Born on April 29, 1899, in Washington, D.C., he grew up among that city's substantial black middle class. His mother, Daisy Kennedy, was the daughter of a District of Columbia police captain. Daisy married the ambitious young James Edward Ellington, who was successively a coachman, butler, caterer, and blueprint draftsman. J.E., as Duke called his father, always acted as though he had money, whether he had it or not. He raised his family as though …
showed first 75 words of 2546 total

showed last 75 words of 2546 total
…paths with greater disdain? But in the end, of course, it is Ellington's music that will be remembered. Twenty-five years after his death, a century after his birth, the Duke's works are being played all over the world. Like all great artists, Ellington took an idiom laying close at hand the down-home blues of Southern African-Americans and crafted it into something so sensuous, elegant, and dramatic that people everywhere respond, and will keep responding, deeply.