Smoketown. He took over the Belmont Hotel in the Hill District and turned its back room into a gambling den he called “the Bucket of Blood.” Just as appealing was the seamless way his two worlds intersected in Pittsburgh. In older cities such as New York, Boston, and Washington, the Negro aristocracy looked down on mobsters, as the Hornes of Brooklyn had on Teddy’s Harlem friends. But in Pittsburgh, all worlds met on Wylie Avenue. The racketeers were part of the elite. Men like Teddy Horne and Woogie Harris could run numbers out of the Belmont Hotel and the Crystal Barber Shop by day, then go around the corner and dine at the Loendi Club at night.
By the time Lena was sixteen, her grandparents had passed away and she was living in the Bronx with her mother and a new stepfather, a hot-tempered white Cuban called Mike, for Miguel. They had no money but a big dream for their daughter: to turn her into a nightclub star. Edna took Lena to audition at the Cotton Club, where she landed a job in the chorus line. Before long, Lena had dropped out of school so she could sleep during the day and work until four in the morning, while her mother sat vigil in the dressing room. One day, Lena was pulled out of the chorus to perform duets with a male singer. When her untrained voice became hoarse by the third show, her mother demanded that she start taking singing lessons.
While Lena was performing in Harlem, Teddy Horne showed up one night and watched her from a stage side seat. It was a double surprise, since Negroes were rarely allowed in the audience at the Cotton Club. Lena would often encounter “friends” of her father’s in Harlem who said they had been told to look after her, but now she saw how powerful those connections were. During his brief stay, Teddy also treated her to another surprise—without her mother’s knowledge. He took her to New Jersey, to a town called Pompton Plains, where the boxer Joe Louis was training. Lena watched Joe work out and met a friend of her father’s from Pittsburgh, a sportswriter named Ches Washington who was covering Louis for The Pittsburgh Courier.
After Lena got a bit part on Broadway, Edna and Mike decided she was destined for bigger things. Though she was under contract to the Cotton Club, they arranged for a singing tryout with the bandleader Noble Sissle, then skipped town wit
h Lena when she got the job. Lena hardly had the voice of the top female band singers of the day: Duke Ellington’s Ivie Anderson, Chick Webb’s Ella Fitzgerald, or Count Basie’s Billie Holiday. But she had the elegant diction and near-Caucasian looks that Sissle craved for his slow-tempo repertoire. Soon Lena was touring the country playing as many garden parties as roadhouses. But when the Sissle band reached Boston, an incident occurred that proved the final straw in Lena’s contentious relationship with her mother and stepfather.
The Ritz-Carlton Hotel had booked the Noble Sissle Society Orchestra to perform on its roof, the first Negro band ever to be hired for that venue. But the hotel insisted the band come in through the back door. With Cuban machismo, Mike declared that this was no way to treat a young lady like Lena. He demanded that Sissle make a stink. Sissle shrugged. There was nothing he could do, he explained. It was how it was for Negroes in America. Mike flew into a rage, cursing the bandleader in Spanish. Lena was livid—and humiliated. Life on the road with Mike and Edna had come to feel like prison.
Shortly afterward, Teddy Horne surfaced again with what seemed like a way out. He came to see Lena perform with the Sissle orchestra in Cleveland, and brought along a young friend from Pittsburgh. The man’s name was Louis Jones, and he was a minister’s son who had a college degree and worked as a clerk in the Pittsburgh coroner’s office. Lena was immediately struck by his good looks and gentlemanly manner, so unlike the coarseness she saw in the entertainment world. She grew to like Jones even more during a visit to Pittsburgh a few months later, in November 1936, and by the end of the year she had resolved to quit show business and move to Pittsburgh to be his wife.
Mike was furious and Edna took ill, but Lena had made up her mind. On the second day of 1937, she returned to Pittsburgh and moved into the Belmont Hotel. Lena was still only nineteen, and Teddy refused to let her go near the ballroom, but she could hear the Lindy-hopping from her room upstairs. Within two weeks she and Jones had applied for a wedding license, and when it came through five days later they decided to get married on the spot.
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