ABSTRACT
L: lyricist There are few facts in the world of Duke Ellington. Annotators have worked decades to
develop a complete list of Ellington compositions. There are a number of factors contributing to the general confusion. First, many songs were performed by his band or recorded in one year, but published in another year; year of copyright is used here. Many instrumental were given different names at different times. Ellington didn’t write everything that his name is put onto; Billy Strayhorn wrote many of the compositions that are credited to Ellington. Also, Irving Mills, Ellington’s manager and publisher, contributed almost nothing to the writing of songs, but has his name attached to many of them. Note under “show songs” that only songs new to a show are included, not older songs that were added because of their popularity. For those reasons and others, this list is necessarily incomplete.
