Billy Strayhorn Pittsburgh origins are the beginning of one of the most remarkable stories in the history of American music, and almost nobody outside of jazz circles knows it. The song “Take the A Train” is one of the most recognizable pieces of music the twentieth century produced. It served for decades as the signature theme of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the opening bars announcing one of the greatest bands in jazz history to audiences around the world. It has been recorded hundreds of times by hundreds of artists. Versions of it have appeared in films, television shows, advertisements, and the ambient soundtrack of every space that has ever wanted to communicate the feeling of sophisticated urban cool.
Duke Ellington did not write it. Billy Strayhorn did. Billy Strayhorn grew up in Pittsburgh. He wrote another song, “Lush Life,” which is one of the most harmonically sophisticated and emotionally complex jazz ballads ever composed. He wrote it as a teenager, in Pittsburgh, before he had ever lived the world-weary urban sophistication the lyrics describe so precisely. The fact that the teenager who wrote “Lush Life” in Pittsburgh also went on to write “Take the A Train” for the greatest jazz orchestra in the world, and spent nearly three decades as Duke Ellington’s closest creative collaborator, is one of those facts that stops people when they first encounter it. It sounds like it should be better known than it is.
Homewood and the Making of a Musician
William Thomas Strayhorn was born on November 29, 1915, in Dayton, Ohio, but his family moved to Pittsburgh when he was about five, and it was Pittsburgh that shaped him. He grew up in the Homewood neighborhood on the eastern edge of the city. His parents, James and Lillian, were ambitious but worked low-wage jobs; the family lived in a small rear house at 7212 Tioga Street, which his mother, according to the Explore PA History essay, told him to call “Tioga Street, the zenith way.” His mother’s family came from Hillsborough, North Carolina, and he spent many childhood months there with his grandmother, who had a piano; Strayhorn later said she was his main influence in his first ten years.
Homewood in the 1920s and 1930s was a neighborhood of rowhouses and front porches, of churches and corner stores, of the dense social fabric that working-class Black Pittsburgh had built for itself across generations. It was not the Hill District, which was the center of Black Pittsburgh’s nightlife and political culture, but it was connected to that world by geography and community, and the musical culture of Black Pittsburgh was not confined to any single neighborhood’s boundaries.
The family did not own a piano, so Strayhorn worked odd jobs to buy a used one and took lessons from Charlotte Enty Catlin. He attended Westinghouse High School, where he played in the school orchestra and studied under Carl McVicker, who had also taught Erroll Garner and Mary Lou Williams (see our Mary Lou Williams article); jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal later attended the school too. His ambition then was to be a concert pianist, and he adored George Gershwin for blending classical and jazz.
After high school he studied music theory and concert music at the Pittsburgh Musical Institute and worked in a drugstore to pay his bills. He wrote a musical, formed a trio that played on a local radio station, and by 19 was writing for a professional show, Fantastic Rhythm. Introduced to Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson, he moved toward jazz, played with a combo called the Mad Hatters, and from 1937 wrote arrangements for Buddy Malone’s Pittsburgh dance band. That classical training gave him harmonic tools most jazz composers of his era did not have.
Lush Life: Written in Pittsburgh
During his teens in Pittsburgh, Billy Strayhorn wrote “Lush Life,” originally titled “Life Is Lonely.” Sources do not agree on the exact year, so treat any specific age as approximate. The song that resulted is one of the most sophisticated pieces of music in the American popular canon, a ballad with harmonic movements that classical composers would not have been ashamed of, combined with lyrics that describe the after-hours world of cocktail lounges and romantic disappointment with a precision and weariness that suggests decades of lived experience.
The lyrics describe someone who has spent years living the sophisticated urban nightlife, who has sought oblivion in parties and drinks and the company of beautiful strangers, and who has arrived at a specific sadness on the other side of all that experience. It is a song of disillusionment written by someone who had not yet been disillusioned, a portrait of worldly exhaustion painted by someone who had barely left Pittsburgh.
The disconnect between the song’s biographical content and the biography of the person who wrote it is part of what makes “Lush Life” extraordinary. Strayhorn was imagining a world he had not yet inhabited and rendering it with an accuracy that suggested deep imaginative access to something he had not directly experienced. That kind of compositional empathy is not teachable. It is what separates artists from craftsmen, and it was fully present in a Pittsburgh teenager in the 1930s.
“Lush Life” has been recorded by many major artists, and jazz writers such as Ted Gioia rank it among the greatest jazz ballads. Strayhorn’s own late-career solo and small-group recordings were collected in a 1992 album titled Lush Life.
The Meeting That Changed Everything
Strayhorn had seen Ellington play in Pittsburgh in 1933. In December 1938, Duke Ellington brought his orchestra back to the city. Ellington was at the peak of his fame and his artistic power, leading the most celebrated jazz orchestra in the world, a bandleader and composer whose influence on American music was already enormous and still growing. After the performance, a twenty-three-year-old Billy Strayhorn made his way backstage.
By most accounts Strayhorn explained, and then showed, how he would have arranged one of Ellington’s own pieces. Ellington was impressed enough to bring band members to hear him, and the critic Ted Gioia says it was “Lush Life” that caught Ellington’s attention that night. Ellington arranged for Strayhorn to meet him when the band returned to New York. Accounts of exactly what was played and said that night vary, as with many good origin stories.
It was an extraordinary opportunity for a young musician from Pittsburgh. Strayhorn accepted, and in the spring of 1939 Ellington told his sister and son, before leaving on a European tour, that Strayhorn “is staying with us.”
He would not leave Ellington’s world for the rest of his life.
