By Benjamin Cawthra · DUKE ELLINGTON’S JUMP FOR JOY AND THE FIGHT FOR EQUALITY IN WARTIME LOS...

DUKE ELLINGTON’SJUMP FOR JOY AND

THE FIGHT FOREQUALITY IN WARTIME

LOS ANGELESBy Benjamin Cawthra

ABSTRACT: Duke Ellington and his orchestra premiered an all-black musicalrevue, Jump for Joy, in Los Angeles in 1941 that addressed racial inequalitywhile celebrating the possibility of a more democratic future. The musicalwas a cultural expression of the activist work of black Angelenos duringthe war years and highlighted African American demands for fair dealing.The article also demonstrates how unrecorded music can serve as a signif-icant historical artifact.

Keywords: racial equality and jazz, Los Angeles and jazz, entertainment in1941, African American cultural expression

“Dissonance is our way of life in America,” said the mus-tachioed man with the processed hair in the silk dress-ing gown, settling into an interview in his suite at the

Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue, Los Angeles, in 1941. Droppingthe needle on his phonograph record, playing a piece with a strongAfro-Cuban rhythm, the debonair Duke Ellington tried to make hispoint clear. “That’s Negro life,” he said. “Hear that chord! That’sus.” In a room strewn with staff paper, scribbled notations, sheets ofcompleted and half-finished pieces—a jazz workshop in progress—Ellington’s suave self-presentation melted just a bit as he warmed to

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his pet subject. “We are something apart,” he said, speaking of AfricanAmericans, his people, “yet an integral part.” From his earthquake-cracked suite in the black section of Los Angeles, a fast-growing metrop-olis rapidly changing in anticipation of war, he wrote music that tried tomake the point. And when he and his orchestra performed for Ange-lenos, he tried to infuse the show with such entertaining panache that itupset expectations and delighted audiences with the possibility ofa brighter, more democratic future. The “American Dilemma,” as soci-ologist Gunnar Myrdal soon would term it, was still the problem W.E.B.Du Bois had identified decades before, the problem of the color line.Duke Ellington acknowledged the line and proposed to make it irrele-vant through the sheer vitality of black cultural expression.1

In 1941, with the United States debating its role in the SecondWorld War, Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, one of themost significant jazz bands in the world, took up residency in LosAngeles, California, far from their home base in New York. Famousfor traveling fifty-two weeks a year—playing one-nighters, collegedances, large-scale concerts, and club engagements—Ellington spentenough time in Southern California in 1941 to be able to claim it asa temporary home base. While there he performed regularly for localswho had supported jazz bands in the city since the early 1920s.2 ButEllington also played for recent African American arrivals who hadleft the cities and towns of the Deep South, Texas, Arkansas, andOklahoma, stepping off at a makeshift unofficial stop on the SouthernPacific line in South Central Los Angeles, looking for jobs in the bur-geoning defense industry in the shipyards and factories of San Pedroand Long Beach, and hoping to craft new lives in the land of sunshine.3

1. John Pittman’s interview with Duke Ellington is reprinted in Mark Tucker, ed., The Duke EllingtonReader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 148–50. Jump for Joy lyricist Sid Kuller rememberedthe cracks in the wall of Ellington’s suite. Maurice Zolotow, “The Duke’s ‘Forgotten’ L.A. Musical,” LosAngeles Magazine (February 1982), 173. Myrdal published An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem andModern Democracy in 1944. In 1903, Du Bois had written, “the problem of the Twentieth Century is theproblem of the color line.” Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1989), 1.

2. Kid Ory was among the early jazz musicians to spend time in Los Angeles, staying for six yearsbeginning in 1919 and helping prepare the ground for Los Angeles as an essential stop for touringbands and musical transplants over the next couple of decades. Betty Yarbrough Cox, “TheEvolution of Black Music in Los Angeles, 1890–1955,” in Lawrence B. de Graaf, Kevin Mulroy,and Quintard Taylor, eds., Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in Los Angeles (Los Angeles: AutryMuseum of Western Heritage, 2001), 255.

3. Immediately after the 1938 Munich Pact, France and Britain, desperate to catch up with Hitler’s warmachine, placed orders with Southern California aircraft companies and, later, shipyards. Whilemuch of the U.S. was still in the throes of the Great Depression, these industries were advertising

6 SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA QUARTERLY

Encouraged by his acquaintances in the entertainment industry,Ellington soon developed a project that would occupy him for muchof the year: an all-black musical revue called Jump for Joy—the firstsuch work since the 1920s—expressing a new era of possibilities forAfrican Americans. In his 1973 autobiography, Music Is My Mistress,Ellington characterized Jump for Joy as “theatrical propaganda” thatwould “take Uncle Tom out of the theatre, eliminate the stereotypedimages that had been exploited by Hollywood and Broadway, and saythings that would make the audience think.”4

Dunbar Hotel, 4225 S. Central Avenue, ca. 1937. Opened in 1927 as the HotelSomerville, new owners renamed it after poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1929.

The Dunbar became the centerpiece of the Central Avenue entertainment district,hosting African American traveling bands, baseball teams, and other celebrities

and dignitaries. It was Duke Ellington’s Los Angeles home base in 1941. Postcard byNeuner Printing and Lithograph Co., Los Angeles. Courtesy of Tom Tomlinson (who notes

that the message on the postcard was dated Sept. 12, 1937) and Special Collections,University of Southern California Libraries.

nationwide for workers. The unofficial rail stop was at 40th and Central, a full three miles south ofUnion Station. Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression tothe Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 45.

4. Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (New York: Da Capo, 1976), 175. Joel Dinerstein linksEllington’s cultural burial of Uncle Tom to key black writers of the period in “‘Uncle Tom IsDead!’: Wright, Himes, and Ellison Lay a Mask to Rest.” African American Review 43:1 (Spring2009), 83.

JUMP FOR JOY 7

He made his music into an argument for equality. As he said ina sermon at a black Los Angeles church commemorating Lincoln’sbirthday that year, black Americans were “the shot in the arm” thatreminded America of its “forgotten” principles of equality anddemocracy. While the forces of fascism and militarism waged a dev-astating World War against America’s democratic European allies,Jump for Joy ran through the summer and early fall in Los Angelesand captured the sense of economic and democratic possibility forAfrican Americans constrained by Jim Crow racial discriminationever since the Civil War ended slavery. American politics, in theprocess of being transformed by African Americans’ defection fromthe Republican to the Democratic Party in the 1930s, were undergoinga change that would redefine American concepts of equality. Elling-ton’s work was a cultural indicator that the character of Americanliberalism would be racially inflected going forward—indeed it wasa cultural expression of activist work that black Angelenos performedduring the war years, work that transformed the national liberalagenda.5 Then, two months after Jump for Joy’s close, Japan’s bomb-ing of Pearl Harbor brought the war home. Black Americans’ loyaltywould be tested in the heat of war, but their participation in that warwould throw their own demands for fair dealing in greater relief evenbefore victory had been won. Ellington, a symbol of dignity andelegance to black America, had helped prepare the way as LosAngeles readied for war in the months before Pearl Harbor.

Jump for Joy is one of the lost continents in American culturalhistory. Because the revue did not make its anticipated run on Broad-way and no performance made it onto film, and because, in the erabefore the 33 rpm vinyl record, there was no official soundtrackrecording, it is relatively unknown even in the world of jazz. Ellingtonrecorded only a few of the show’s tunes that summer, but their radiolife suffered an interruption with a recording ban on radio in early1942. Decades later, a Smithsonian collection of them quickly went

5. Alan Brinkley identifies the transforming effect of race in “World War II and American Liberalism,”in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, ed. Lewis A. Erenbergand Susan E. Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 315. Douglas Flamming argues that“if African American leaders from Los Angeles and elsewhere had not pushed the matter, racialinequality might never have become a viable part of the liberal agenda. And if that had been the case,the southern civil rights moment of the 1950s and 1960s might have gained little to nothing fromCongress.” Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley: Universityof California Press), 363.


out of print. Viewers can catch a glimpse of the show on the internetvia two “soundie” films of featured numbers made after the showclosed. Writers on jazz have been especially prone to write the historyof the music from recordings.6 But what about music that has beenunder-recorded, those records made but not often heard? How doesone go about assessing the significance of Jump for Joy as an interpre-tive source with relevance beyond the realm of jazz history?

The cover of the opening night program, Jump for Joy, 1941. Duke Ellington Collection,Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

6. On youtube.com: “Bli-Blip”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼7FDc1ZQ1-uk “I Got It Bad andThat Ain’t Good”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼iJfII6gcVCo. Jed Rasula, “The Media ofMemory: The Seductive Menace of Records in Jazz History,” in Jazz among the Discourses ed. KrinGabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 135–36.

JUMP FOR JOY 9

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FDc1ZQ1-uk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FDc1ZQ1-uk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJfII6gcVCo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJfII6gcVCo

The revue has not gone unnoticed by cultural historians. MichaelDenning has written persuasively about Ellington’s musical revue aspart of what he calls the “laboring of American culture,” tracing itsconnections backward to the cultural front of the 1930s and 1940s.Gena Caponi-Tabery calls it “part of a broader cultural movement”of black cultural expression during the period. Daniel Widener pro-jects its influence forward; he sees it as a progenitor of the postwarflowering of black cultural activism in Los Angeles.7 I suggest severalavenues of analysis for Jump for Joy that are rooted in 1941. Fromzoot suits to drive-ins to the problem of black recruits, the revuereflected the rapidly changing city of Los Angeles, a culturally diversecenter both for the entertainment industry and for national defense.As preparations for war intensified, the city became a key battle-ground in the civil rights movement the revue supported. Jump forJoy also marked a key moment in the trajectory of Duke Ellington’scareer as a musician/activist whose musical forms revealed compo-sitional ambition beyond category, with content that argued for thecentrality of the African American experience in U.S. history ata moment of trial for American democracy. And in its pointed songlyrics and updated theatrical values, Jump for Joy functioned as a cul-tural expression of the Great Migration and the racial pride andoptimism attending African Americans’ move out of the South.Combined, these perspectives situate Jump for Joy as a key culturaltouchstone in what has become known as the “long civil rights move-ment,” the effort to trace significant civil rights activism to a timebefore the mid-1950s and to better understand the struggle asa national one waged in parts of the country distant from the South.8

From these perspectives, Jump for Joy’s genesis, its content, and itscontext make it a significant production, the politics of which spokedirectly to its moment.

7. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (NewYork: Verso, 2010), 309–19; Gena Caponi-Tabery, Jump for Joy: Jazz, Basketball, and Black Culture in1930s America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 186; Daniel Widener, Black ArtsWest: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

8. See Jacqueline D. Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Politics of Memory,” Journal ofAmerican History 91:4 (March 2005), 1233–63. Significant recent studies of northern and western civilrights history include Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in theNorth (New York: Random House, 2009) and Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: HowRacial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978 (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2012).


A WA RT I M E LO S AN G E L E S ST O RY

As he constantly traveled via the nation’s rails in private Pullman cars,Ellington defined his own life in terms of places he had been, names ofwhich figure prominently in his song titles and his autobiography.9 Jumpfor Joy’s location in Los Angeles provides an important lens throughwhich to view Ellington’s project. Here Ellington spent much of 1941,and he witnessed the remarkable changes taking place in the city. LosAngeles was a capital of popular culture and entertainment, and it alsofunctioned as a base of operations for national defense. In 1941, the citybecame a civil rights battleground as the nation prepared to fight fascismwith a segregated army and discriminatory home front. Los Angelestripled in size between 1920 and 1940, making it the fastest growingmetropolis in the country. Migrants continued to arrive as SouthernCalifornia struggled to absorb massive demographic change and boos-ters—both black and white—tried to maintain an image for the region asan American Eden, a place where dreams could come true. The crank-iness over growth and moral disgust at corruption expressed in Ray-mond Chandler’s fiction of the late 1930s and early 1940s reads likea prelude to the racial clashes of the war years. Migrant defense workerChester Himes’s work, especially the 1945 semi-autobiographical novelIf He Hollers Let Him Go, views that world from a black perspective thatmakes Chandler’s exposures of morally ambiguous police procedurelook petty by comparison to the indignities Himes suffered and laterfictionalized.10 But Chandler and Himes were both part of a larger LosAngeles-centered cultural moment that fed a new public demand forwhat was real, expressed most obviously in the popularity of what laterbecame known as film noir but which studio executives referred to as“red-meat” pictures. The elements that make up noir were already find-ing their way into film productions in 1940–41 movies—such as This Gunfor Hire—that would be released before and just after Pearl Harbor.11

9. Andrew S. Barish, Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930sand ‘40s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 1–9.

10. Raymond Chandler, Stories and Early Novels (New York: Library of America, 1995). See especiallythe attitude toward growth and attending moral corruption of the city in The Big Sleep (1939).Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002). Himes hadalready joined Richard Wright in the anti-Tom crusade with his 1943 short story “Heaven HasChanged,” which features a funeral for Tom; analyzed by Dinerstein, “‘Uncle Tom Is Dead!’” 91–93.

11. Sheri Chinen Biesen, Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir (Baltimore: The JohnsHopkins University Press, 2005), 15–58. See also Mike Davis’s chapter “Sunshine and Noir” inCity of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 2006), 15–98.

JUMP FOR JOY 11

The war, of course, was the engine that drove the changes. Elling-ton had taken his orchestra to Europe for the second time in 1939 justbefore the conflict began, and the unstable situation there had cut thetour short. By the time he settled in Los Angeles in 1941, the U.S. wason nearly full war footing. President Roosevelt, in the midst of switch-ing from “Dr. New Deal” to “Dr. Win-the-War,” had won re-election

in November 1940, just weeks after authorizing a peacetime draft inOctober. By the time the Ellington Orchestra began its seven-weekrun in Culver City in January, sixteen million men had already reg-istered under the 1940 Selective Service Act for military duty, tenmonths before Pearl Harbor.12

The Mayan Theater, 1038 South Hill Street, 1937. The 1927 Mayan revival moviepalace and stage theater hosted Jump for Joy and is still a part of the Los Angelesentertainment scene. Photographer unknown. Los Angeles Public Library, 00015388.

12. David M. Kenney, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1999), 632. Early draft boards accepted only whites because of thelogistical problems posed by the need for segregated training facilities. For a response, see RoyWilkins, “Discrimination in the Draft,” The Crisis 48:1 (January 1941), 7.


