by David Hajdu
“Martin called once on a Saturday,” said Marian Logan. “Strays was here and I was in the kitchen, and the phone rang. Martin said, ‘Marian, we’re having trouble.’ I said, ‘Leader, what’s wrong?’ He said, ‘Well, we’re running back and forth from Selma to Montgomery, and we can’t take the buses. We need some cars.’ I said, ‘I don’t know what I can do about that, Martin.’ And Strays came in, and I put my hand over the phone, and I told him what was going on with Martin, and he got on the phone. He said, ‘I’ve got an idea, Martin. Let’s run a raffle. We’ll get somebody to contribute a station wagon.’ Well, that turned out not to be necessary—somebody else donated a couple of cars. But until then, for a few days Strays and Martin were working on their raffle. Working for the movement made Strays stronger. It brought out the best in him. Of course, he always brought out the best in other people, and he gave me the strength I needed to work for the cause. I went to Atlanta to help Martin integrate a hotel, and not everybody thought it was a smart idea, including Ellington. He was afraid I was going to get hurt. He was truly worried for me. He said, ‘Bridie Mae, what the fuck are you doing going to Atlanta? You’re going to get your ass killed.’ But Strays never criticized. He was always supportive. ‘If that’s what you want to do, Baby Doll, go ahead and do it.’ I did, and Strays called me every single night to make sure I was all right.”
Assuming his most-practiced role, a quiet source of others’ strength, Strayhorn offered the same kind of support to his dear friend Lena Horne as she strove to develop her own voice on behalf of black consciousness. Derided by some black activists for her “white” appearance and her dormancy in the early days of the civil rights movement, she recovered self-confidence through Strayhorn’s empathy. “It was a big upheaval in my life,” recalled Horne. “Billy was the source of my consciousness raising, not about being black but about being me and understanding that I was somebody who both blacks and whites could accept in some ways but could not accept in others, because of who I was. I had to learn to accept myself first, and that’s what Billy helped me do. He taught me not to hate myself, not to feel a lot of guilt. Billy was like a piece of me, and he knew how wretched I felt. Stokely Carmichael and some others had talked terribly about ‘blue-eyed black folks’ and how rotten they were, and my son had great blue-green eyes. It was a time of making middle-class blacks feel like shit. Billy soothed me—‘I know what you’re like. You know what you’re like. What you’ve done, what you’ve done without. This too will pass.’ He was marvelous. He was there as my backbone. He knew that I was suffering for my people. They didn’t know, because they had been separated from me by MGM and the record companies, by people who said, ‘Oh, she’s not really black. She’s different.’ Billy knew my insides. He knew that I had to expose myself. He knew I had to be unafraid. He knew me and knew my hunger, and he sorted the whole thing out for me.” Bolstered by Strayhorn, Lena Horne decided to undertake her first initiative of public acclamation for black rights early in 1963. “When I said, ‘I’ve got to go, I’ve got to go South, I have to,’ he said, ‘Yes, of course you have.’ He said he’d go with me, and he helped me make the plans.”
On Easter Sunday, April 14, 1963, James Strayhorn died of a heart attack at age seventy-four. He had suffered from arteriosclerosis, likely accelerated by years of cigarettes and liquor. Billy flew in for the memorial services and sat on his mother’s right, his older brother, Jimmy, on her left, in the front row of folding metal chairs arranged before the casket at Hopewell’s Funeral Home on Tioga Street in Homewood. Within the natural effusion of grief, there was a strain of content in this loss, however. “That man put Mama and everybody through an awful lot,” Lillian Strayhorn Dicks said. “Everybody sort of let go a big sigh when it was all over.” Billy stayed in town a few days to help comfort his mother and, with Jimmy, to attend to the legal and financial details. On his return to New York, Strayhorn seemed little affected by his father’s death; he didn’t even tell most of his friends. Among those he did, such as Cookie Cook and Honi Coles (his other “Father”), Strayhorn seemed nonplussed. “I don’t think he had felt anything for his father for years,” said Coles. “I would be exaggerating to say [the death] was a crucial event in his life. I have read, yes, that that is what happens for many homosexual men—when their father dies, they let loose. Strayhorn wasn’t that way. He wasn’t that way. He let go of his father a long time before I met him. He had other father figures—Duke, I was one of them. If Duke had died, now that would have been a different thing.”
