Technically this is considered one of Duke Ellington’s “Previously Unreleased.” @RapGenius doesn’t even have the lyrics to it on their website.
This version of New York, New York was written between 1970 and 1972. Frank Sinatra’s version wasn’t released until 1979.
Another Thrill reference. @YouTheReader do I have to ramble about it once more?
Hmm, I wonder if this song has ever been a 15 Second Reel before?
Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy Ellington or also known as Duke Ellington was born on April 29, 1899, in Washington D.C. He was raised by 2 musically gifted parents in a middle-class neighborhood of the Nation’s Captial. At 7 years old, he started studying piano and earned the nickname "Duke" for his gentlemanly ways. The term “Duke” is a nobleman of the highest hereditary rank, just in case you weren’t sure I went to Merriam-Webster for the exact definition. Duke fell in love with studying music and art while in high school. A talented artist in his own regard, Ellington turned down a scholarship to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, which is known in the art world as one of the best art schools in the country. (Source: Princeton Review) In 1914 at age 15, Duke Ellington wrote his first song called “Soda Fountain Rag.” He was inspired to write it because he had a job as a soda jerk (someone in those days who served soda) at a cafe. He wrote his first song all by ear because he couldn’t read or write music well yet as a young teen. (Source: Composer of the Month)
Duke Ellington became a professional musician at the age of 17. His Fairytale in NY took place in 1923 when he moved to NY and first started performing in Broadway nightclubs as the bandleader, pianist, and composer of The Washingtonians. The band was originally only a sextet (6 members) but it would eventually grow to a 10-piece ensemble of an orchestra. Duke Ellington would recruit musicians who had their own unique styles such as Bubber Miley, who played a plunger mute (trumpet) with a drunken wah-wah sound to it, & Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton, who played the trombone with a “growl.”
Duke and his band would regularly play in clubs in Harlem. Eventually, they would land a permanent gig at the Cotton Club from 1927 to 1932, a legendary jazz spot still around today, but back then was one of the hottest Speakeasies in Town. Their popularity grew from Cotton Club, which included them on radio broadcasts and made the group famous. The rise of the radio in the late 1920s and early 1930s correlated perfectly with Duke Ellington’s brilliant music. Ellington had hundreds of recordings that appeared in films too. Not just old movies in black&white either, Duke Ellington has movie scores in The Green Mile, Breaking Bad, Malcolm X, White Men Can’t Jump, The Matrix, American Hustle, and The Notebook.
Eventually, the band’s name would become The Duke Ellington Band and they toured Europe in 1933 and 1939, with World War II on the brink. That was also around the time when Duke Ellington and one of his frequent collaborators, Billy Strayhorn, wrote “Take The ‘A’ Train.” The “A” subway line stops at the Cotton Club and the song would go down as one of the most important jazz compositions of all time. In Stuart Nicholson’s “Reminiscing in Tempo: A Portrait of Duke Ellington,” Mercer Ellington – Duke Ellington’s son – recalled retrieving the composition from the trash. “ . . . At one point he was having some sort of trouble and I pulled a piece out of the garbage. I said, ‘What’s wrong with this?’ And he said, ‘that’s an old thing I was trying to do something with, but it’s too much like Fletcher Henderson’ . . .it was ‘A’ Train.”The song would become one of the ensemble’s signature tunes and biggest commercial successes. (Source: PBS)
Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t the only U.S. President that Duke Ellington hung around. In 1956, President Eisenhower sought to improve America’s international reputation abroad, so the State Department enlisted jazz musicians to promote American values in opposition to racially-charged Soviet Propaganda. Duke was one of the jazz musicians recruited to travel as a “Jazz Ambassador.” Ellington toured for the State Department more than any other musician of all time, visiting the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Latin America, East Africa, and Southeast Asia. His travel abroad influenced some of his later albums such as “Far East Suite,” “Latin American Suite,” and “Afro-Eurasian Eclipse.” (Source: PBS) In 1969, President Richard Nixon held a 70th birthday party for Duke Ellington and awarded him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Duke Ellington had an unbelievable amount of influence on the music we listen to today. Although the exact start of swing music is tough to pinpoint, the word “swing” appears in the title of a famous Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” which came out in 1932. Upon the death of Duke Ellington, President Nixon said, “the wit, taste, intelligence, and elegance that Duke Ellington brought to his music have made him, in the eyes of millions of people both here and abroad, America’s foremost composer. We are all poorer because the Duke is no longer with us.” Duke Ellington’s last words were, "Music is how I live, why I live, and how I will be remembered." What an absolute icon.
