Duke Ellington

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 he were a millionaire Ellington had a happy childhood, from which he emerged strong and whole: He was an eager athlete, a bit of a bookworm, but not much interested in schoolwork. In the only music course that appears on his high school transcript, he got a D. But when he learned, as he later put it, that when you were playing piano there was always a pretty girl standing down at the bass clef end of the piano he dedicated himself to keyboard technique. By his mid-teens, Duke (the nickname came from a snooty junior high school friend who liked to give his pals titles) was hanging out at Frank Holliday's pool room on T Street, a magnet for Pullman porters, pool sharks, and the city's best piano players. And the kid watched. And listened.…