This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories, the show where America is the star

and the American people.

And we love to tell stories about history, particularly the intersection of art and culture.

Many music critics believe Duke Ellington was one of the most important composers in and out of jazz.

An artistic giant of the 20th century, his story is more than a

musical journey. It is a story about race, culture, and art, and a walk through the 20th century.

Here to tell this remarkable story is the late Wall Street Journal culture critic and author Terry

Teachout, whose book Duke, A Life of Duke Ellington, may be one of the finest biographies

I've ever read.

And we're telling this story because on this day in history, Duke Ellington died in

1974. Duke Ellington died in 1974.

Duke Ellington was born in 1890 in our nation's capital, and both the timing of his birth and location impacted his life greatly. Here is Terry T.Chap.

Washington, D.C. in Ellington's childhood and youth was one of the most ruthlessly segregated cities in America.

It was, you might say, the northern tip of the deep south.

But it had a large, healthy, prosperous black middle class, a black bourgeoisie at the same time.

That is what defines the Washington of Ellington's youth in the neighborhood he grew up in,

U Street.

It was a place where you lived, if you could afford to, and in the alley if you couldn't afford to,

where every kind of black person, well-to-do and poor, striving and desperate, they were all thrown together.

But it was a society that in its own class divisions mirrored the class divisions of the white world.

There was a racial caste system among blacks.

...