ABSTRACT
In 1969, Ralph Ellison published an essay in the Washington Sunday Star entitled “Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday” in which he made this astute observation:
Even though few recognized it, such artists as Ellington and Louis Armstrong were the stewards of our vaunted American optimism and guardians against the creeping irrationality which ever plagues our form of society. They created great entertainment, but for them (ironically) and for us (unconsciously) their music was a rejection of that chaos and license which characterized the so-called jazz age associated with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and which has returned once more to haunt the nation. Place Ellington with Hemingway, they are both larger than life, both masters of that which is most enduring in the human enterprise: the power of man to defi ne himself against the ravages of time through artistic style. 1
Ellison’s assessment of Ellington is a glowing tribute to Ellington as an icon of exceptional social signifi cance in American culture. It also brings into sharp relief the unique role that African American music, in general, and African American composers, in particular, have played in defi ning and refl ecting fundamental values of African American and American expressive culture. Ralph Ellison praises Louis Armstrong and Ellington as “the stewards of our vaunted American optimism”—a quality widely considered characteristic of the American ethos, but also of great signifi cance in the collective consciousness of the African American community.