Within a short span of years, Los Angeles had gone from remotecultural backwater to vibrant cosmopolitan center of popular culture,including music. The swing journal Down Beat noticed the remark-able musical activity in the city in 1941. Citing Ellington, JimmieLunceford, and a number of other visitors, editor Dave Dexter Jr.called Southern California “a hotbed of syncopation” the like ofwhich would probably not be seen again.13 But who could say, giventhat the local audience for the music continued to grow? Ellingtonrecalled that the audience for Jump for Joy had been about half black,with “the most celebrated Hollywoodians, middle-class ofays” joininga variety of Negroes who “always left proudly, with their chests stickingout.”14 Just in case, patrons received a primer on jazz slang to makethem hip to the show’s lyrics.15 One patron recalled entering theMayan Theater for Jump for Joy and feeling like “walking on air. I cango into certain people’s homes and I say ‘oh, this home’s got love. It’sgot peace. It’s got harmony.’ I can feel it. Jump for Joy had all of that.”16

Those already in the know—a working-class urban black audi-ence—comprised only part of the diverse constituency for the big bandjazz form known as swing. In addition to a white Hollywood elite—Humphrey Bogart, Rita Hayworth—who slummed it in Central Ave-nue clubs, Mexican Americans (four times the African Americanpopulation in 1940s Los Angeles), Filipino Americans, Japanese Amer-icans, and even some white youth sported the zoot suit and attendeddances where jazz and rhythm and blues were the order of the day.17

Jump for Joy caught the vogue in a sketch starring the comedy troupePot, Pan, and Skillet, whom Ellington had encountered in Texas—thethree came West and provoked “guffaws” in a sketch called “Made toOrder.”18 Potts enters a tailor shop to order a five-drape

13. Dave Dexter Jr., “Big Band Boom Has California on the Jump.” Down Beat (August 14, 1941), 3.

14. Ofay: a derogatory term for a white person but could have a more genial spin. Ellington didn’t havea problem with whites coming to the show and uses it in his autobiography. By the time he used it in1973, it was a fairly archaic term. He also mentioned “the sweet-and-low, scuffling type Negroes, anddicty [i.e., upper-class, pretentious] Negroes as well (doctors, lawyers, etc.)” Ellington, Music Is MyMistress, 175–76.

15. Daniel Widener points out that this is one way the show established a cultural link “betweenHollywood and Central Avenue.” Widener, Black Arts West, 25.

16. Richard Dunn quoted in R. J. Smith, The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Los AfricanAmerican Renaissance (New York: PublicAffairs, 2006), 34.

17. Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2008), 84–85.

18. “Sepia Comics Hit at Mayan,” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1941, 9.

JUMP FOR JOY 13

“zoot suit with a reet pleat and a stuff cuff and a drape shape, shouldersextend, eighteen as intended; padding—Gibraltar; shiny as a halter;streamlined alignment; pipeline the pocket; drap it, drop it, sock it, andlock it—fifty-three at the knee and seven at the cuff.”

As for the color? Pot suggested, “let the rainbow be your guide.”19 Therevue helped make the “zoot” term for the suit standard—it was nowbecoming part of minority youth culture, and an increasingly contro-versial one as the war advanced. By the middle of the war years, thedrape suits celebrated in the 1943 film Stormy Weather had a strongnegative connotation in the minds of white Angelenos goaded by theLos Angeles Times into fear of ethnic gangs. The justice system seemedto reflect these fears with harsh treatment of the young Mexican Amer-ican Sleepy Lagoon murder defendants in 1942. Military personnelstationed in Southern California responded to young Mexican-Amer-icans’ visibility in Los Angeles public spaces by attacking them in whatbecame ironically and unfairly known as the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943.20

The nature of spread-out Los Angeles itself had an impact onJump for Joy. In a large production number that closed the first halfcalled “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a Drive-In Now,” Ellington treatedaudiences to a bait-and-switch. The visual effect, designed by ReneHubert, used a “backdrop which depicts an old weatherbeaten shackin the cotton fields” then became “suddenly lighted” to reveal“a modern drive-in stand on the same drop.”21 Ivie Anderson sang:

“It used to be a chicken shack in CarolineBut since they moved it up to Hollywood and VineThey paid off the mortgage with barbecued chow‘Cause Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a drive-in now!”22

19. Patricia Willard, liner notes to Jump for Joy (Smithsonian Collection Recordings, 1988), 16–17. The threecomics were on the program for a dedication ceremony for “Mt. Aluminum,” a growing pile of pots andpans donated to the city’s defense drive that symbolized, in Mayor Fletcher Bowron’s dedicatoryremarks, “the determination of our people that America will defend itself.” “Aluminum Pile Mounts:Pots and Pans Given in City’s Defense Drive Becoming Mountain,” Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1941,1A. While Ellington himself was not known for zoot style, few could complete with him sartorially.Cornetist Rex Stewart remembered one Ellington Easter special: “Duke made his dramatic entranceattired in a salmon-colored jacket and fawn-gray slacks and shoes. The shirt, I remember, was a tab-collared oyster shade and his tie some indefinable pastel between salmon and apricot. The audiencecheered for at least two minutes.” Stewart, Jazz Masters of the Thirties (New York: Da Capo, 1982), 84–85.

20. Douglas Henry Daniels, “Los Angeles Zoot: Race ‘Riot,’ the Pachuco, and Black Music Culture,”Journal of African American History, Vol. 87: The Past before Us (Winter, 2002), 104. See also Alvarez,The Power of the Zoot.

21. “Montage Effect Revue Feature on Mayan Stage,” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1941, A10.

22. Willard, 16–17.


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JUMP FOR JOY 15

The move from the South to the West does not mean that goodtraditional food has been left behind—the whole business plan inthe tune had been to take advantage of the appetites fellow migrantsbrought with them for good barbecue. In the number, black integra-tion into California’s emerging car culture is an easily imagined stepup from the land of cotton. In fact, the tune reflected Ivie Anderson’sown story. She had moved to Los Angeles in 1930 and had recentlyopened her own Ivie’s Chicken Shack, a club on Central Avenue.23

Most listeners, including critics across the board, agreed on “I’veGot It Bad (and That Ain’t Good),” sung by Anderson, as the besttune in the show. Its ostensibly lovelorn lyrics of lament, “I’ve Got ItBad” have been described as containing a “political unconscious,”helping chart Ellington’s strengthening of his ties to liberal activismduring the show’s run. On Labor Day, 1941, at a time when AfricanAmericans were unable to get more than janitorial jobs in SouthernCalifornia’s booming aircraft plants, Ellington’s orchestra and sing-ers Anderson and Herb Jeffries performed a medley of Jump for Joytunes, including the title tune and “I’ve Got It Bad,” for an NBCbroadcast. In the surviving airshot recording, host Melvyn Douglas,an actor/activist, calls for Ellington to perform “American swing.”Here Ellington argues that swing music and fair labor practices are anessential part of American culture.24

Ellington’s participation in Labor Day was a natural fit. LosAngeles was a major theater in the battle for civil rights in 1940 and1941, as African Americans continually found themselves shut out ofmany prime defense industry jobs just as the federal governmentbegan letting large contracts with aircraft and shipbuilding firms.25

23. Jump for Joy Program, 1941, n.p. Duke Ellington Collection, Series 2, Box 10, Folder 3, NationalMuseum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

24. Denning, The Cultural Front, 317–19. The “Jump for Joy” airshot may be heard in Central AvenueSounds: Jazz in Los Angeles, 1921–1956 (Rhino Records R2 75872, 1999). The Lockheed investigationwas to be a proxy for dealing with hiring discrimination in other Los Angeles-area plants, includingDouglas Aircraft and North American Aviation Corporation. David Welky, Marching Across theColor Line: A Philip Randolph and Civil Rights in the World War II Era (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2014), 85.

25. The dramatic expansion of the shipbuilding industry alone remains remarkable: in 1940 theindustry employed nearly 103,000 workers nationwide, a number that increased to 1.7 million in1943, making it the largest industrial employer in the national economy. Lester Rubin, NegroEmployment in the Maritime Industries: A Study of Racial Policies in the Shipbuilding, Longshore, andOffshore Maritime Industries (Philadelphia: The Wharton School, 1974), 10, 33. Skilled workersamong Negroes actually decreased as a percentage of total employment in the early war years.Ibid. In aviation, the story was the same. Only 186 nonwhite workers were employed in the


Duke Ellington manuscript, “I’ve Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good.” Ellington’sballad, sung by Ivie Anderson in Jump for Joy, recorded on 78 rpm record, and

performed in a soundie film, was the best-known song from the revue and becamea jazz standard. Duke Ellington Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of

American History, Smithsonian Institution.

aircraft industry in 1940; in 1941, the industry filled more than 8,700 jobs with only 13 going to non-whites. Smith, The Great Black Way, 62. There was nothing subtle about the discrimination. TheChicago Defender quoted an official for Vultee Aircraft of Downey, California: “I regret to say that it

JUMP FOR JOY 17

This had been the major theme behind the Negro and National DefenseUrban League radio broadcast on CBS in March featuring Ellingtonand other black entertainers, the success of which emboldened thehead of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, A. Philip Ran-dolph, to pitch a radio broadcast on fair labor practices to NBC. Thenetwork rejected the idea, but Randolph proceeded with plans fora major protest.26 With a million unemployed and the few jobs avail-able mostly of the unskilled variety, Randolph, the black press, andother civil rights and labor leaders combined to put pressure on theWhite House.27 The obvious discrimination—hardly restricted toSouthern California but very much concentrated there—led Ran-dolph to call for a March on Washington to demand an end to unfairtreatment by both employers and unions and to desegregate the mil-itary, a longstanding sore point. “Of all the shabby dealings of Amer-ica with a tenth of her citizens,” intoned Roy Wilkins in theNAACP’s Crisis, “none is more shameful or more indefensible thanher refusal to give Negroes a fair deal in the armed forces.”28 Ran-dolph told journalist Roi Ottley that “the administration leaders inWashington will never give the Negro justice until they see masses—ten, twenty, fifty thousand Negroes on the White House lawn” callingfor executive action.29 In May, Randolph called for an “‘all out’thunderous march on Washington, ending in a monster and huge

is not the policy of this company to employ people other than of the Caucasian race . . . ” Reprintedin The Crisis 47:10 (October 1940), 323.

26. Barbara Dianne Savage, Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938–1948 (ChapelHill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 166.

27. At Atlanta University in April, Robert C. Weaver cited a 1938 study that placed unskilled blackworkers nationally at a full two-thirds: 66.7 percent. Weaver, “Racial Employment Trends inNational Defense,” Phylon 2:4 (1941), 340. Even in U.S. Navy shipyards, where policies were some-what more liberal than private firms in the South and elsewhere, Negroes made up 78 percent of theunskilled work force in September 1940. Ibid., 351.

28. Roy Wilkins, “For Manhood in National Defense,” The Crisis 47:12 (December 1940), 375. Inaddition to the regular army, recent reports had criticized the army air force, which had “tricked”Negroes into believing they would be trained as pilots, and the navy. See James L. H. Peck, “WhenDo We Fly?,” The Crisis, ibid., 376–78, 388; and Anonymous, “The Negro in the United StatesNavy,” The Crisis, 47:7 (July 1940), 200–01, 210. (The author revealed himself as J. Earl Mason in thefollowing issue.)

29. Roy Ottley, New World a-Comin’: Inside Negro America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 289–91. InMarch, FDR had called for national unity to back the policy of providing aid to Britain. The Crisisresponded: “On the very day Mr. Roosevelt spoke Negro men were being denied employment infactories” doing the very work called for in the president’s message. Roy Wilkins, “The PresidentSpeaks,” The Crisis 48:4 (April 1941), 103.


demonstration at Lincoln’s Monument” that would “shake up whiteAmerica” on July 1, 1941.30 Roosevelt, unable to persuade Randolphto delay or desist, signed Executive Order 8802 on June 25, two weeksbefore Jump for Joy’s run opened, creating the Fair Employment Prac-tices Committee to investigate defense industry hiring complaints.Satisfied with the order, Randolph canceled the march, and the newcommittee was deluged with more than six thousand complaints fromall points of the compass in its first year alone.31 The first FEPCCommittee hearings were scheduled for Los Angeles in October1941 to investigate charges of discrimination at Lockheed and otherplants.32

Ellington and his collaborators condemned Southern socialpractices in Jump for Joy; the critique had local significance as well.The FEPC hearings described deep and systematic patterns of dis-crimination in the boom economy of the promised land itself.While the grievances of African Americans were the germ for thehearings, some who took the stand—such as Los Angeles UrbanLeague Executive Director Floyd Covington—spoke more broadlyfor racial minorities across Southern California, and Mexican-and Japanese-American community leaders also testified. The testi-mony also ranged beyond specific instances of hiring discrimination.The State of California’s quick curtailment of relief programs, com-bined with discriminatory hiring, had left many workers of colorwithout employment options. Some also encouraged the FEPC toinvestigate the U.S. military, which remained segregated despite Ran-dolph’s original demand even as the nation prepared to fight fascismabroad.33

30. “Negroes’ Committee to March on Washington for Equal Participation in National Defense; Call toNegro America.” Originally published in The Black Worker and circulated widely, the full text ofRandolph’s call for the march may be found in Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941–1963(New York: Library of America, 2003), 1–4.

31. Ottley, New World A-Comin’, 302.

32. Randolph’s wartime activities are detailed in Welky, Marching Across the Color Line. The story of LosAngeles and the limited success of the FEPC in 1941 is told in Sides, L.A. City Limits, 67–68.

33. Kevin Allen Leonard, The Battle for Los Angeles: Racial Ideology and World War II (Albuquerque:University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 36–39. The New Deal relief programs had been adminis-tered in a segregated manner, but given the dire employment landscape of the 1930s, blacks had littlechoice but to acquiesce. Douglas Flamming, “Becoming Democrats: Liberal Politics and the AfricanAmerican Community in Los Angeles, 1930–1965,” in De Graaf, et al., Seeking El Dorado, 290. MarkBrilliant studies the activities, cooperative and otherwise, of California’s racial minorities in thecivil rights efforts of the World War II and postwar years in The Color of America Has Changed.

