By Stuart Mitchner
On April 23, Shakespeare’s birthday, I left the Princeton Public Library with Duke, Terry Teachout’s biography of Duke Ellington (Penguin 2013), and Willie Nelson’s Letters to America (Harper Horizon 2021), which he wrote with Turk Pipkin (Harper Horizon 2021).
The only reason these two American legends are sharing the same space today is that they entered the world on the same date in April, Duke on April 29, 1899 in Washington, D.C., Willie in Abbott, Texas on April 29, 1933. Duke moved on in May 1974. Willie is still here and still singing. If first names seem overly familiar, my excuse is that listening to Willie’s songs and reading his book puts you on a first-name relationship with the whole world.
Duke in 1933
Curious to see what Duke was doing during Willie’s birth year, I learned that 1933 marked a turning point in his band’s career, with a tour of England, Holland, and France launched by a two-week gig at the London Palladium. Duke also managed to fit in the filming of shorts like The World at Large, featuring “Sophisticated Lady” and “Creole Rhapsody” and Bundle of Blues, kicked off by “Rockin’ in Rhythm,” Duke at the keyboard, with the band joining in. Later that year in Hollywood, the Ellington band was taking part in the filming of Mitchell Leisen’s Murder at the Vanities, which was released in May 1934.
“Daybreak Expresss”
Still exploring Willie’s birth year, I found Visions of Jazz author Gary Giddins talking online about the apparent impossibility of transcribing Duke’s 1933 composition “Daybreak Express.” Duke’s son Mercer, who took over the band after his father’s death, revealed that because no one could figure out how to get the reeds “to simulate the sound of a train whistle,” they “finally had to bring in a slide whistle,” which Duke “would never have done.” At a typical recording session, “for example, all the musicians have their music on the music stands for a piece, and after the first run-through Ellington will tell the trombone, the second tromboners ‘Over here I want you to voice with the saxophones. And over here I want this guy to lay out and I want this guy to, you know, put a B flat there instead of a B natural.’ And nobody is copying all these things down and making a final score. So by the time the piece is ready to record, each musician knows what his job is, but it is gone so far from what’s on the paper that when the papers finally made their way to The Smithsonian, frequently the scores just don’t sound like the recordings.”
In his biography, Terry Teachout describes “Daybreak Express” as a “jazz counterpart of Arthur Honegger’s Pacific 231 “recorded in 1933, ten years after the Swiss composer produced his own exercise in musical onomatopoeia.” Teachout quotes Ellington clarinetist Barney Bigard: “We’d be up all night gambling and we’d hear the whistle blow as we went over a crossing. Duke would hear all the same things. The only difference was, we were playing poker and he was writing music about that whistling.” Duke’s sister Ruth remembers seeing her brother on a railroad siding “somewhere in Texas, the heat at 110, the sweat pouring off him on to a piece of manuscript paper on his knee, catching up on something he wanted to finish.”
If you’ve been reading the letters in Willie Nelson’s book, it’s easy to imagine the singer of “Freight Train Boogie” and “Railroad Lady” smiling at that image of the elegant Ellington sweating out a composition in the hot heart of Texas, just as you know how much he’d enjoy the YouTube version of “Daybreak Express” recorded in December of his birth year, wherein the band creates a cross-country ride in just under three minutes. Inspired by the sly grin on the face of Willie’s book, I’m trying to think about how the singer of songs like “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die” and about how the author of a love note to “Cannabis” in Letters to America might picture Ellington’s sound: “Smoky music from a strange, distant world like what happens with quality pot or what they used to call ‘reefers’ in Duke’s day.”
In Willie’s House
Listen to enough songs by this guy and you find yourself happily falling into a laid back easygoing style; it’s as if you’re already in his house, the mere sound of his voice puts you there. I can also imagine Duke’s reaction to, say, the penultimate verse of Willie’s cannabis song: “Hey, take me out and build a roaring fire / Roll me in the flames for about an hour / Then take me out and twist me up / And point me towards the sky / And roll me up and smoke me when I die.”
Willie’s thoughts on smoking weed are outlined in a letter he titles “Whiskey River,” in which “the smartest thing” he ever did was quitting cigarettes and whiskey and “the dumbest thing” he ever did was doing “cigarettes and whiskey.” His letter, “Dear Cannabis,” begins, “What can I say? You saved me, and we both know it….Lots of folks said we were doing wrong, but I know love when I see it. And I don’t believe the seeds and flowers that were given to us from a creator are any more illegal than the hops that are used to make beer or the grapes that make wine.” Noting that “people like to make jokes about me and you. They say we tour the country in a cannabus!” In fact, Willie’s in the business: “People say, ‘When you smoke Willie’s pot, you get Willie high!’’ The letter is signed “High on a hill.”
Duke and Elegance
Elegance is not a word that comes to mind when you think about Willie Nelson. One of the most appealing things about that image of Duke working on his music on a railroad siding in Willie’s home state is the way it undercuts the standard image of the top-hatted, evening-suited master of his element crooning “I love you madly” to his swooning audience. That’s the mysterious gent you see gazing out at you on the cover of the CD Duke Ellington and His Cotton Club Orchestra: Jungle Nights in Harlem 1927-1932.
Teachout’s biography quotes Duke’s tour manager on how hard it was to rouse him and get him dressed for the first show of the night because he would never start dressing “until the last possible second, and then when everybody around him was worked up and yelling, he would scramble on his coat while running down the corridor, and with that bland smile of his, stride onto the stage and commence playing — all in one breath as it were. He simply could not face the ordeal of being dressed-up and waiting backstage all ready for the curtain to rise — he had to run on in a whirl of excitement in order to get the right mood for that opening number.”
You know Willie would love that story. One of his last letters is addressed to the Road — “They used to say all roads lead to Rome but they were wrong. All roads lead to another road.” Heading for the end, he writes: “I love you when you take me home, but I love you more when you are stretched out in front of the bus as we make our way to some honky-tonk or concert hall, where people are coming to hear me play. As I listen to the wheels on the pavement, I can see the faces of my audience, men and women, young and old, white, brown, black, and every shade in between. Americans at their best. Some are coming because they want to feel good and be lifted up, some to forget their troubles or heal their losses, All of them, I hope are coming to celebrate love and to dance and sing along.”
Duke couldn’t have said it better. Or maybe he did, in his own style, every time he looked out at the audience and said “I love you madly.”