Ready after months of planning, Lena Horne and Billy Strayhorn left for the South on June 5, 1963. They traveled by train to Atlanta, first for a meeting with the twenty-three-year-old protest organizer Julian Bond; both Horne and Strayhorn made donations to his organization, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. “Julian, Julian—he had such a mind,” said Horne. “He and Billy talked so deeply, without emotion yet completely from the heart.” The following morning, Horne and Strayhorn flew to their primary destination, Jackson, Mississippi, where the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was preparing to stage its largest rally to date, in defiance of a state court injunction barring racial protests. They were greeted at Hawkins Field airport by the NAACP’s Jackson representative, Medgar Evers, a thirty-seven-year-old former insurance salesman. “We met with Medgar, and we said, ‘What can we do?’ And he said, ‘Well, we’re having a big rally tomorrow. Will you come?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Will you sing?’ And Billy said, ‘Yes.’ He made the commitment to Medgar. He made me do it, and he taught me how because I didn’t know what to sing. I didn’t know the songs. Billy had to teach me ‘Amazing Grace’ and tell me how to do it.” Evers arranged for Horne and Strayhorn to stay overnight in one of his friends’ homes, apologizing for not welcoming them into his own house, which, he told them, had been damaged by firebombs. “He felt terrible that we couldn’t stay with them,” said Horne. “He said there was debris everywhere, and he felt bad about the impression it would make on us.” On the evening of June 7 at the Jackson County fairground, its perimeter outlined with barbed wire, some two thousand supporters applauded as the regional secretary of the NAACP, Ruby Hurley, introduced Lena Horne. Strayhorn gave her a squeeze of the hand, and Horne walked up to the microphone to sing, a cappella. (Evers, noticing three white men smoking cigarettes in the front of the audience, handed Hurley a note instructing her to ask the men to refrain from smoking while Horne was singing; rather than comply, all three walked away.) Five days later, President Kennedy gave his first nationally televised address on civil rights. “We face a moral crisis,” Kennedy pronounced. “It cannot be met by police action. It cannot be met by increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is time to act in the Congress, in your state and local legislative bodies, and in all our daily lives.” Shortly after the conclusion of the president’s address, just after midnight, Medgar Evers was shot in the back on his front lawn by a salesman named Byron De La Beckwith, an outspoken segregationist (and one of the three smokers who had walked out on Horne).
“He [Evers] left Billy and me with such a good, strong feeling that weekend. I was horrified when they told me,” recalled Horne, who heard about the murder while she was having her makeup applied moments before an appearance on the Today show; unbridled, Horne revealed the depth of her rage on the air, live. “The whole experience was a turning point in my life,” she said. “I think Medgar’s death signaled a change for many, many people. Medgar, the dear, sweet man, gave the movement a sad human face.” At the same time, participation by a broadly popular black celebrity like Horne helped expand the movement’s reach, according to Evers’s widow, Merlie Evers. (A year after De La Beckwith’s conviction in 1994, more than three decades after his crime, she was elected president of the NAACP.) “Lena Horne was very, very special to our population at that time,” she said. “She was a role model. With her participation, she showed that people who have obtained
celebrity status can and do still relate to the salt of the earth, as Medgar used to call his ground troops—that theirs was a just cause. It served another purpose as well. People who were afraid to venture out—there was an awful lot of fear then, and a lot of it was justified. When the word got out that they attended one of the rallies, some people’s mortgages were called in the next day, in full. People suddenly lost their jobs. So people were afraid to come and we needed them there, and Lena brought them out.”
Duke Ellington, who had always protested racial inequity through the defiant, proudly African eloquence of his music as well as in his public role as a cultural leader, was offered a chance to make a timely new contribution to black consciousness as the Southern summer and the civil rights movement approached a boil. For the theatrical attraction of an exhibition entitled Century of Negro Progress at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center, Ellington was commissioned to write an original stage production as a demonstration of black pride. Enthusiastically and virtually single-handedly, Ellington created My People, a potpourri of old and new songs and tone poems (some sung by Joya Sherrill and Jimmy McPhail) produced twice daily in the 5,000-seat Arie Crown Theatre. (Although Ellington wrote the lyrics and most of the arrangements himself, there were two notable exceptions: “Strange Feeling” from the Ellington-Strayhorn Perfume Suite and the novelty number “Purple People,” which was copyrighted as a Strayhorn composition and used in My People but not included in the album of the music or released on any other record.) Ellington’s usual touring schedule kept him from directing the show’s jazz orchestra. That task fell to Strayhorn, assisted by the pianist Jimmy Jones; as a result, the seventeen-piece ensemble was billed as the Billy Strayhorn Orchestra despite his relatively minor involvement. “Billy was happy to do it because it was a good thing to do, a statement against racism,” said Jimmy McPhail. Although it was received somewhat lukewarmly by the press, My People played its full run, until September 2, to responsive audiences. “Obviously the time was ripe for the thing,” said McPhail.
Handing off his duties to Jones, Strayhorn took a brief break from the show for another demonstration of black pride, the 200,000-strong March on Washington on August 28, 1963. Arriving two days early to offer help in the preparations, Strayhorn rendezvoused with Marian and Arthur Logan at the Willard Hotel, where the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had reserved a block of rooms for King and his friends, including the Logans and Strayhorn. “Strays spent most of his time in our room,” said Marian Logan, “because we decided we would be the room with the booze. Everybody congregated there. Martin and Strays got together again, and Strays talked off his ear about Ellington’s show and how wonderful it was. Martin promised to go see it, and after that, he did. Arthur and I took him, and that was where he met Edward for the first time. They saw each other and hugged like they were old friends.” On the day of the march, Strayhorn declined to walk but sat in the third row of the seats, alongside the Logans, and listened to all the speakers and the singers. “I mentioned to Arthur, ‘Isn’t that funny? Itty Bitty Buddy came all the way here to the march, and then he didn’t march.’ And Arthur said, ‘He might not be feeling well. I’ll talk to him about it’—which he did, and Strays said, ‘I’m fine, Arturo. Just a little tired. That’s all.’”