JUMP FOR JOY 19

With war looming, minorities found themselves in a difficult posi-tion. They could unquestioningly support the government and par-ticipate in the war effort, or they could withhold their support by notworking in defense or enlisting. But they also had to make a living,and despite efforts by some to make black participation in the Amer-ican war effort conditional on greater equality in the U.S., takingadvantage of the opportunity for a better material life was under-standable. It was all the more disheartening, then, to find that doorof opportunity closed in the burgeoning economy while the one forenlistment and danger remained open and marked “Colored.” In thedenouement of Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go, shipbuilder BobJones, already shocked by racism throughout Los Angeles and havingrun afoul of discrimination on the job, has been framed for a crime hedid not commit. Jones chooses the segregated army over jail or worse.In his mind war is the lesser of two evils.34 The often grim experienceof minorities who did serve in the military helped inspire civil rightsactivism after the war.35

Ellington’s stance was complex. As his Los Angeles interviewer,John Pittman, declared, the Duke was a “race man,” meaning that hesupported “national loyalty” and embodied “patriotism,” but, cru-cially, in his “devotion to the ideas of the nation” Ellington expectedthe respect he had for that nation to be reciprocated to his people.36

As a move in that direction, the FEPC did not go far enough. Exec-utive Order 8802 authorized a committee without prosecutorialpower, only with the ability to publicly shame the prejudiced. In thewords of Roi Ottley, by 1943 the FEPC had not even “washed thedirty linen of the federal government” itself, where discrimination stillruled.37 In Jump for Joy, comic Wonderful Smith’s phone call to theWhite House had been answered, but movement toward equality

34. Himes later wrote that his time in Los Angeles as a defense worker had been surprisingly painful.“Los Angeles hurt me racially more than any city I have ever known—much more than any city Iremember from the south. It was the lying hypocrisy that hurt me.” Quoted in George Lipsitz, ARainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 35.

35. Allison Varzally, Making a Non-White America: Californians Coloring Outside Ethnic Lines, 1925–1955(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 159.

36. Pittman, interview with Ellington, 150.

37. Ottley, New World A-Comin’, 305. In May 1943, FDR strengthened FEPC by appointing thePresident’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice with Executive Order 9346, which alsomade it illegal for labor unions to practice racial discrimination. William A. Harris, The HarderWe Run: Black Workers since the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press), 1982.


would be a drawn-out and difficult process, made especially clearduring the riots in Harlem and Detroit in 1943.38 While Jump for Joymay have been a step forward in its presentation of black entertain-ment on stage, the combination of the Great Migration and defensediscrimination meant that the show’s writers could not catch up withthe rush of new events and the issues the wartime economy hadbrought to light—even in the revue’s host city.39

ART I S T/AC T I V I S T: TH E DU K E A N D HI S AM B I T I O N S

How effectively did Jump for Joy speak to civil rights in Los Angeles?Record producer Norman Granz was skeptical “because the peoplewho went to see the show already felt that way.”40 But in part thequestion has to do with how much stock one puts in cultural produc-tions to either critique existing conditions or effect social change.While Ellington rarely made overt statements on civil rights, heintended even his instrumental works to contain a message. Elling-ton’s ambitions to write music that spoke to Negro history andpresent-day political concerns were a significant element in the dis-course surrounding his early 1940s period. While Ellington had beenput on the defensive in the jazz press about whether his orchestra’sevolving music was truly “jazz”—that is, whether it was true enoughto the music’s “folk” roots—discerning black listeners agreed withEllington that it was a moot point.41 The California Eagle’s Wilma

38. Waldo E. Martin finds the seeds of postwar black cultural politics in the ironic injustices of the waryears. Martin, No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2005), 10–13. Specific to Jump for Joy’s host city, Daniel Widener cites the revue as a keyprogenitor of postwar black cultural politics in Los Angeles. Widener, Black Arts West, 21–28.

39. Mercer Ellington recalled that Duke Ellington meant Jump for Joy “absolutely and definitively as anindictment of the South, but not perhaps in a strictly geographical sense. ‘The South’ wascommonly a term for depicting overweening bigotry, something certainly not confined solely tothat area.” Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington in Person, 182. Nevertheless, Jump for Joy’s lyrics presentmigration out of the South as a deliverance from racism.

40. Norman Granz interview, Duke Ellington Oral History Project, Smithsonian Institution, August23, 1989. Ellington’s most recent biographer, Terry Teachout, devotes considerable space to Jump forJoy but refers to the revue as a “flop” and a “failure,” couched as Ellington’s sentiments. Presumablythe failure was the show’s inability to generate funding for a tour or to reach Broadway, or perhapsbecause Teachout does not believe the show’s message got out or was particularly salient. I arguethat the complexity of the show’s conception, reception, and context tell against any singledeclaration of its success or failure. Terry Teachout, Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (New York:Gotham, 2013), 230, 232, 235.

41. Ellington wrote a series of columns for Down Beat addressing the issue. See the section “Ellington inDown Beat: Swing and Its Critics,” in Tucker, The Duke Ellington Reader, 132–39. The issue isdiscussed in Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? (Berkeley: University of California Press,

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Cockrell, writing in a prominent black newspaper to defend theEllington Orchestra’s August 1941 Pasadena concert, which hadoccurred on a Sunday afternoon, described the music as “the cry ofthe African slave as he works under the yoke of his captors; it is thegay, gaudy and free life of the Negro in Harlem; it is the low, plaintivecry of the Negro against the hard, mechanical white world, which hemust fight against in order to survive.” The intent behind the musicjustified its performance on the Sabbath. Cockrell suggested thechurch and theater “should meet on some common ground and worktogether—not against each other.” She worked in a city that alreadyhad a reputation for unusual religious practices and media-distributedspirituality, including the theatrics of the celebrated Aimee SempleMcPherson. Playing orchestral jazz on the Sabbath under churchsponsorship did not seem all that problematic to Cockrell, given hercommunity’s more urgent priorities.42

Jump for Joy can be heard as a transition between the early periodof Duke Ellington’s career and its middle phase—the end of his greatorchestra featuring saxophonist Ben Webster and bassist Jimmy Blan-ton and the move toward completing longer-form concert-lengthworks (such as Black, Brown and Beige), which he would soon performat Carnegie Hall during the war.43 Since Ellington also consideredJump for Joy his most direct musical statement on race and civil rightsin America, the revue provides important clues to his thinking onthese matters at a crucial period during the buildup to Americanparticipation in World War II.44

2002) 1–2, and John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2006), 43–55.

42. Wilma Cockrell, “Jam Session,” California Eagle, October 2, 1941. Jazz musicians have often lookedto the church both for musical inspiration and for “oratory” models in black preaching. See SterlingStuckey, “The Music That Is In One’s Soul: On the Sacred Origins of Jazz and the Blues,” LenoxAvenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry 1 (1995), 73–88. Ellington himself created his Sacred Concerts inthe 1960s as part of his orchestra’s special repertoire.

43. Blanton’s active bass had helped redefine the band’s sound, but he would not leave Los Angeles. Heshowed signs of illness during Jump for Joy’s run and left the orchestra in November after beingdiagnosed with the tuberculosis that killed him in 1942. John Edward Hasse, Beyond Category: TheLife and Genius of Duke Ellington (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 258. On Ellington’sdevelopment of concert jazz, see John Howland, Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P.Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). Therecordings from this period featuring the new personnel may be heard on the three-disc set NeverNo Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band (Bluebird 82876-50857-2, 2003).

44. Mark Tucker makes a connection between Jump for Joy and the composition of Black, Brown and Beigein “The Genesis of Black, Brown and Beige,” Black Music Research Journal 13:2 (Autumn, 1993), 67–86.


Born in Washington, D.C. in 1899, Edward Kennedy Ellingtongrew up in middle-class circumstances with parents who encouragedhis artistic interests. He chose music over his first love of painting,began playing with small groups around the city, and finally left forNew York in 1923 to make his way in the burgeoning music scenethere. The ambitious young composer and bandleader eventuallybecame a fixture in the uptown Harlem night spots frequented bylocals and slumming whites. Closely associated with the famous Cot-ton Club by the late 1920s, Ellington’s early orchestra purveyeda “jungle sound” often heard as modernist primitivism par excel-lence.45 By the 1930s Ellington had moved on musically, craftingpopular tunes such as “Mood Indigo” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing(If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” He helped establish what becameknown as big band swing and then watched as white bands such asBenny Goodman reaped most of the financial rewards in the segre-gated 1930s.46 But two tours of Europe in the 1930s secured Elling-ton’s international fame; following the second, British jazz fansnamed Ellington’s orchestra the greatest of all swing organizations.47

Despite the economic hard times, Ellington’s orchestra workedsteadily throughout the Depression years, relying on the Duke’s con-stant flow of original compositions—always written with the band’sparticular players in mind—to keep the music fresh. Ellington even-tually pieced together perhaps his greatest band and cultivated a per-sonal image of debonair elegance he retained the rest of his life.48 By1940, saxophonist Ben Webster and young bassist Jimmy Blanton hadreenergized the orchestra. The orchestra’s credentials as a dance bandmay be heard on a now-famous 1940 recording from Fargo, NorthDakota. Ellington had lofty ambitions for his orchestra, but as thisrecording demonstrates, the Duke’s men could energize a ballroom of

45. Alfred Appel Jr., Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce (New York:Knopf, 2002), 203–15.

46. Much of this period’s music is collected on The Complete 1932–40 Brunswick, Columbia, and MasterRecordings of the Duke Ellington Orchestra (Mosaic MD11-248, 2011).

47. A Melody Maker poll reported in Metronome. “‘Duke Greatest Band of All!’ Vote Britishers,”Metronome, January 1938, 13, 33.

48. Photographer William Gottlieb recalled Ellington’s ability to transform himself into “the Duke”when he photographed the bandleader for Down Beat in the 1940s: “He’d just come out of theshower, and I saw him naked, and he was another fat slob. But by the time he had used all of thelotions that were on his table, and put on one of the many suits that he always had with him, hebecame the debonair Ellington.” Quoted in Benjamin Cawthra, Blue Notes in Black and White:Photography and Jazz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 89.

JUMP FOR JOY 23

dancers like no other. Joined by composer and arranger Billy Stray-horn and buoyed by hits such as Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train,”Ellington had gathered more talent around him than ever before. His1941 Los Angeles sojourn saw him at a peak of fame and his orches-tra playing at its best. This was the moment Ellington chose to makehis most direct social statements.49

Despite his growing reputation as one of America’s great entertai-ners, Ellington’s artistic and commercial ambitions had not yet beenfully realized—though Jump for Joy’s program mentioned that heearned an estimated $250,000 per year.50 He had dabbled in the filmindustry prior to 1941, but hoped for more opportunities to composefor film and expose his orchestra by spending more time in LosAngeles. His acting in an early short, Black and Tan (dir. DudleyMurphy, 1929) did not lead to more such roles, but the film show-cased his music and fixed his image as a composer, a rare credentialaccorded a black musician on film. In the 1930s Ellington had foundhimself subject to the racial anxieties of the film industry. His was thefirst black orchestra to receive credited billing for its on-screen per-formance in a film with an otherwise white cast. But the film, RKO’spopular Check and Double Check (1930), undermined Ellington’s dis-tinction. It starred whites in blackface as comedians Amos and Andy.The short film Bundle of Blues juxtaposed Ellington’s suave music andsinger Ivie Anderson’s sophistication with images of the barnyard. Itdid not seem possible for Hollywood to conceive of black entertain-ment in artistic terms.51 The slow realization that vernacular Amer-ican music in the form of jazz constituted a new art form was justbeginning to be argued within the emerging popular music press in the1930s, making Ellington’s film appearances as a composer all the more

49. Important biographies of Ellington include: Stanley Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (New York:Da Capo, 1981); Hasse, Beyond Category; Stuart Nicholson, Reminiscing in Tempo: A Portrait of DukeEllington (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999); Harvey G. Cohen, Duke Ellington’s America(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); and Teachout, Duke. For Strayhorn, see David Hadju,Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1996)

50. Presumably a gross figure, much of which went into salaries and transportation for his orchestra.Jump for Joy Program, 1941, n.p. Duke Ellington Collection, Box 10, Folder 3, National Museum ofAmerican History, Smithsonian Institution.

51. As Krin Gabbard writes in his analysis of Ellington’s relationship to film in the 1930s, “very fewAmericans, and for that matter very few Europeans, could regard any black performer as an artist.”Gabbard, Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1996), 169. Gabbard’s chapter on Ellington is essential reading on the Duke’s relationship tothe film industry.


notable.52 In a musical pantomime short work for Paramount releasedin 1935, Ellington performed as a composer in Symphony in Black:A Rhapsody of Negro Life, an early clue to his larger compositionalambitions as well as a bid for meaningful screen time.53 Despite hisdignified turn, the short did not appreciably increase his Hollywoodcachet. It was not much better in mainstream print media. Ellingtonmade it into Life’s “Swing” photo-essay in 1938 at the height of themusic’s and the magazine’s early popularity, but the editors relegatedthe Duke and other black bandleaders to their own segregated pagewhile Benny Goodman and other white musicians dominated thespread.54 Even so, Ellington went into 1941 with his stateside popular-ity on the upswing. The national music magazine Metronome namedhim the most popular recording act of both 1939 and 1940, with eightof his recordings ranking on the magazine’s Fifty Favorites of the latteryear, double that of second-place Woody Herman.55 Down Beat, per-haps the leading swing journal of the day, placed Ellington on its coverin January 15, 1941, a rare occurrence for a black musician.56

Jump for Joy would be something new, a transitional work inEllington’s career. It is an early long-form production, but the revueformat, in which the orchestra accompanied a variety of acts, wasquite different from the full-length suite he would soon complete anddebut at Carnegie Hall. In one sense, the story is pure showbiz.Ellington’s orchestra was in the midst of a long residence at CasaManana in Culver City (running from January 2 to February 20)when MGM screenwriter Sid Kuller invited the band to his houseon Mulholland Drive overlooking the San Fernando Valley.57

52. On the split between classical and popular cultures in the 1930s, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1989) 169–242.

53. John Howland, “‘The Blues Get Glorified’: Harlem Entertainment, Negro Nuances, and BlackSymphonic Jazz.” The Musical Quarterly 90:3–4 (Fall-Winter 2007), 319–70. Howland argues for the“rhapsody” style of George Gershwin as a major reference point for Ellington rather than tradi-tional European classical composers.

54. “Swing: From a Dark Past It Comes Into Its Golden Age,” Life, August 8, 1938, 51–64. Analyzed inCawthra, Blue Notes in Black and White, 26–39.

55. “Duke Ellington Tops All 1940 Disc Bands,” Metronome, January, 1941, 11.

56. Down Beat, January 15, 1941.

57. In addition to the Casa Manana shows, Ellington made a couple of radio appearances and, onFebruary 15, he and the orchestra recorded Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train,” which had justbecome the group’s new theme song. Klaus Stratemann, Duke Ellington Day by Day and Film by Film(Copenhagen: Jazz Media ApS, 1992), 166.

