This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show.

And our favorite subject is music, and our second favorite is history.

And this next, well, this next hour combines both with one of America's very best cultural writers and one of our best music writers.

Today we're here to talk to Terry Teachout about the book Duke, Life of Duke Ellington,

who was born in Washington, D.C. in 1899.

Terry, thanks for joining us.

Talk about where Duke Ellington was born.

And he was born, of course, in 1899 in Washington, D.C.

Talk about the effect and the impact that location had on his life.

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 and 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.

It was tremendously vital,

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,

parents who had white blood in them.

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