Social consciousness so pervaded the era that it overtook the Copasetics that year. Although each of the organization’s past several shows had been more thoroughly conceived and better produced than the last, the fall 1963 event surpassed them all in its topicality. For the 1961 production, On the Riviera, Strayhorn and Roy Branker, a cocktail pianist, had written numbers with French themes, including a cancan performed in drag and a spoof of pretentious painters featuring the Copasetics dancing in berets and smocks (to choreography by Cholly Atkins and Pete Nugent). In 1962, the group put on Anchors Aweigh, a marginally nautical romp written by Strayhorn with the help of Honi Coles. “There were stowaways and beautiful girl sailors—it was all very realistic,” said Coles dryly. “But it was fuuunnnn.” This time, in a twist, the Copasetics produced a show with a touch of seriousness, though that touch was gentle. Entitled Down There, the production was a joyful ride on the “freedom train” of civil rights. With both music and lyrics by Strayhorn, Down There followed a group of nameless characters—the Copasetics in their usual onstage personas—from a day at hard labor to a wild night of liberation. “We wanted to do something that was in keeping with what was happening,” said fellow Copasetic member LeRoy Myers, who ranked the show as his favorite. “There was a lot of feeling all around for that show. We had a lot to feel good about, and it was meaningful. Billy did the right thing there.” (As usual with the Copasetics shows, the music was not recorded, and Strayhorn never had it published. Virtually none of the music from On the Riviera, Anchors Aweigh, and Down There is known to exist.)
“Strayhorn was going through a good period,” remembered Honi Coles. “The civil rights activities gave him something to work for. He was a fighter, and he was even more of a minority than most of us, because of his lifestyle orientation. He kept the drinking under control or he was hiding it very well—you never know. But it was a pretty good time for him.”
That year the traditional September event had been bumped up to the last Monday in August to accommodate Strayhorn, who was accompanying Ellington and the orchestra on its most exotic overseas jaunt yet: a fourteen-week goodwill tour of the Near and Middle East sponsored by the “New Frontier” State Department of the Kennedy administration. Ellington and Strayhorn were hoping to draw inspiration for a new suite. Strayhorn was soon called, however, into more rigorous service. Immediately on landing in Damascus, the orchestra’s first destination, Ellington fell ill and called Arthur Logan, who said the malady sounded like air sickness, since the band had been flying on a DC-3, a small, outdated, unpressurized propeller plane. But Ellington’s condition worsened over the ensuing week, and at his patient’s insistence, Logan agreed to meet Ellington in East Pakistan and travel with him on the rest of the tour; Marian Logan would meet them soon after that, in Baghdad. As Arthur Logan recalled, “I found him there physically in pretty good shape but pretty badly depressed”: Ellington said he had never seen such a level of poverty.
Strayhorn filled in as pianist for the orchestra, sharing conducting duties with Harry Carney. In a concert at the Scheherazade Grand Hotel in Calcutta on October 14, Strayhorn played and sang “Lush Life.” “That was a little strange, hearing Strayhorn do ‘Lush Life’ in Calcutta,” said Rolf Ericson, the Swedish-born trumpeter, who had temporarily joined the Ellington Orchestra for the tour. Feeling better, Ellington soon reclaimed his place on the bandstand, only to encounter larger problems. In Baghdad on the evening of November 12, Iraqi air force jets attacked a government palace in an attempted coup d’etat while the Ellington Orchestra performed at the Khuld Hall, just a few hundred yards away. The bandleader and his musicians were escorted to their rooms, where they were instructed to remain, lights off and blinds down. Meantime, Strayhorn and Arthur Logan found their way up onto the hall’s roof, and Strayhorn snapped pictures of the jets’ fire. “They were shooting all over the palace,” recalled Herbie Jones, the trumpeter called over from the States to replace Ray Nance. (The reasons for Nance’s departure are unclear.) “A little later, we were in Turkey,” Jones continued, “and they had a special dinner for the band, with the diplomats and everybody around. Somebody came in and yelled out, The president’s been shot.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Yeah. Well, okay. Everybody’s always getting shot around here.’ The guy says, ‘Our president.’ And you hear about a dozen plates fall on the table.” The tour was cut short on the spot, and Ellington and his company were hustled home. “Edward was beside being beside himself,” said Marian Logan. “The whole tour was strange, and now the president went and died on him. He had a big problem with death—not just his own, anybody’s. He couldn’t deal with it. It scared the daylights out of him. So he blocked it out. He just wouldn’t deal
with it.”