JUMP FOR JOY 25

A resulting series of weekend jam sessions became the talk of thetown, with various musicians and celebrities—including amateurrival drummers Jackie Cooper and Mickey Rooney—joining in.During one of these weekend blowouts at Kuller’s, Jump for Joy was

Marie Bryant, performing in the “Chocolate Shake” in Jump for Joy. Bryant receivedstrong notices for her dancing, acting, and singing. She later starred in such

productions as Sweet ‘N’ Hot and Gjon Mili’s famous 1944 jazz short, Jammin’ theBlues and became a choreographer for nightclubs, theater, and the film industry.

Herald Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library, 00050643.


born. Kuller remarked that “this joint sure is jumping.” Ellington, theringmaster at the piano, said it was “jumping for Joy!”58 On the spot,Paul Francis Webster, who had been working to put together a pro-duction called the Negro Revue or Rhapsody in Black in Los Angelesunder the rubric of the Hollywood Theatre Alliance without successfor more than a year, joined Kuller and other guests, including vet-eran Hollywood composer Hal Borne, to hatch the American RevueTheater to back an Ellington production. At least this is the story,with variations, that participants told over the years. It is likely thatEllington had discussions with Webster and HTA members, includingLangston Hughes, well before the blowout at Kuller’s, but that nightprobably did crystallize important support for the revue.59 As dawnapproached, the room had committed $20,000 toward the cost ofmounting the show, which eventually ran to at least $42,000.60 Withthe additional backing of producer Joseph Pasternak, who staked$15,000 himself on the revue, Ellington began writing while out ontour in the spring as Borne, Kuller, and Webster squeezed in revuework among “day job” responsibilities in the film industry.61 Theproduction company booked the Mayan Theatre, an ornate artifactof 1920s revival style designed by prominent architect Stiles Clementsand situated on Hill Street downtown, to host the show.62

Ellington composed music for the revue on and off—even writingthree pieces on the overnight train ride from Utah back to LosAngeles—through the late spring of 1941.63 With time running short

58. Hasse, Beyond Category, 243.

59. The HTA had been inspired by such eastern Popular Front-inspired productions as Meet the People(to which Kuller had contributed in 1940), The Cradle Will Rock, and Pins and Needles, shows whoselineage may be traced to the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theatre Project. Teachout,Duke, 224. Ellington would have been well aware of these and other left and left-leaning projectswell before his time in Los Angeles.

60. John Franceschina, Duke Ellington’s Music for the Theatre (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), 31.

61. Willard, 4.

62. See photo page 12. Key Clements’s architectural inventory is listed at the University of Washington’sPacific Coast Architectural Directory: http://pcad.lib.washington.edu/person/116/. AccessedOctober 29, 2015.

63. Ellington’s son Mercer recalled this activity in Dance, The World of Duke Ellington, 40. The threenumbers were also among the best of the show: “The Brown-Skinned Gal,” “Jump for Joy,” and “IGot It Bad (And That Ain’t Good).” Following the orchestra’s Culver City residency, the organi-zation toured the west coast as far north as Vancouver, British Columbia, and southeast from thereto Salt Lake City and Ogden, playing at least eighteen shows between February 21 and March 26,a typically grueling schedule for the band that Ellington proudly proclaimed worked “52 weeksa year.” Stratemann, Duke Ellington Day by Day, 166. Ellington, Music Is My Mistress, many citations.

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http://pcad.lib.washington.edu/person/116/

before the scheduled opening, Ellington settled into the Dunbar Hotelin the Central Avenue district, a narrow ribbon of commercial shops,entertainment venues, and dwellings extending south from down-town. This would be the orchestra’s base during the show’s run.64

While Ellington’s choice of residence had been constrained by thecity’s de facto segregation, the Dunbar placed Ellington in the centerof the fastest-growing section of a sprawling metropolis and kept himwell supplied with his favorite breakfast, a bowl of peaches and pearseaten around noon along with coffee to sip and cigarettes to smoke.65

The Dunbar had hosted the first convention of the National Associ-ation for the Advancement of Colored People in 1929 and regularlyhosted touring jazz bands from Louis Armstrong to Fats Waller, NegroLeague baseball teams, and prominent eminences such as LangstonHughes and W.E.B. Du Bois.66 With four music clubs nearby and thehotel as a center of Central Avenue social life, there were plenty ofdistractions to be found there, but Ellington’s famous work ethic wonout. As the opening loomed, Ellington composed sheet after sheet ofmusic from his bathtub and sent out calls for comedy teams, singers,and especially collaborators who could write song lyrics that wouldcreate an entertaining but proud black image for the show.67

As principal lyricist Paul Francis Webster, Langston Hughes, SidKuller, and an eventual total of fifteen writers worked on variousnumbers and routines, several tunes seemed like good candidates forrecording and release during the run of the show.68 A ballad written

64. Photo on page 7. For the Central Avenue scene, see Clora Bryant, et al., Central Avenue Sounds: Jazzin Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), an oral history featuring musicianswho played there from the 1930s through the 1950s. See also Smith, The Great Black Way. Anauthoritative study on black Los Angeles before World War II is Flamming, Bound for Freedom.

65. Pittman, interview with Duke Ellington, 150. While some of Los Angeles’s housing segregation wasunofficial, the prevalence of neighborhood associations with restrictive covenants made forrampant discrimination and the seeds of ghetto conditions in black sectors of town, includingCentral Avenue. Keith E. Collins, Black Los Angeles: The Maturing of the Ghetto, 1940–1950(Saratoga, CA: Century Twenty One, 1980), 26–28.

66. Cox, “The Evolution of Black Music in Los Angeles, 1890–1955,” 259.

67. Production manager Henry Blankford’s humorous account had the Duke’s valet maintainingconstant water temperature along with chocolate ice cream and scotch, Billy Strayhorn testingout the scribbled compositions on a piano elsewhere in the suite, and the various band memberspicking up the tunes as the fresh sounds wafted down the hallway. “And about four or five hourslater, two more songs for the show were finished.” Quoted in Hasse, Beyond Category, 250–51.

68. Ellington registered more than ten songs to be published by Robbins Music Corp. from Jump for Joy,which Metronome reported would head to New York in the fall. “Robbins to Publish EllingtonMusic,” Metronome (August 1941), 43. Writers credited in the original Jump for Joy program:Music by Duke Ellington and Hal Borne, lyrics by Paul Webster, with additional lyrics and music


Two of Jump for Joy’s stars, Ellington’s longtime singer Ivie Anderson and newcomerDorothy Dandridge, who would go on to fame in Hollywood, becoming the first

black actor to be nominated for an Academy Award in a lead role for herperformance in Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954). From Jump for Joy Program,

Duke Ellington Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History,Smithsonian Institution.

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by Ellington with Webster’s lyrics for longtime Ellington singer IvieAnderson, “I’ve Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good),” sold well onrecord when released later in the year and soon became a torch stan-dard. Herb Jeffries, well known as the star of independent blackmotion pictures such as Harlem Rides the Range from 1939, was thefirst male singer to work with Ellington. His suave rendition of“Brown-Skinned Gal in the Calico Gown,” sung onstage to the “gal,”Dorothy Dandridge, was another hit.69 Rising stars Dandridge andMarie Bryant would sing and dance as well. In the weeks before theopening, Jump for Joy had the attention and support of leftist PopularFront Hollywood icons Charles Chaplin, Orson Welles, and espe-cially the actor John Garfield.70 Ellington knew Popular Front artisticcircles well, playing fundraisers for civil rights organizations (most ofwhich had Communist Party members) in the late 1930s, makingenough friends in red places to inspire an FBI file on him. Ellington’sversion of communism seems to have been of the lower-case “c”variety to which many 1930s and 1940s artists subscribed, and in anycase the Popular Front as a Soviet-driven international cultural policyhad died with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.71 The extent to which thewriters, musicians, and artists of the U.S. Popular Front took actualmarching orders from Moscow or were inspired by the homegrowneconomic disaster of the Great Depression remains a matter fordebate, one that hinges on how one weighs the scales of “anti-fascism” and “pro-communism” in Popular Front rhetoric of the

by Sid Kuller, Hal Fimberg, Otis Rene, Langston Hughes, Charles Leonard, Mickey Rooney, SidneyMiller, Ray Golden, and Richard Well. Jump for Joy Program, n.p., 1941. Duke Ellington Collection,Series 2, Box 10, Folder 3, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

69. Jump for Joy program, 1941, n.p. “I’ve Got It Bad” sold “hundreds of thousands of copies,” accordingto Hasse in Beyond Category, 247.

70. Ellington’s connection to Welles seemed to bear fruit when the young director, whose Citizen Kanedebuted near the end of Jump for Joy’s run in September 1941, asked the composer to provide musicfor a new film, mistakenly taken by Metronome to be the ill-fated It’s All True. The magazine claimedthat the film would star Louis Armstrong in the story of his own life, and quotes technical directorDave Stuart, who—somewhat incredibly—criticized Ellington’s knowledge of jazz history. ElliotPaul, “Louis Film Director Slaps at Duke,” Metronome (November, 1941), 9, 30–31. In fact, Welleshad retained Ellington for another unrealized project, The Story of Jazz, for which Ellington wrote 28bars while accepting more than $12,000 on retainer. Simon Callow, Orson Welles, Volume 2: HelloAmericans (New York: Viking, 2006) 11–12.

71. The National Urban League’s answer to charges of Negro disloyalty demanded equality ofopportunity as a way to ensure continued national devotion in African Americans. “The uglyface of treason has often been seen in America since Benedict Arnold betrayed his country in theWar of Independence,” Opportunity intoned, “but that face has always been white.” Elmer A. Carter,“Subversive Activities and the Negro,” Opportunity 18:10 (October 1940), 290–91.


day.72 Jump for Joy’s title song, with lyrics written by Kuller and Web-ster, steered rather wide of international concerns, focusing insteadon a call for black America to leave home-grown fascism behind. Themessage could not be missed when the show finally opened on July 10,1941:

Fare thee well land of cotton.Cotton lisle is out of style,Honey chileJump for joy.Don’t you grieve little EveAll the hounds I do believeHave been killedAin’t ‘cha thrilled?Jump for joy.73

The song comments on what was already well underway—thesecond wave of the Great Migration out of the South, slow but steadyin 1941, soon to gain force with the war.74 As reviewer Almena DavisLomax put it in the Los Angeles Tribune, the black weekly she edited,Jump for Joy was “a new mood in the theatre, reflecting truly the happysatire of colored life. In Jump for Joy, Uncle Tom is dead. God rest hisbones.”75 Davis captured well Ellington’s aims; according to the mae-stro, “the original script had Uncle Tom on his death bed with all hischildren dancing around him singing, ‘He lived to a ripe old age. Lethim go, God bless him!’”76 “Tomism” was a kind of obsession withEllington. In a 1941 interview he expressed the challenge of counter-ing “offensive stereotypes instilled in the American mind by whole

72. The charges of the House Un-American Activities Committee, formed in 1938 to root out Amer-ican ties to Nazi Germany but later evolving into an effort to unmask “premature anti-fascists,”should also be weighed in political context. Terry Teachout acknowledges Michael Denning’s studyof Popular Front culture, but in his biography of Ellington writes in a substantially less nuanced waythan does Denning about the Communist nature of the Popular Front activities of artists andcelebrities connected in some way to Jump for Joy. For their contrasting approaches to the problem,see Denning, The Cultural Front, 4–13, and Teachout, Duke, 224–26.

73. Paul Webster, Sid Kuller, and Duke Ellington. “Jump for Joy” (1941), Duke Ellington Collection.

74. Within a few weeks in early 1942, the Southern Pacific Railroad brought more than 3,000 workers toLos Angeles. In June 1943 alone, 10,000 to 12,000 black migrants arrived. Collins, Black Los Angeles,18–19.

75. Willard, Jump for Joy, 19. Almena Davis Lomax edited the upstart Tribune, born in 1940 asa competitor to the California Eagle and Los Angeles Sentinel, the two established black papers inLos Angeles. Leonard, Battle for Los Angeles, 16.

76. “There was a Hollywood producer on one side of the bed and a Broadway producer on the otherside, and both were trying to keep him alive by injecting adrenalin into his arms!” Ellington, Music IsMy Mistress, 175.

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centuries of ridicule and degradation.” Ellington’s disdain for theTom figure had less to do with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s characterthan with a revolt within the black cultural sphere against subservi-ence as a Jim Crow survival tactic. Richard Wright’s first book, a 1938collection of stories titled Uncle Tom’s Children, counted the costs ofJim Crow and demanded alternatives to remaining under the threatof white violence in the South. Wright signaled that a new generationof African Americans themselves had lost patience with “the cringingtype who knew his place.”77 Jump for Joy tried to solve the problem ofproviding quality entertainment while confounding expectations, bothblack and white. “The American audience,” Ellington said, “has beentaught to expect a Negro on stage to clown and ‘Uncle Tom,’ that is, toenact the role of a servile, yet lovable inferior.”78 Wittingly or not,Almena Davis’s review—which was also published in the nationallydistributed Pittsburgh Courier—had quoted Wright when she wrote that“Uncle Tom is dead!” Ellington, though a decade older than Wright,had aligned himself with the demands of Wright’s generation.

As if to underline the point, another tune, “I’ve Got a Passportfrom Georgia (and I’m Going to the U.S.A.),” provoked the localchapter of the Ku Klux Klan to threaten the show and didn’t last thefirst week. Comedy numbers burlesqued black life—but not in dialectand not in blackface, still common before the war—and one spokencomedy number, “Hello Mr. President,” sent up President FranklinRoosevelt and a Congress whose agenda did not seem to include blackAmericans as the country headed toward war. “If we could put ourheads together, we could straighten things out,” says the draftee, playedby Wonderful Smith, to his Commander in Chief. FDR, on the otherend of the line, apparently agrees with Smith that the world is in a mess;his remedy is to go fishing. Congress has recently made huge appro-priations, but Smith wonders whether the president knows what it feelslike to ask for aid and not get it. “I could be a much better soldier,” saysSmith, “if I knew I had a brand new suit waiting for me when I got outof the army.” The suit stood in for equality. Smith hoped the presidentwould get back to him. “You know, you have my number,” he closes.79

77. The quotation is from one of Wright’s epigraphs to Uncle Tom’s Children, discussed as a sign ofchanging black attitudes to the mask of servility, by Dinerstein, “‘Uncle Tom Is Dead!,’” 84.

