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.

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. Chowp. 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. It had to do with economics. It also had to do

with skin color. And Duke Ellington came from light-skinned parents.

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