Take the A Train
The popular origin story of “Take the A Train” is that Ellington gave Strayhorn subway directions to his Harlem home and Strayhorn turned the directions into a song. The story has the tidy shape of a legend, and the sources I checked give different dates for when the tune was written, so treat the details as folklore. What is solid is that the Ellington Orchestra first recorded it in 1941.
“Take the A Train” became the Ellington Orchestra’s theme song, the piece that opened performances. It was not composed by Duke Ellington. It was composed by a young man from Homewood, Pittsburgh, within about two years of arriving in New York.
In the early 1940s he also wrote “Chelsea Bridge,” “Raincheck,” and “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing,” all first recorded in 1941 and credited to him.
The Ellington Partnership
The relationship between Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington that developed over the nearly three decades they worked together is one of the most remarkable creative partnerships in the history of American music, and also one of the most complicated to assess fairly. Ellington wrote that Strayhorn was “my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brain waves in his head, and his in mine.” The praise was real, but it was also convenient for a bandleader whose name was on everything the orchestra produced.
Strayhorn served as composer, arranger, and musical director in ways that went beyond any conventional definition of those roles. Some of his pieces, such as “Something to Live For” (1939) and “Day Dream” (1940), were listed as Ellington collaborations, and he wrote the uncredited “Sugar Hill Penthouse” section of Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige (1943). Others, such as “Lotus Blossom” (1946), carried his name alone. The composer Gunther Schuller wrote that it is “frequently impossible to tell with certainty where the work of one ends and the other’s begins.”
This attribution problem was not entirely accidental. The music business of the mid-twentieth century operated on the star system, and Duke Ellington was the star. Ellington joked on stage, “Strayhorn does a lot of the work, but I get to take the bows,” yet he let publicists credit him alone, and Strayhorn confided to friends a growing unease about his lack of public recognition. Biographers differ on how much blame Ellington deserves. What is not disputed is that Strayhorn’s contribution was enormous and not fully credited in his lifetime.
The Man Behind the Music
Billy Strayhorn was openly gay to his friends and to the members of the Ellington band. Through Ellington’s son Mercer he met his first partner, the musician Aaron Bridgers, with whom he lived until Bridgers moved to Paris in 1947. He was also part of the civil rights movement and a friend of Martin Luther King Jr.; in 1963 he arranged and conducted “King Fit the Battle of Alabam’” for Ellington’s revue My People, which was dedicated to King.
Critics often hear longing and restraint in his ballads, though how far that reflects his life is interpretation, not documented fact.
Pittsburgh’s wider Black music world, including the Hill District where so many of the city’s clubs were, was part of the setting for his early years, though the sources I found do not document which venues he frequented.
Blood Count
In 1967, Billy Strayhorn was dying. He had been ill with esophageal cancer for about three years. His final composition, “Blood Count,” was handed to Ellington from the hospital, and many musicians and critics rank it among his finest.
He died on May 31, 1967, in New York City, at 51. His partner Bill Grove was with him; the often-repeated story that he died in Lena Horne’s arms is false, since she was touring in Europe when she heard the news. His ashes were scattered in the Hudson River.
Duke Ellington’s response to Strayhorn’s death was one of the most moving tributes in the history of popular music. Months later he recorded an album of Strayhorn compositions, “…And His Mother Called Him Bill,” with the orchestra. On the last track, a solo “Lotus Blossom,” Ellington sat at the piano after the formal end of the session while the band packed up, and their voices can be heard in the background.
The recording exists and is easy to find.
What Pittsburgh Lost Track Of
Billy Strayhorn’s name is known to jazz musicians and to listeners with serious interest in the music. It is not known the way it should be known, which is to say it is not known the way “Take the A Train” is known, or the way Duke Ellington is known, or the way the compositions themselves are known. The gap between the ubiquity of his music and the obscurity of his biography is real.
Pittsburgh’s claim on him is legitimate and underexercised. He grew up in Homewood. He was shaped by the musical culture of Black Pittsburgh. He wrote “Lush Life” here, in this city, as a teenager. At twenty-three he showed his work to Duke Ellington, and it changed the direction of his life.
The A train runs through New York. The music that made it famous was written by a kid from Pittsburgh.
Strayhorn in Pittsburgh Today
A Pennsylvania marker at Westinghouse High School, 1101 N. Murtland St. in Homewood, was dedicated May 27, 1995; it notes that Strayhorn, a Westinghouse graduate, “had his musical talents nurtured here.” In East Liberty, the former Regent Theater was renamed the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in 2000 for Strayhorn and fellow Pittsburgher Gene Kelly. Hillsborough, North Carolina, where he spent childhood summers, has its own marker and a mural.
Timeline
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Nov. 29, 1915 | Born in Dayton, Ohio |
| c. 1920 | Family moves to Homewood, Pittsburgh |
| 1930s | Westinghouse High School; Pittsburgh Musical Institute; writes “Lush Life” |
| Dec. 1938 | Meets Duke Ellington after a Pittsburgh performance |
| 1939 | Joins the Ellington organization in New York |
| 1941 | Ellington Orchestra first records “Take the A Train” |
| May 31, 1967 | Dies in New York at 51 |
| 1967 | Ellington records “…And His Mother Called Him Bill” |
Frequently Asked Questions
Was Billy Strayhorn born in Pittsburgh? No. He was born in Dayton, Ohio, and raised in Homewood from about age five.
Did Strayhorn write “Take the A Train”? Yes. It became Ellington’s theme song, and the Orchestra first recorded it in 1941.
Did he write “Lush Life” in Pittsburgh? Yes, as a teenager, though sources differ on his exact age.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Billy Strayhorn”; Explore PA History (PHMC marker text and essay); Pennsylvania Heritage magazine, “William Strayhorn”; Pennsylvania Center for the Book; WRTI, “Bob Perkins Tells The Story of Billy Strayhorn”.