78. Pittman interview with Ellington, 149.

79. Wonderful Smith, “Hello Mr. President,” Jump for Joy (Smithsonian). The recording is taken froma reprise of the skit Smith performed in Top Sergeant Mulligan, a 1941 film. Smith himself ended up


Jump for Joy included comedy numbers, production routines, andballads in a format common to Harlem revues after the First WorldWar. Ellington and his collaborators tried to create a revue that wouldbe entertaining while not sounding didactic, though the message wasalways part of the equation in Ellington’s mind.80 In his memoir,Ellington acknowledged that Jump for Joy had “aroused” a “feelingof responsibility” in him that soon found expression on his historyof Black America in music, Black, Brown and Beige, a work whosegenesis went all the way back to 1930.81 And there was a direct musi-cal connection as well: a portion of Jump for Joy’s “Concerto forClinkers” became the basis for “Blues,” one of Black, Brown andBeige’s sections.82 Soon Ellington would develop this and other fullsuites of music that retained the sense of independent songs heard inthe revue format, but without lyrics. He attempted to convey throughmusic alone the history of the black experience, necessarily commu-nicating his attitude toward race in America in oblique ways.83 InJump for Joy, he made his most direct statement about equality even ashe felt his way toward more substantial musical forms to be played inprestigious halls built for European concert music. He may havereached back to the revue form of one of his inspirations, NobleSissle, whose 1921 Shuffle Along had been the most important blackmusical before Jump for Joy.84 But there was to be no shuffling in

enlisting in the army. “Tentative Outline for Jump for Joy, A Musical Revue,” Duke EllingtonCollection.

80. John Howland, Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (AnnArbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 184.

81. Ellington, Music Is My Mistress, 180.

82. Stratemann, Duke Ellington Day by Day and Film by Film, 169

83. Ellington’s concern with black history ties him to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s,with artists such as Aaron Douglas investigating the black past, and to other intellectual currents aswell. Carter G. Woodson’s Journal of Negro History, going strong in the 1940s, had provided animportant venue for scholarship in the field. The WPA’s oral history project with ex-slaves of the1930s was still a recent phenomenon. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, published in1936, reinterpreted an entire era of American history from a black perspective, though it did nothave a large audience. As Barbara Dianne Savage’s scholarship reveals, Negro history was thesubject of pioneering radio broadcasts in the late 1930s and early 1940s. For a contemporary essayon the significance of black history at that moment, see J. A. Rogers, “The Suppression of NegroHistory,” The Crisis 47:5 (May 1940), 136–37, 146.

84. Sissle and Eubie Blake wrote the music for Shuffle Along, the success of which demonstrated thatthere was money to be made in a musical with an all-black cast. Paul Robeson and Josephine Bakerwere among the performers whose careers benefited from their participation in Shuffle Along. AllenWoll, Black Musical Theatre: From Coontown to Dreamgirls (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UniversityPress, 1989), 58–75. Ellington had experienced not only Shuffle Along but other black musicals in the

JUMP FOR JOY 33

Ellington’s revue—the jump, from the Lindy Hop to the basketballcourts, was the new move of the day.85

Ellington’s aspirations were already being tested in Los Angeles in1941. The place of Ellington’s music, and that of big band swing ingeneral, animated discussions of Ellington concerts in Los Angelesthat year. In the midst of Jump for Joy’s run, the Ellington orchestraperformed in formal concert conditions in August at the Gold Shellin Pasadena. Sponsored by two local ministers, the “First AnnualStarlight Fiesta of Negro Music” asked its listeners to think of Elling-ton almost entirely in terms of comparison to “European musicalsavants” such as Bach and Delius, but also as one whose work meantto present “an authentic Negro music, and to express the history,emotions, and characteristics of his race.”86 Writing at the conclusionof two Ellington concerts at the Mayan in November, Isabel MorseJones appeared to take seriously Ellington’s larger artistic aspirations,which hadn’t been fully expressed in Jump for Joy, whose varied audi-ences included only a few who might attend a symphony orchestraconcert. Jones let Ellington describe his project. “‘There is more toNegro music than the spirituals and the blues,’ the gifted Dukedeclared recently. ‘When we went to Europe in 1939, the last time,we found plenty of listeners for Negro music that is neither of these.But I will have to put the history of the American Negro into anopera if it is to be known in the United States.’”87 Ellington scholarshave established that he was conceiving an opera to be called Boo-lah, but the sentiment also points to completion of Black, Brown andBeige.88 Earlier in the year, Jones had expressed frustration with thetrend of mixing genres in the concert hall, a practice contributing to“the confused state of American music.” Orchestras played jazzbadly and even Benny Goodman’s band could not adequately per-form a symphony. “All music has its right place and a symphony

1920s, including work by Fats Waller and Porter Grainger. Franceschina, Duke Ellington’s Music forthe Theatre, 8.

85. Gena Caponi-Tabery’s reading of 1930s black culture in her Jump for Joy analyzes the meaning ofjumping and its many cultural expressions in creative and convincing fashion. Caponi-Tabery,Jump for Joy.

86. Concert Program featuring Duke Ellington, First Annual Starlight Fiesta of Negro Music, August 24,1941. Duke Ellington Collection, Series 2, Box 10, Folder 5, National Museum of American History,Smithsonian Institution.

87. Isabel Morse Jones, “The Week’s High Note in Music,” Los Angeles Times, September 28, 1941. CF.

88. Teachout, Duke, 208–09.


program is not the place for jazz,” she wrote, “however vital, intense,ingenious or American it is under such leaders as Goodman andDuke Ellington.”89

Ellington’s ambitious path remained a critically bumpy road.Jump for Joy itself did not impress all of its listeners, including mem-bers of the jazz and swing press such as Metronome’s George Simon,who traveled from New York to Los Angeles to review the show.Simon called the show a “sometimes fast, sometimes not so fast,moving revue” with “loads of good stuff” performed by an orchestraunfortunately hidden away in the pit. The Ellington Orchestra didn’tfeel like the main attraction because “you can’t make a feature of a pit

Herb Jeffries sings while Duke Ellington conducts in the pit during a Jump for Joyperformance at the Mayan, 1941. A star in black films, Jeffries was Ellington’s firstmale vocalist. He stayed in Los Angeles after the show ended and died in 2013 atage 100. Talented young bassist Jimmy Blanton, left, showed signs of illness duringthe run of the revue. He stayed in Southern California and died of tuberculosis in1942. Duncan P. Schiedt Photograph Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of

American History, Smithsonian Institution.

89. Isabel Morse Jones, “The Week’s High Note in Music,” Los Angeles Times, July 27, 1941, C5.

JUMP FOR JOY 35

band.” While praising the work of Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, andRex Stewart, Simon called Ivie Anderson “awfully cold and unsym-pathetic on stage” and generally objected to a lack of dynamism.90

Down Beat, the other major swing journal, concurred with the head-line “Duke Relegated to Pit Band in Revue.”91

The supposed supporters of jazz revealed their own ideas aboutwhat black culture was all about, and direct social statements did notrank high on the list. A formalist reviewer, such as Metronome’sSimon, decried the lack of stand-alone music in his review of Jumpfor Joy as well as what he thought of as a lack of energy in the show.After all, Simon wrote, “lack of restraint is the key-note to coloredentertainment.” He identified rhythm and blues singer Joe Turner asthe star of Jump for Joy—not necessarily a compliment in a magazineconverted only a few years before from classical music coverage to bigband swing.92 In the discourse of the day among its (invariably white)journalist partisans, jazz’s job had been to take folk materials such asTurner’s and elevate it into a more vibrant and relevant (and demo-cratic) art than that of “longhair” European concert music. In thisformulation, Ellington lost by emulating European classical forms onthe one hand (see Black, Brown and Beige) and received criticism forTurner’s blues performances in Jump for Joy on the other. Ellington’sunwillingness to satisfy white expectations for black entertainmentremained at odds with the white jazz press through the war years.93

But even back on familiar concert ground, Ellington could notwin. His concerts at the Mayan on November 1 and 2 after Jump forJoy had closed, in which the orchestra finally left the pit for the stage,caused Los Angeles Times reviewer Philip K. Scheuer to questionwhether Ellington’s music could be effectively presented in thatformat, a reaction quite different from that of his fellow reviewer,Isabel Morse Jones. Scheuer gave the orchestra its due. “Their style,”he wrote, “places them somewhere between the strident extremities of

90. George T. Simon, “Joe Turner Star of Duke’s Revue!” Metronome (October 1941), 20.

91. Quoted in Stratemann, Duke Ellington Day by Day and Film by Film, 170. Down Beat noticed therevisions in the show in August. “Duke’s Revue Shifts to High, But Pit Slows,” Down Beat (August15, 1941), 7.

92. Simon, “Joe Turner Star of Duke’s Revue!” 20.

93. Scott DeVeaux examines the critical reception of Black, Brown and Beige in “Black, Brown and Beigeand the Critics,” Black Music Research Journal 13:2 (Autumn 1993), 125–46. Ellington’s adventurousmusical attitude was one factor in his break with longtime manager Irving Mills in 1939. Cohen,Duke Ellington’s America, 155–58.


[a] Jimmy Lunceford or a Cab Calloway and ‘cultured’ Harlem, and isstamped by a remarkable ability to take seeming dissonances betweensolo and obbligato and make them come out exotic harmonies.” Thiswas all well and good, but Scheuer felt that Ellington’s work lackedvariety. “I do not believe the Duke has yet attained legitimate concertstature,” Scheuer said, “not because his men can’t play rings aroundmost symphonists I’ve heard but because he does not use the jazzidiom with sufficient variety to avoid, in a full evening, the reactionof sameness and monotony.” And then came the critical jab thatstruck at Ellington’s aspirations: “It takes more than calling a compo-sition a tone poem or a concerto to make it one—although in minia-ture, and even literally, it may fit the description.”94 Ellington theingenious miniaturist would later receive criticism that his longer formworks were simply the stringing together of a series of short pieces withorchestral connecting tissue. In their commentary on Ellington’s 1941Los Angeles concerts, Jones and Scheuer had described well the ten-sions in Ellington’s music and in his uncomfortable—or at leastunclearly defined—place on the American music scene. And theycould identify these issues without directly confronting Ellington’sstated purpose to tell the story of the Negro in America through hismusic. The events of the day, especially the Great Migration, made thatmessage more urgent, a message that found expression in the contentof Jump for Joy.

TH E GR E AT MI G R AT I O N A N D J U M P F O R J O Y

The Ellington Orchestra’s performance of Jump for Joy’s title songended with the band collectively creating a train whistle, an effectdeveloped years earlier that reflected the group’s never-ending railjourney but that now highlighted the meaning of the song. The whis-tle was the “fare thee well” thousands were bidding the Deep South.95

Ellington’s understanding of his own celebrity and his concern thatNegro history be represented in his own art meant that he inscribedthe greatest interior migration in the country’s history into Jump forJoy itself. But the revue was not his only effort in this vein. On March30, 1941, Duke Ellington and His Orchestra went to CBS Studios in

94. Philip K. Scheuer, “Ellington Dresses Jive in White Tie and Tails,” Los Angeles Times, November 3,1941, 22.

95. Caponi-Tabery, Jump for Joy, 175–76.

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Los Angeles to participate in a National Urban League broadcastcalled The Negro and National Defense. Appearing along with otherimportant entertainers such as Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters (fromDetroit) and Marian Anderson (from Montreal), Ellington played“Take the ‘A’ Train” and “Flamingo” in a program billed as the firsttime a network had granted a full hour to a show with an all-blackcast. Interviews and statements interspersed between the perfor-mances described the Urban League’s goals for fair employmentopportunity and Negro commitment to the preparations for war.96

The artist Jacob Lawrence began his famous migration series in1941 with a painting of World War I-era black Southerners movingthrough train station portals marked “Chicago,” “New York,” and“St. Louis.” A World War II version would have had to account forthe City of Angels, for even as Lawrence depicted the beginnings ofthe greatest demographic shift in U.S. history, its greatest wave wasabout to crest.97 Los Angeles, and the West as a whole, underwentremarkable changes due to World War II. The city experienced part ofa boom that swelled the West’s population by 26 percent; California’sblack population grew 272 percent from 1940 to 1950.98 Writing in1951, Los Angeles activist Carey McWilliams argued that “duringWorld War II, the West Coast suddenly became the nation’s newracial frontier,” with migration to cities such as Los Angeles, SanFrancisco, and Seattle augmented by dramatic increases of the blackpopulation in smaller port cities such as Bremerton, Washington.99

The Urban League, which in Los Angeles and other cities playeda key role in assisting black migrants in need of housing and hopingfor new job opportunities, was an instrumental element in the GreatMigration, the second and larger wave of which had just begun.100

96. Savage, Broadcasting Freedom, 160–61.

97. Emmett J. Scott’s Negro Migration during the War (1920) influenced Lawrence’s selection of cities forhis first panel in the series, During the World War there was a great migration North by Southern Negroes.Leah Dickerman and Elsa Smithgall, Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series (New York: Museum ofModern Art: 2015), 48.

98. Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990(New York: Norton, 1998), 251–53.

99. Carey McWilliams, “Storm Signals,” from Brothers under the Skin (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951)reprinted in Fool’s Paradise: A Carey McWilliams Reader, ed. Dean Stewart and Jeannine Gendar(Santa Clara, CA: Santa Clara University, 2001), 139–41.

100. In 1940, the Urban League published an estimate that two-thirds of all African Americans lived insubstandard housing, compared to one-third of whites. Carol Aronovici, “The Future of NegroHousing,” Opportunity 18:12 (December 1940), 378–79. For an optimistic picture of New Deal


By 1970, more than three million people had moved from the Southto the cities of the north and west during the previous three dec-ades.101 The Los Angeles Urban League chapter had a strong pres-ence in the city dating back to 1921 and had expanded its local reachthrough publications and radio broadcasts under the leadership ofFloyd C. Covington.102 The organization addressed pressing needs.The black population of Los Angeles, nearly 16,000 in 1920 immedi-ately following the Great War, rose to nearly 64,000 in 1940—a four-fold increase—with thousands more on the way.103 The content ofJump for Joy directly addresses the movement occurring across thecountry, speaking to the sense of possibility the Urban League fos-tered.104 As we have seen, the revue’s title tune calls explicitly forblack Americans’ departure from the South.

