EDWARD K. “DUKE” ELLINGTON

Ellington (1899-1974) began playing music professionally in Washington, D.C. in 1917. He went to New York for the second time in 1923, and Ellington became the leader of The Washingtonians after a disagreement over missing money. The band hit the big time when Irving Mills became their manager and publisher in 1926 and the group become the house band at the Cotton Club after King Oliver unwisely turned down the job. Radio broadcasts from the club made Ellington famous across America and also gave him the financial security to assemble a top notch band that he could write music specifically for. Having become The Duke Ellington Orchestra, the band left the club in 1931 to tour the U.S. and Europe. Unlike many of their contemporaries, the Ellington Orchestra was able to make the change from the Hot Jazz of the 1920s to the Swing music of the 1930s. The song "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" even came to define the era. This ability to adapt and grow with the times kept the Ellington Orchestra a major force in Jazz up until Duke's death in the 1970s from cancer, after which his son Mercer took over the reins of the band. Duke Ellington brought a level of style and sophistication to jazz that it hadn't seen before. Although he was a gifted piano player, his orchestra was his principal instrument, and he considered himself to be a composer and arranger, rather than just a musician.

BILLIE HOLIDAY

Holiday (1915-1959) was born Eleanora Fagan in Baltimore, Maryland, when her mother was only 13 years old. Her musician father abandoned the family, and Holiday had to work scrubbing floors from the time she was six. At the age of ten, she was raped by a neighbor, and then sent to a home for “wayward girls," and then jailed for prostitution at the age of 14. She procured a singing job in Harlem in 1928 and brought customers to tears with her melancholy singing style. Despite her alluring voice, she was an unreliable employee and had to move from one nightclub to another. In 1932 she recorded a few titles with Benny Goodman’s orchestra and eventually worked in a pickup band led by Teddy Wilson. By 1937 she was making some of the finest recordings of her career, turning second-rate love songs into jazz classics. That same year, Holiday toured with Count Basie’s Orchestra, then fronted the all-white Artie Shaw’s Orchestra, experiencing so much racial discrimination on the road that she eventually abandoned the tour and returned to New York. Around this time, Holiday recorded "Strange Fruit," a biting, anti-racist song depicting a lynching. By the early 1940s, she was locked into a turbulent and abusive marriage to a man who introduced her to heroin and opium. From 1944 to 1950 she records steadily and had her biggest hit, “Lover Man.” Also during this period she spent time in prison for heroin possession and lost her cabaret license. Upon her release, she could no longer sing at the popular clubs in New York City. However, she continued to grow in popularity because of the scandal and her seemingly glamorous, notorious reputation. By the 1950s the abuse had begun to cause her voice to deteriorate, and in 1959, Holiday was arrested on her deathbed for possession of narcotics. She died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 44. "Lady Day" remains the most famous of all jazz singers.

Bibliography
Holiday, Billie. Lady Sings the Blues. Garden City, N.Y.; Doubleday, 1956.

HOWLIN' WOLF

Wolf (1910-1976) was born Chester Arthur Burnett somewhere in Mississippi. At age 18, his father gave him a guitar and around the same time he met Charley Patton, an influential blues performer. For the next five years, Burnett farmed full time with his family while occasionally singing and playing. He served in World War II, then formed a band of his own in 1948. His break came at age 38, when he was given the chance to perform a weekly show on a West Memphis radio station. The show was so successful that Burnett was offered a job selling advertising to local store owners, a job he held until leaving for Chicago in 1952. It was at this time that Burnett first began using the name, Howlin' Wolf, which was suited to his fierce singing style, which was punctuated with falsetto whoops and howls. When he settled in Chicago his recording career took off. Though that peaked in 1956, he enjoyed a resurgence in popularity during the mid-1960s, when he toured Europe. The Rolling Stones began recording his songs and asked him to be their introductory act on their tours. Standing six-foot, six inches, and weighing close to 300 pounds, Howlin' Wolf had a commanding stage presence. Toward the end of his career, Howlin' Wolf was plagued with chronic kidney trouble and would perform only in cities where he had access to a dialysis machine.