Quick Intermission…
I’ll be honest, all month I wondered what would be the right song or artist to feature with Frederick Douglass. This is going to sound terrible, but I wasn’t even 100% sure who Duke Ellington was prior to visiting the Frederick Douglass statue in Central Park and then going to The Ellington for a Guinness Pint. In fairness, I’ve always said I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, so I’m glad I learned about Duke Ellington through Week to Week Notes. The Ellington’s #GuinnessChallengeSeason write-up will mention this when it comes out.
I wish I could’ve taken a more centered picture, but the sun was directly behind the head (see shadow).
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey or also known as Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in or around 1818 in Talbot County, Maryland. Douglass himself was never sure of his exact birth date, his estimates were at some point in February so he celebrated it on Valentine’s Day. His mother was an enslaved black woman and his father was white of European descent. Like many other enslaved children, Douglass was separated from his mother at a very young age. She worked as a field hand on a neighboring plantation and had to walk more than 12 miles to visit her son, whom she sadly only met a handful of times. His mother died when Douglass was only 7 years old.
At 8 years old, Frederick Douglass was “given” to Hugh and Sophia Auld at Fells Point, Baltimore. His job at the time was to take care of the Auld’s young son named Thomas. Douglass credits Sophia Auld with first teaching him the alphabet. The alphabet lessons ended abruptly when Hugh informed Sophia that literacy would “spoil” a slave. In Maryland and most slaveholding states, it was forbidden to teach enslaved people how to read and write. Frederick Douglass remarkably was able to teach himself how to do so by exchanging bread for lessons from poor white boys he played with in the neighborhood and by tracing the letters in Thomas’s old schoolbooks. Frederick Douglass would later find out that his mother had been the only black person in Talbot who could read, so he always had perseverance and aspiration in him. (Source: Britannica)
Frederick Douglass knew early on understood the connection between literacy and freedom. At 12 years old, he made an exchange for the book The Columbian Orator. It was a collection of revolutionary speeches, debates, and writings on natural rights. He began trying to teach other slaves how to read the Bible. As word spread of Douglass’ efforts to educate, he was then transferred to Edward Covey, who was notorious for being a “slavebreaker” and whose brutal treatment of enslaved people he was in charge of. At 16, Douglass was regularly whipped by Covey. Douglass recalled the first time he witnessed a whipping, “The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin. I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember anything. It was the first of a long series of outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass.” He would physically fight back against Covey and plotted an unsuccessful escape. Frustrated by Douglass’ perseverance Covey returned him back to Baltimore.
@YouTheReader I constantly bring up Fairytales in NY and I’m sure you’ve picked up on that by now, but this one can’t be topped.
When Frederick Douglass went back to Baltimore, this time he met a young free black woman named Anna Murray. She would help him escape. On September 3, 1838, Douglass disguised himself as a sailor and boarded a northbound train, using money from Anna to pay for his ticket. Douglass traveled by train, then steamboat, then train and in less than 24 hours, he arrived in New York City and declared himself free. He had successfully escaped from slavery and had brought along a copy of The Columbian Orator he bought in bartered for in exchange for bread. He would marry Anna Murray later that year.
Frederick Douglass’ Fairytale in NY was quite quick, as it was recommended by black abolitionists that he continues heading North. He and Anna ended up in New Bedford, Massachusetts. It was in New Bedford where Frederick Douglass would officially become his name. The Frederick part came from his mother and Douglass was in part inspired by an exiled nobleman in Sir Walter Scott’s poem The Lady of the Lake. Douglass earned money for the first time as a free man in Massachusetts as a common laborer.