Despite good notices for Jump for Joy in local newspapers, it alsostruck a more dissonant chord for some listeners. Leaving the Southhad not necessarily meant acceptance and equality in the North orthe West for African Americans. And even the biggest boosters ofemerging black Los Angeles could only point to halting progress. TheCentral Avenue district may have been the cultural center of the newblack Los Angeles, but “the bulk of Central Avenue trading,” notedthe California Eagle in an editorial published just before the revue’sopening, “is carried on by whites, Japanese, and Chinese.” Growthcontinued, and the paper could point to the black-owned GoldenState Life Insurance Company as “the fastest growing black business

housing initiatives from an early federal housing administrator, see Robert C. Weaver, “NegroesNeed Housing,” The Crisis 47:5 (May 1940), 138–39, 158. Part of FDR’s “black cabinet,” Weaverlater became administrative assistant to the Advisory Commission to the Council of NationalDefense, an ineffectual body eventually replaced by the Fair Employment Practices Committee. Onthe Weaver appointment, see “National Defense Labor Problems,” The Crisis 47:10 (October 1940),319, 322. Weaver provided Opportunity readers with a survey of the employment issue, optimisti-cally projecting a more welcoming tone from organized labor than black workers actually heardand calling for black participation in training programs to prepare them for the postwar economy.Weaver, “The Defense Program and the Negro,” Opportunity 18:11 (November 1940), 324–27.Weaver made substantially the same points in the second half of his Phylon series. Weaver, “RacialTrends in National Defense, Part II,” Phylon (First Quarter 1942), 22–30.

101. Sides, L.A. City Limits, 38.

102. “History,” Los Angeles Urban League online, accessed July 8, 2015.

103. Lawrence B. de Graaf and Quintard Taylor, “Introduction: African Americans in CaliforniaHistory, California in African American History,” in de Graaf, et al., Seeking El Dorado, 22.

104. The Urban League was not alone in this. In Los Angeles, a local organization called the Forumworked on resettling new residents and fighting discrimination as far back as 1903. It also providedscholarships for young black Angelenos until its end in 1942, superseded by local branches ofnational civil rights organizations and the Negro Victory Committee. Ibid., 19–20.

JUMP FOR JOY 39

of its kind,” but ultimately Central Avenue was “another man’smecca—not our own.”105 Black entertainment gave the district itsfame but hardly provided a stable economic base, as its rapid declineafter the war demonstrated. The problem of de facto segregation andrestrictive covenants created slum conditions—unable to expand geo-graphically, newly arrived black Angelenos packed themselvestogether to make do.

Black musical productions certainly did good business in LosAngeles in 1941, even if whites owned most of the venues. Jump forJoy itself had extraordinary competition for the Los Angeles enter-tainment dollar, despite Ellington cornetist Rex Stewart’s memory ofthe city not being considered “a good show town.”106 In the weekEllington’s show was about to begin, the Broadway touring produc-tion Cabin in the Sky, starring Ethel Waters, began a successful run atthe Biltmore, playing to full houses not far from the Mayan itself.107

Later in Jump for Joy’s run, Hellzapoppin’ visited the Biltmore; bothstage productions would be made into film versions within twoyears.108 Other touring bands, including Jimmie Lunceford’s, alsoplayed to strong gates that summer. Just weeks before Jump for Joy’sopening, members of the Ellington and Lunceford bands “hada chance to cut each other” at the Capri.109 Despite the competition,anticipation for Ellington’s show was strong, at least judging by theCalifornia Eagle’s coverage. The paper asserted, “hot, cold, or corny,the show will write West coast theatrical history, being one of the fewmajor efforts to debut this side of the Rockies.” With a large photospread on the front page of the entertainment section, the Eaglephotos featured Ellington at the piano “looking up” at a glamourhead shot of “his magnificent song-bird, Ivie Anderson,” along with

105. “Central Avenue: Business Mecca,” California Eagle, June 5, 1941, 8A. The main strip of blackbusinesses on Central extended twelve blocks. In addition to Golden State Mutual and theDunbar (known in the 1920s as the Somerville), theaters, savings and loans associations, andretail business could be found there. De Graaf and Taylor, “Introduction,” 22.

106. Rex Stewart, Jazz Masters of the 30s (New York: Da Capo, 1982), 99.

107. “‘Cabin’ Due at Biltmore,” Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1941, A14. The show starred, in addition toWaters, Dooley Wilson, Rex Ingram, and Katherine Dunham and her pioneering dance troupe.

108. Display advertisement, Los Angeles Times, August 11, 1941.

109. “Behind the Scenes,” California Eagle, June 19, 1941, 2B; Wilma Cockerell, “Jam Session,”California Eagle, June 26, 1941, 2B. More than a month later the Eagle reported the Cabin in theSky, playing at the Biltmore, was “still pulling nightly crowds, mostly ofays from Hollywood.”“Behind the Scenes,” California Eagle, July 31, 1941, 2B.


the Pot, Pan and Skillet dance team and the “Delovely” “Dot”Dandridge.110

Los Angeles Times coverage of the revue tended to be upbeat andfocused on its entertainment value for a general audience, leavingquestions of Ellington’s aims and relevance to the social momentaside. Syndicated columnist Hedda Hopper led the charge, enjoyingthe “bits I saw of it,” presumably in rehearsal, so much that upon itsopening she told her readers she “booked tickets every night for thefirst week.” Hopper teased a burlesque of Katherine Hepburn andGreta Garbo by “two colored gals,” and after a later performancereported that the show had “tightened up and got a real hit.” IvieAnderson’s ad-libbing of celebrity audience members Clark Gableand Carole Lombard into her “Uncle Tom’s Drive-In” numberimpressed the Hollywood gossip columnist.111 Another Times Holly-wood columnist, Jimmie Fiedler, chimed in, giving a plug for MickeyRooney’s “Cymbal Socking Sam” as a highlight of the new show.112

The paper quoted Ellington as optimistic that his new songs would be“accepted as well as have his ‘Sophisticated Lady’ and ‘MoodIndigo’” classics, and called the revue the result of “combined talentsof a stellar colored cast and well-known Hollywood writers.”113

Drama critic Edward Schallert praised the cast and Ellington, a leader“with style and distinction.”114 The Times published brief, upbeatreports on aspects of the show throughout the run—the jam sessionsheld after the show, the antics of the Pot, Pan and Skillet comedyteam, the success of “Concerto for Clinkers” as a revue highlight, andthe good box office returns.115 But Ellington’s concerts with hisorchestra in July and November 1941 inspired more considered anal-ysis from music critics Isabel Morse Jones and Philip K. Scheuer.Ellington had intended Jump for Joy to be an entertaining evening-

110. “Mayan to ‘Jump for Joy’ Tonight,” California Eagle, July 10, 1941, 4.

111. “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, July 3, 1941, 8; July 25, 1941, 13.

112. “Jimmie Fidler in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1941, A7.

113. “Ellington Will Offer ‘Firsts’,” Los Angeles Times, July 8, 1941.

114. Willard, Jump for Joy, 17–18.

115. “‘Jam’ Sessions Attract Swing Fans to Mayan,” Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1941, A14; “SepiaComics Hit at Mayan,” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1941, 9; “Critics Agog at ‘Klinkers’,” LosAngeles Times, July 27, 1941 C4; “Mayan Show Continues Pace,” Los Angeles Times, August 10,1941. Some or all of these may have been plants. George Simon’s review of the show noted “thecomparatively small audience” when he saw it early in the run. Simon, “Joe Turner Star of Duke’sRevue!” 20.

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length statement on civil rights, but the Times only mentioned theentertainment, and that in a less than comprehensive fashion. This isconsistent with the absence of racial rhetoric in the pages of themainstream Los Angeles press before the Fair Employment PracticesCommittee hearings of October 1941.116 The Times did not hear themessage because many Angelenos believed there seemed to be noneed for a message in the first place.

The revue had a much greater presence in the Eagle. Shortly afterJump for Joy opened, the paper published accounts of the show thatvaried in their enthusiasm but connected the revue to the GreatMigration in different ways. Wilma Cockerell’s notice praised Elling-ton’s music but, anticipating George Simon’s critique, longed fora full-blown orchestra concert uncompromised by the other acts. Shealso complained of the audience’s lack of decorum and inability tograsp some of the satire, suggesting distinctions between establishedblack Angelenos and recent arrivals who sometimes received a less-than-warm welcome to the city. Aware of the show’s early shortcom-ings—which had also been noted in entertainment trade journalssuch as Variety, Billboard, and The Hollywood Reporter—Ellingtonordered rewrites and the adding and dropping of numbers, establish-ing a chaotic pattern that continued throughout the show’s run.117

Ellington added bluesman Turner to the cast after a few weeks, andhis offerings seemed to shore up the revue. The Eagle’s John Kinloch,while acknowledging the roughness of the first couple of perfor-mances, called Jump for Joy a “sensational evening in the theater,”praising the range of talent and the overall direction of the Duke.“Surprise of the whole affair,” he wrote, “is its wit and sparkle, theuncompromising exile of Uncle Thomas and his cohorts, the daringsatire of white society by a dusky brother.” Nearly a week into therun, Kinloch saw improvement in the revue. “The show was a far

116. Leonard, Battle for Los Angeles, 22–23.

117. Notes made early in the show’s run in preparation for a meeting on revisions—likely byproduction supervisor Henry Blankfort—reminded Ellington and his collaborators “that theshow as is runs much too long and though it might be all right for Los Angeles, the momentwe hit towns with a large suburban population, we will find that trains and busses have a way ofdeparting on time and that a great many of our patrons must leave to catch them.” Running orderand production notes, Duke Ellington Collection. Billboard’s Sam Abbot called for the dropping ofseveral numbers and agreed with The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, whose notices tended topraise Ellington without much enthusiasm for the sketches and the show’s length. Noted inStratemann, Duke Ellington Day by Day and Film by Film, 169.


cleaner, swifter helping of entertainment,” he enthused. Kinlochtossed roses to Dandridge (“don’t know whether she can sing ordance or wot. But she’s beautiful!”) and, more substantially, to PaulWhite and Marie Bryant’s acting and Ivie Anderson’s work in theLangston Hughes contribution “Mad Scene from Woolworth’s.” Anencore from the orchestra satisfied Kinloch’s desire for more from theDuke and his men.118

So the Eagle’s early coverage focused on more than the show’sentertainment quotient, but Gilbert Allen’s August review struck aneven more thoughtful note and addressed the broader concerns ofa restless black America in 1941. In a subdued assessment of the showand its meaning, Allen sensed that Ellington was after two things:a new form of musical expression and a strong statement of protest.To Allen’s ear, the percussion overture and the accompanimentthroughout contained a dissonance that eventually “converted” him“to this raw music, these tones of steel, which express strong Americaand the protest found underneath the singing of ‘My country ‘tis ofthee . . . ” Allen felt that Ellington, especially when directing theorchestra, was preaching to his audience, orating “his message in themusic.” But what was the message beyond having a good time ona night out? To Allen, the title was entirely misleading. “‘Jump forJoy’ is not a happy show,” he wrote. “There is too much doublemeaning in the jive lines.” If anything, the show’s efforts to use humorto make its point underscored the “doubts, fears, hopes for a betterAmerica,” leaving the audience “wondering if our dreams for a newDemocracy will crumble under the heel of marching men.” In hisreading of the revue, Allen saw Ellington himself as “the voice in thewilderness crying to a troubled world, playing, directing, guiding,speaking the mind of oppressed Americans.”119

That voice was busy after every show for weeks, discussing indetail what went right or wrong and sifting every idea through a testof racial dignity. “Fifteen cats would sit up and discuss it,” Ellingtonlater recalled, “and prove in their discussions why this thing, whereit appeared, where it was very, very funny, and it appeared to be

118. Cockrell, “Jam Session,” and John Kinloch, “‘Jump for Joy is Sensational Eve in Theater—Kinloch,” California Eagle, July 17, 1941. Writing a month later after experiencing the showa second time, Cockrell also found it much improved, including the substitution of WyneldaCarter for Dorothy Dandridge. Cockrell, “Jam Session,” California Eagle, August 14, 1941.

119. Gilbert Allen, “‘Jump for Joy’ Search for New Form,” California Eagle, August 21, 1941.

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legitimate, but actually it was a form of Uncle Tom because there wasa compromise there.”120 Every word, note, and gesture counted,because Ellington and his partners believed they were playing for highstakes precisely because of the widespread foreboding and disappoint-ment Allen expressed in his review.

That anxiety and attending frustration ran through the thinkingof black intellectuals throughout 1941, a discontent that ran counterto the developing narrative of American cultural hegemony assertedby Henry Luce and others as the nation drew closer to the worldconflict. When in February 1941 Time-Life publishing titan Lucemade his call for an “American Century” in the pages of his magazineLife, he made American mass culture a rationale for American inter-vention in world affairs in the short term and for postwar globaldominance and influence in the long term. Arguing against “halfwaymeasures” in support of the Allied war effort, Luce pushed for Amer-ican moral leadership. To Luce, much of the fight had already beenwon if only Americans could see it. His concept of American freedomspreading throughout the world included “American jazz, Hollywoodmovies, American slang, American machines and patented products.”Luce called the United States “the powerhouse of the ideas of Freedomand Justice.”121 His notion that “we must undertake now to be theGood Samaritan of the entire world” prefigures the Truman Doctrineafter the war. But what would the great internal migration within thenation itself mean? What pressures would result from the great demo-graphic shifts that converted the race problem from a regional issue tobe dealt with via Southern home rule into an issue of national respon-sibility and, potentially, international embarrassment?122

From the black perspective, Luce’s view ignored the unfinishedbusiness of democracy at home. Just a week before the publication of“The American Century,” Duke Ellington rose to address the annualLincoln Day Services at Scott Methodist Church in Los Angeles,a speech broadcast locally on KMPC, known as the “Station of theStars” with backing from the likes of Bing Crosby.123 Taking histheme from “I, Too, Sing ‘America,’” a line of Langston Hughes’s

120. Ellington quoted in Cohen, Duke Ellington’s America, 189.

121. Henry Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941, 65.

122. This theme is pursued in Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American RaceRelations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

123. “The Chronicled History of KMPC,” internet. Accessed July 9, 2015.


poem “The Weary Blues,” Ellington changed the pronoun from “I” to“We” and made his most direct recorded statement on racial equality.In Ellington’s view, the black 10 percent of America “is the very heartof the chorus,” singing “with an eye overseas . . . ‘America’ with fervorand thanksgiving.” The Negro played “more than a minority role,” incomposing America.

I contend that the Negro is the creative voice of America, is creativeAmerica, and it was a happy day in America when the first unhappy slavewas landed on its shores.

There, in our tortured induction into this “land of liberty,” we built itsmost graceful civilization. Its wealth, its flowering fields and handsomehomes, its pretty traditions; its guarded leisure and its music, were all ourcreations.

We stirred in our shackles and our unrest awakened Justice in the heartsof a courageous few, and we created in America the desire for true democ-racy, freedom for all, the brotherhood of man, principles on which thecountry had been founded.

Ellington asserted that democracy was “the yet unachieved goal”in an America that has been too “lazy” to complete the mission of itsfounding. “We are more than a few isolated instances of courage,valor, achievement,” Ellington said. “We’re the injection, the shotin the arm that has kept America and its unfinished principles alivein the fat and corrupt years intervening between our divine concep-tion and our near tragic present.” The California Eagle publishedEllington’s words as its “Speech of the Week.”124 This was a rarepublic statement from Ellington, who preferred to let his music implya message. “Very often, and in many ways, he came out and statedhonestly and definitively how he felt,” remembered his son Mercer,who had contributed to Jump for Joy as a composer and musician, “butthis was only with people he was close to and not for the record.”125

124. Duke Ellington, “We, Too, Sing ‘America’,” California Eagle, February 13, 1941. Reprinted inTucker, The Duke Ellington Reader, 144–46.

125. Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington in Person, 181. Mercer had joined the band in January 1941. Alongwith Billy Strayhorn, he was tasked with writing a new performance book for the band due toa feud between the American Society of Composers and Publishers (ASCAP)—which collectedperformance royalties for artists on more than a million songs—and the radio networks. Thenetworks formed Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI), which demanded a boycott of ASCAPsongs on the radio beginning January 1, 1941. Duke Ellington’s entire output had been registeredunder the auspices of ASCAP, and he needed new compositions as he opened at Cafe Manana atthe beginning of the year. Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” and “Flamingo,” a Duke-pennedfeature for Herb Jeffries, were among the results of a furious three-way writing spree in January1941. Teachout, Duke, 220–21.

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In the swirl of events in 1941, Ellington clearly felt a greater sense ofurgency.

Henry Luce was not mistaken that mass culture disseminatedthrough technology was changing the world. Technology had alsomade possible the broadcasting of Negro culture on a previouslyunimagined scale. Duke Ellington’s records, his live radio broadcasts,his occasional appearances on film or in print—these aspects of masscultural consumption were fueled by the reproducibility of music andimage, what Joel Dinerstein has called “swinging the machine.”126 Butthey also made possible the ongoing stereotypes of Amos and Andyon radio, the lampooning of blacks in Hollywood films, and thecirculation of lynching postcards as distinctly American souvenirs.It is this awareness that seems to have informed Gilbert Allen’s ironicresponse to Jump for Joy in 1941, a year that saw protests for fairtreatment in defense industry hiring and practices—with SouthernCalifornia as a prime example—that led to Randolph’s threatenedMarch on Washington.

While the Popular Front of the 1930s and the prospect of waragainst fascism had emboldened some writers to imagine such anattack striking a blow for democratic justice in America, in themonths before U.S. entry a more sober tone prevailed.127 Black his-torian L. D. Reddick expressed his frustration in verse. Shedding notears over the imperial powers brought low by Germany, Reddickasked, “We say democracy;/Do we mean democracy?/We say all ofthe people;/Do we mean all of the people? . . . WE MUST BELIEVE,DO, WHAT WE SAY.128 Richard Wright’s bitter assessment of Amer-ican race relations infused not only his 1940 novel Native Son—thefirst novel by an African American selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club—but also his lesser-known essay for the Farm SecurityAdministration photography book 12 Million Black Voices, publishedin October 1941. Wright continued his campaign to remove the mask

126. Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between theWorld Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).

127. An example of 1938 optimism among the black left came from James W. Ford in a speech laterpublished in his The Negro and the Democratic Front (New York: International, 1938): “If we are tostave off fascism in our own country, we must curb fascist aggression on an international scale.Every victory of fascism anywhere strengthens fascism everywhere. The struggle for security,democracy and peace at home is inseparable from the world-wide struggle to curb fascism” (144).

128. L. D. Reddick, “Meditations Upon the War and Democracy in America,” The Crisis 47:8 (August1940), 263.


that hid the Negro’s true aspirations from white view. “Each daywhen you see us black folk upon the dusty land of the farms or uponthe hard pavement of the city streets,” Wright wrote, “you usuallytake us for granted and think you know us, but our history is farstranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem.”129 Butwhile Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children stories had been set in the South,Native Son (set in Chicago), and 12 Million Black Voices revealed thatmigration to the cities had exposed African Americans to new venuesfor prejudice. “The Bosses of the Buildings,” Wright wrote, “decreethat we must remain maids, porters, janitors, cooks, and generalservants,” forced “to live in the clinging soot just beyond the factoryareas, behind the railroad tracks, near the river banks, under theviaducts, by the steel and iron mills, on the edges of the coal andlumber yards” in overcrowded, aging housing stock.130 In November,just before Pearl Harbor, journalist Roi Ottley surveyed the situationof black Americans who had found a far less than warm welcome atthe end of their journeys north and west and declared to NewRepublic readers that many living in urban America were “seethingwith resentment.” Even conservative black leaders had become dis-mayed by the way preparations for a war against fascism hadrevealed ongoing discrimination in defense industries and the con-tinued segregation of the military.131 After U.S. participation in thewar had begun, Ottley saw “the Negro’s cause in America” as “thebarometer of democracy,” a promise the rest of the world cravedthat had not been fulfilled in America itself.132 This attitude led thePittsburgh Courier to call for a “Double V”: victory over fascismabroad and discrimination at home.133 It led the NAACP and itsorgan The Crisis to see the war’s implications for European empires

129. Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, photo direction by Edwin Rosskam (New York: Viking,1941; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1969), 10.

130. Ibid., 103.

131. Roi Ottley, “Negro Morale,” New Republic, November 10, 1941; reprinted in Reporting Civil Rights,6–11. The White House had angered Randolph, NAACP Secretary Walter White, and T. ArnoldHill of the National Youth Administration by announcing that the leaders had signed off on armysegregation after meeting with the president in October 1940. The Crisis published a point for pointrefutation of the policy and of the leaders’ bogus approval. “White House Blesses Jim Crow,” TheCrisis 47:11 (November 1940), 350–51, 357.

132. Ottley, New World a-Comin’, 347.

133. John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II (San Diego:Harcourt, Brace, 1976), 208.

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and the fate of the world’s “darker races.”134 The Urban League’sjournal Opportunity called for an end to discrimination across thecountry in employment and housing.135

The resentment in Los Angeles went multiple ways. So manyblack migrants came to the city that they practically made it intoan entirely new place. Not all established black Angelenos welcomedthe newcomers.136 Whites who could conveniently ignore the small-ish black population of the pre-1940 years now had to deal with racialdiversity on a daily basis. The new scale on which Angelenos per-formed ongoing practices of segregation and discrimination madeinjustices more obvious and resistance more vocal, though discontentin the black community had been voiced for years. The CaliforniaEagle had sponsored an Industrial Council beginning in 1930 to coor-dinate boycott efforts (“Don’t spend your money where you can’twork” went the slogan) and to demand the opening of segregatedjobs, with only meager success. Efforts to use union membership toachieve equality met with discrimination in the unions themselvesand the charge of communism from labor’s enemies.137 The racialtensions in 1940s Los Angeles can partly be attributed to the influxnot only of southern blacks, but of southern whites, who brought theirracial attitudes with them. Finding ways to deal with race relationsbecame part of local governments’ portfolios in ways it never had

134. W. E. B. Du Bois had left the NAACP and the Crisis editorship, but the journal continued its traditionof linking the plight of the American Negro to oppressed peoples elsewhere. See George Padmore,“The Second World War and the Darker Races,” The Crisis 46:11 (November 1939), 327–28.

135. Indeed, from the beginning of the war, the black press had framed the conflict as an important testof democracy at home. Opportunity saw the conflict as an opening for a new era in which equalitywould prevail with the defeat of Germany. Elmer A. Carter, “A New Era,” Opportunity 18:1(January 1940), 2–3; and “The Negro and Nazism,” Opportunity 18:7 (July 1940), 194–95. RoyWilkins, “Defending Democracy,” The Crisis 46:10 (October 1939), 305.

136. The common assumption that most migrants came from rural areas shaded the ways establishedurban black citizens thought of the newcomers. A good example may be found in an essay for theUrban League by William H. Jones, who examines the impact of new arrivals in the city, which byits nature “fosters class distinctions” and whose opportunities may be wasted “in riotous living.”Jones, “The Negro Moves to the City,” Opportunity 18:11 (November 1940), 332–34.

137. Charlotta A. Bass, Forty Years: Memoirs from the Pages of a Newspaper (Los Angeles, 1960) 76–77. In1940, Preston Valien identified six types of black relations with unions, ranging from outrightexclusion to admission to “mixed organizations only,” with some unions passively allowing mem-bership while not encouraging it and others insisting on racially separate unions. The Sleeping CarPorters union succeeded in large part because that area of employment was almost entirelyreserved for blacks. Valien, “The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters,” Phylon 1:3 (July–Septem-ber 1940), 224.


before.138 In the face of this, Jump for Joy celebrated Black America—highlighting its lifeways, aspirations, and even its sense of style. “SharpEaster,” a tune with lyrics by Sid Kuller, spot-lit the “sartorialsensation” of the tradition of dressing to the nines to promenade onEaster. “Every cat’s wearin’ spats/Every dame is aflame on SharpEaster,” went the words, “And the bright colored cloth/Would scarea moth away/From Sugar Hill to Central Avenue.”139 This last lineunderscores the emergence of a national black culture—carried onairwaves and reproduced in popular print and visual media—that knitthe regions of the country together and rendered them less distinct—a trend the war would only accelerate.140 The new arrivals were in LosAngeles to stay, and while their status as Negroes remained immutable,they carried with them a growing sense of being Americans as much asSoutherners or Angelenos.

The title tune, described in pre-production notes as “a modernspiritual,” opened the second half of the show, building to “a rousingdancing and singing finale” that underscored the tune’s “significant”lyrics, words that encouraged the great movement out of the Southand into a new future as part of the nation. “We’re so fed up with theSouthland/That way down southa in the mouthland/For all theseyears, we’ve been bored to tears with the blues,” as the verse had it.“Those Southern songs are getting tired,” it continued, but it wassomething more than music that troubled black America.141 Search-ing for better lives, to cities like Chicago and Pittsburgh and SanFrancisco they would come, and they came to Los Angeles, too.

LE G A C I E S

While Jump for Joy’s social impact is debatable, the sense of liberation itgave to its own cast is undeniable, and it made significant connectionsbetween the Los Angeles culture industries and black entertainment.

138. Sides, L.A. City Limits, 43–44. Kevin Allen Leonard cites the FEPC hearings in 1941 as the firstmoment that race became a matter of broad public discourse in Los Angeles newspapers. Leonard,Battle for Los Angeles, 36–48.

139. “Sharp Easter” typescript, Duke Ellington Collection. Sugar Hill was a section of the West Adamsneighborhood; home to black middle class and black members of the entertainment industry.Sherrie Tucker, Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 76.

140. David M. Stowe makes this point in “Jazz in the West: Cultural Frontier and Region during theSwing Era,” Western Historical Quarterly 23:1 (February, 1992), 72.

141. “Tentative Outline of Jump for Joy, A Musical Revue,” Duke Ellington Collection.

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Ellington’s musical had been a kind of first shot in a broader effortduring the war years to create a “cultural democracy” in LosAngeles. Liberal protest against the Japanese-American removal,the arguments over the cultural politics of zoot suits, and the spiritedlegal defense of the youths accused of the Sleepy Lagoon murderwere all part of a larger activism articulated most visibly in the fairemployment drive in defense factories and the NAACP’s critique ofthe Negro’s restricted role in Hollywood.142 At least from inside theentertainment world, Ellington understood this and remained asproud of Jump for Joy as anything he did in a career of five decades,though a 1959 revival in Miami was a failure.143 In his autobiogra-phy, he quotes cast member Avanelle Lewis Harris, who called Jumpfor Joy “the most exciting experience in my life in the theatre.”According to Harris, the script “caused a wave of enthusiasmthroughout the cast,” and “everything, every setting, every note ofmusic, every lyric, meant something.” Harris felt that the revue wasahead of its time. “The tragedy,” she said, “was that the world wasnot ready for Jump for Joy.”144 Actor John Garfield, acting as anunofficial artistic director and as one of the show’s investors,expected singer Herb Jeffries to “black up” for the show, but accord-ing to Jeffries, the move upset Ellington, who had Jeffries remove themakeup during intermission.145 Ellington recalled that he also pre-vented the show’s comedians from “using cork on their faces,” andalthough they objected at first, they soon saw and heard the results.“As the audience screamed and applauded,” Ellington recalled,“comedians came off stage smiling, and with tears running downtheir cheeks.”146 Ellington’s decision to undermine the blackfacetradition, in tune with the attitude in black America produced byparticipating in a war for democracy, insured that a practice dating

142. Widener, Black Arts West, 21–28. On Sleepy Lagoon, see Eduardo Obregon Pagan, Murder at theSleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime Los Angeles (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 2006). Civil rights attorney Loren Miller spearheaded a class action suit in 1945against the West Adams Improvement Association that became part of the U.S. Supreme Courtruling striking down restrictive covenants in the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer case. Sherrie Tucker, DanceFloor Democracy, 102.

143. Despite revising the lyrics to suit the changed times, the Miami show lasted only twenty days andlost $100,000. Hasse, Beyond Category, 336.