Douglass continued to be an avid reader while working as a common laborer. He was introduced to William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, which inspired Douglass to attend the Anti-Slavery Society conventions in Massacuhessets of 1841. At only 23 years of age, Frederick Douglass stood at the podium, trembling with nervousness, overcame his nervousness, and gave a stirring, eloquent speech about his life as a slave. Douglass would continue to give speeches for the rest of his life and would become a leading spokesperson for the abolition of slavery and for racial equality. (Source: PBS) He took a job as an orator, or public speaker, for the Anti-Slavery Society and began touring around the North & Midwest.
People became skeptical of Douglass, not believing that he was truly a fugitive slave who was going on speaking tours publicly. In 1845, Frederick Douglass published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which provided a clear record of names and places from his enslavement. This quieted the doubters and was obviously an extremely bold motion of Douglass, so to avoid being recaptured, he traveled overseas to Ireland, Scotland, and England. He wrote to his American friends, “I am now safe in old Ireland, in the beautiful city of Dublin.”
Douglass knew all about Ireland’s history of British colonization and political, economic, and religious oppression. He kept up with the work of Liberator, Daniel O’Connell, who his former “masters” hated. Anybody they hated so much, he was thrilled to get to know, so 8 years after first hearing about O’Connell as a slave, Douglass met him as a free man. O’Connell was fiercely anti-slavery and believed that freedom & liberty would come when all human suffering ceased. It was in Ireland that Douglass began considering America’s future beyond ending slavery and towards equality for all, previously his only objective was to end slavery. Douglass was in Ireland in 1845 during the start of the first reports of blighted potatoes which would become the Great Famine.
He saw the Irish were oppressed economically, socially, and religiously, but he echoed O’Connell’s assertion that the oppression of the Irish was not the same as slavery in America. Douglass said, “The Irish man is poor, but he is not a slave. He may be in rags, but he is not a slave. He is still the master of his body.” Douglass’s time in Ireland exposed him to oppression that existed outside of America and it provided a new perspective and even deeper understanding for him of the issues faced at home. (Source: Celtic Junction) Douglass would go on to create his own new Irish edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and he toured the country giving speeches with Daniel O’Connell. In one speech, he even referred to himself as the “Black O’Connell.”
After gaining a new perspective (@YouTheReader could it have been the Guinness pints?!?!?) and having abolitionists buy out his freedom from his former “masters”, Douglass returned home to the United States legally free. He relocated Anna and his family to Rochester, NY. It was there that Douglass started embracing the women’s rights movements, helped slaves on the Underground Railroad, and supported anti-slavery political parties. He also bought his own printing press and ran his own newspaper called The North Star. In 1855, he published My Bondage and My Freedom which not only elaborated on his experience as a slave but also started to challenge racial segregation in the free North.
When the U.S. Civil War broke out in 1861, Frederick Douglass worked like a madman to make sure emancipation would be in the war’s outcome. Using The North Star, Douglass recruited African-Americans men of the North to fight in the U.S. Army. 2 of his sons even served. Douglass met with Abraham Lincoln to advocate that these soldiers should receive the same pay and treatment as the white ones. Once the outcome of the war seemed imminent that the North would win, Douglass then started to push for equality. He had a huge influence on the 13th Amendment (ratified in 1865) abolished slavery, the 14th Amendment (ratified in 1868) granted national birthright citizenship, and the 15th Amendment (ratified in 1870) stated nobody could be denied voting rights on the basis of race, skin color, or previous servitude.
In 1872, Frederick Douglass moved to Washington D.C. and became even more politically active as a statesman. From 1877 to 1891, Douglass served 5 U.S. presidents as U.S. Marshal for D.C., Recorder of Deeds for D.C., and Minister Resident and Consul General to Haiti. All the while, he was still giving impassioned speeches for equality. He passed away on February 20, 1895, preparing to give a speech at a local church. From the time he taught himself how to read&write until the end, Frederick Douglass was a fearless advocate for freedom and justice for all.