144. Harris quoted in Ellington, Music Is My Mistress, 176.

145. Herb Jeffries Interview, September 22–23, 1989, Duke Ellington Oral History Project, Smithsonian.



to the early nineteenth-century minstrel shows would not survivethe early 1940s.147 Ellington always considered Jump for Joy to be hismost direct musical statement on civil rights. When he received thePresidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 near the end of a volatiledecade, he listened while an all-star band performed a White Houseconcert broadcast over Voice of America. Singer Joe Williams andthe band ended the show with “Jump for Joy,” a nod to Ellington’s1941 stance and perhaps a nudge to the sitting president, RichardNixon.148

Jump for Joy had the attention of many key players in Hollywoodand called attention to the significance of black culture. While thefilm industry may have congratulated itself on awarding black actorHattie McDaniel the Academy Award in 1939, the role—that ofa loyal “mammy” in the Civil War South in Gone with the Wind—haddone little to advance opportunities for minorities in film.149 But inthe war years, that industry became a theater of debate about thisvery subject, making Los Angeles, in Daniel Widener’s apt formula-tion, “a key site for the articulation of a new African Americancultural politics” that demanded fair visual representation and greateropportunity.150 In a city that by war’s end had still not fully deseg-regated the film industry and still maintained two separate butunequal musicians’ unions—one designated for blacks that keptmusicians hemmed in and fenced out of prime jobs beyond CentralAvenue and Watts—the steps represented by Jump for Joy in 1941 seem

147. For the history and an analysis of blackface minstrelsy, which most often involved whiteentertainers blacking up, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the AmericanWorking Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). In 1942, Ellington was reported tohave been chosen to write the score for a screen version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with veteranactor Charles Grapewin in blackface as Tom based on a Bradbury Foote screenplay, but theproject never came to fruition. It is not clear that Ellington understood the plans for Tom oreven that he was in fact contracted for the work. Edwin Schallert, “Drama: ‘Seventh Column’ Set;Metro Buys Dog Story,” Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1942, A10.

148. Dance, The World of Duke Ellington, 287–88.

149. In the 1920s, fully 80 percent of black film roles in Hollywood motion pictures were menial. Onlycelebrity entertainers in the 1930s brought this percentage down, but even these roles were oftendirected at a black audience only. De Graaf and Taylor, “Introduction,” 23. See also ThomasCripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil RightsEra (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Hattie McDaniel and the Hollywood VictoryCommittee’s Negro Subcommittee mobilized black entertainers in Los Angeles; the USO-YWCANegro Women’s Committee were working on behalf of black servicemen in Los Angeles evenbefore Pearl Harbor. Sherrie Tucker, Dance Floor Democracy, 85.

150. Widener, Black Arts West, 28.

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particularly insurgent.151 As Ivie Anderson sang in “Uncle Tom’sCabin is a Drive-in Now,” “Jemimah doesn’t work no more forRKO/She’s slinging hash for Uncle Tom and coining dough.”152 TheNAACP’s contestation of Hollywood’s reluctance to feature blackcharacters and performers with respect met with partial success by1943. War films as varied as Archie Mayo’s Crash Dive (Fox) andZoltan Korda’s Sahara (Columbia) were among a handful of filmsthat featured black actors in credible roles, though the industry neverdirectly addressed the fact of segregation in the U.S. military.153 Thetwo films that most seemed like breakthroughs were the musicalsStormy Weather (Andrew Stone), starring Lena Horne, and VincenteMinnelli’s first directorial effort, Cabin in the Sky, both from 1943. Thelatter featured none other than the Duke Ellington Orchestra in anexciting nightclub sequence that failed to clear away the occasionalstereotypes in which other scenes in the film traded. Cabin had beencompetition for Jump for Joy in 1941 Los Angeles, and its less progres-sive cultural politics meant that the industry still had a long way togo.154 Perhaps the most artistic film created during the war thatfocused squarely on black culture, Gjon Mili’s short Jammin’ the Bluesfrom 1944, featured the singing and dancing of Marie Bryant, a keycontributor to Jump for Joy. The film would not have happened with-out the efforts of Norman Granz, who worked for Warner Bros. andwas one of the liberal whites in Hollywood who had been a contrib-utor to progressive political and artistic causes in Los Angelesthroughout the war years. His creation of Jazz at the Philharmonicin Los Angeles in 1944, originally a benefit for the Sleepy Lagoondefendants, pioneered desegregated seating at concerts and respectfultreatment of the musicians involved.155 But here again, Jump for Joy

151. The white union enjoyed favored status when it came to club dates and residencies, filmsoundtrack work, and studio session recordings. Cox, “The Evolution of Black Music in LosAngeles,” 260.

152. Lyric sheet, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a Drive-in Now,” Duke Ellington Collection.

153. Other key war films with significant black characters included Tay Garnett’s Bataan (1943) andAlfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944).

154. Cabin in the Sky is set in what seems to be a Southern rural setting, the kind of place from whichJump for Joy had gleefully celebrated African Americans’ departure.

155. Granz, who had been impressed with Mili’s photographs of a jam session for Life, was also datingMarie Bryant at the time of the film and contracted with Lester Young and other importantmusicians in Los Angeles to appear in the film. For an analysis of Jammin’ the Blues, seeBenjamin Cawthra, Blue Notes in Black and White, 59–67, and Arthur Knight, “Jammin’ the Blues,or the Sight of Jazz, 1944,” in Gabbard, Representing Jazz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,


ran ahead of the game. Ellington’s show played to a desegregatedMayan in 1941.

Los Angeles became an important incubator of the most signifi-cant new movement in jazz, bebop, welcoming the touring CharlieParker and Dizzy Gillespie and nurturing home-grown talent such asHoward McGee, Wardell Gray, Dexter Gordon, and Charles Min-gus.156 Ross Russell’s Dial Records, a label that grew out of his TempoMusic Shop in Hollywood, became an early recording home forParker, McGee, Gordon, and others, a precursor of the small inde-pendent jazz labels that flourished in Los Angeles after the war whenthe Central Avenue scene waned and recordings came to occupya larger place in jazz culture.157 In bebop’s rejection of “Uncle Tom”stage mannerisms and entertainment values and cool outsider imag-ery, we see a younger generation’s more insistent version of Elling-ton’s demand of respect for black culture.158 Jump for Joy had helpedprepare that ground.

Ellington recorded several of Jump for Joy’s tunes in Los Angelesstudios in 1941, hoping to generate hit songs that would propel theshow beyond its Angeleno beginnings. Despite the popularity of “I’veGot It Bad (and That Ain’t Good)” and other memorable tunes sungby Ivie Anderson, including the bluesy “Rocks in My Bed,” and thesensual and pulsating “Chocolate Shake,” Jump for Joy closed its runin Los Angeles September 27 after 101 performances.159 The cast ofnearly sixty was unusually large, so even with strong box office, the

1995), 11–53. On Granz, see Tad Hershorn, Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

156. Ted Gioia, West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California (Berkeley: University of California Press,1998), 9–53. Mingus was part of the flourishing musical community in Watts, outside the city limitsuntil 1926, when it came under the city’s midnight curfew for dance clubs. It remained a center forclubs until the late 1940s and for music education for some time after that. Cox, “The Evolution ofBlack Music in Los Angeles,” 258. For oral histories of the Watts scene, see Bryant, et. al., CentralAvenue Sounds, 89–194.

157. The full Dial recordings are now available: The Complete Dial Modern Jazz Sessions (Mosaic 260),2014.

158. The rise of bebop is detailed in Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). On the cultural politics of bebop, see Eric Lott,“Double Time, Double V”: Bebop’s Politics of Style” in Robert G. O’Meally, ed., The Jazz Cadenceof American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 457–68. On the bebop image, seeCawthra, Blue Notes in Black and White, 71–124.

159. Victor released the latter two songs together in the fall as a 78 rpm disc, and they received strongreviews in Metronome. “Goodman, Shaw, Head Months ‘A’ Sides.” Metronome (December, 1941),14. On the closure: Hasse, Beyond Category, 248.

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revue was always on shaky financial footing. Mercer Ellingtonblamed the closure not on attendance but on “panic in the company.”He believed the musicians’ union insisted on more bonds to ensurethe performers would be paid. “There were lines at the box officewhen the show closed down,” he later wrote.160 All the possiblereasons lead back to the lack of deep funding behind the show.Although the California Eagle and Los Angeles Times reported that

Sheet music for “Chocolate Shake,” one of the stronger orchestra features in Jumpfor Joy with lyrics sung by Ivie Anderson, recalled Ellington’s earlier “jungle” stylefrom his late 1920s Cotton Club period. Duke Ellington Collection, Archives Center,

National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

160. The demand to pay the performers from the box office rather than “at a later date” cut the cashflow. Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington in Person, 165. Mercer claimed that Duke Ellington’s “desireto do a Broadway show was the only area in which he was frustrated.” Rex Stewart said that Jumpfor Joy’s failure to reach Broadway “was one of the regrets of his [Ellington’s] life. Stewart, JazzMasters of the 30s, 99. Ellington did participate in other Broadway musicals, contributing to thescore of Beggar’s Holiday (1946); and the 1966 Pousse Cafe, based on the 1930 Josef von Sternbergfilm The Blue Angel. Neither lasted long. Ellington’s greatest Broadway hit is unquestionablySophisticated Ladies, a musical tribute featuring Ellington’s songs that debuted in 1981 sevenyears after his death, ran for 767 performances, and lived on in a television adaptation andoccasional revivals. Woll, Black Musical Theatre, 207–09.


Ellington’s show would soon hit the road, including stops in SanFrancisco, Chicago, and New York, a tour turned out to be wishfulthinking.161 While reports in the Times claimed that the revue brokeMayan Theater box-office records over the course of one hundredshows, drew tourists to Southern California, and spawned a couple ofcatchy tunes, going on the road required more than this.162 Therelease of the four sides from the show by Victor in August receivedfavorable notice but ended up being the only lasting public record ofthe show’s content before the internet age.163 As Norman Granz saidyears later, the show would have expected to lose more money on theroad in hope of finding success on Broadway, and it wasn’t even well-funded enough to undertake the journey.164

At the end of December 1941, Ellington and his orchestra left LosAngeles and would visit again only as part of a never-ending tour,with recording sessions often squeezed in on a schedule of one-nighters and short engagements. In late November, Ellington hadgathered some of the stars of Jump for Joy for a week of shows (sevenper day) at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles. He also hadreturned to the Hollywood studios to record a series of five soundiesfor R.C.M. Productions—filmed music clips that played in specialviewing jukeboxes—including one for “Bli-Blip” from the revue per-formed with much shimmying by Marie Bryant and Paul White andanother featuring Ivie Anderson singing “I’ve Got It Bad (and ThatAin’t Good)” with Ellington and the band also featured.165 OnDecember 7, the United States suffered the bombing of Pearl Harborand soon declared war on Japan.

161. “‘Jump for Joy’ Closes Run on Saturday,” California Eagle, September 25, 1941; “‘Jump for Joy’ inFinal Week,” Los Angeles Times, September 22, 1941, 11.

162. “‘Jump for Joy’ Breaks Records,” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1941, A10; “Mayan Show DrawsFans,” Los Angeles Times, August 31, 1941, C4; “Jive Show Ends Today,” Los Angeles Times,September 27, 1941, A7.

163. Metronome’s Barry Ulanov singled out “I’ve Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good” as the one tune thatothers would cover. Ulanov described “Brown-Skinned Gal,” “Chocolate Shake,” and more sur-prisingly, “Jump for Joy” itself as “of little moment.” Ulanov, “Duke Certainly King of the LateStuff,” Metronome, September, 1941, 15. Gordon Wright and Henry S. Cummings, in a disc reviewroundup in the same issue, noted the “exciting progressions” on “Jump for Joy” and “Brown-Skinned Gal,” “with the band getting a beat and you [the reader] a Johnny Hodges chorus on theformer, and Harry Carney getting of one of his usual, fine, baritone passages on the latter.” Wrightand Cummings, “Byrne Band Finds Itself on Discs,” ibid.

164. Granz interview, 25–26.

165. Duke Ellington Orchestra with Marie Bryant and Paul White, “Bli-Blip.” Youtube, accessed March1, 2015.

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The war roiled Los Angeles. It upped the demand for labor,leading to even more migration to the city, swelling the black popu-lation from its 1940 level of about 64,000 to more than 100,000.166

At the same time Little Tokyo opened up to black tenants due tothe forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast toconcentration camps in the interior West. Little Tokyo became—atleast during the war years—an overcrowded western Bronzeville,where the poorest of new migrants, many from Louisiana andTexas, lived in substandard conditions as they tried to gain a foot-hold in the new wartime economy.167 The spark of activism blackAngelenos experienced in 1941 kindled greater activism throughoutthe war years. Collaborating with national civil rights organiza-tions, the Negro Victory Committee, led by the Rev. Clayton Rus-sell, organized protest rallies in the city to break down—at leasttemporarily—employment barriers.168 But the Ellington organizationmoved on, pulling out of Union Station and heading to Kansas Cityto start the New Year. It left behind young bassist Jimmy Blanton, illwith tuberculosis and soon to die in a local sanatorium. Singers IvieAnderson and Herb Jeffries stayed on in Los Angeles—Anderson torun her Chicken Shack and sing off and on in the city, and Jeffries tocontinue his screen and recording career and to open his BlackFlamingo club.169

In 1943, Ellington composed a long-form work that debuted atCarnegie Hall called New World a-Comin’, named for Roi Ottley’sbook, a recent work of social criticism that had impressed the maestro.The bitterness Ottley had expressed in 1941 had turned to guardedoptimism. “I visualized this new world as a place in the distant futurewhere there would be no war,” Ellington later recalled, “no greed, nocategorization, no nonbelievers, where love was unconditional, and no

166. Flamming, “Becoming Democrats,” 292. The total may have been north even of 100,000. In 1945,the Red Cross estimated that Los Angeles contained 175,000 African Americans; a special censusreport from 1946 put the total at 133,000. Kevin Allen Leonard, “‘In the Interest of All Races’:African Americans and Interracial Cooperation in Los Angeles during and after World War II,” inde Graaf, et al., Seeking El Dorado, 312.

167. Sides, L.A. City Limits, 44–45. See also, Hillary Jenks, “Bronzeville, Little Tokyo, and the UnstableGeography of Race in Post-World War II Los Angeles,” Southern California Quarterly 93:2 (Summer2011): 201–35.

168. Raphael J. Sonenshein, Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1993), 29.

169. Jeffries had sung Ellington’s “Flamingo.” The club was located on Avalon west of Central. Cox,“The Evolution of Black Music in Los Angeles,” 261–62.


pronoun was good enough for God.”170 But Jump for Joy had expressedoptimism even before the FEPC and Pearl Harbor, and the betterfuture it imagined was not a distant one—it was one of its ownmoment. Instead of an overture featuring music from the show, Jumpfor Joy’s company wanted the opening to mean something.171 In thenumber “Sun-Tanned Tenth of the Nation,” the spot-lit Duke Elling-ton began the show by addressing the audience directly:

Duke Ellington and Jump for Joy cast member Louise Franklin in a publicity shot.Herald Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library, 00050828.


171. The “tentative outline” for the revue clearly states the intention to make Ellington the “featuredpersonality” of the show by starting the revue with, first, a drum rhythm and then Ellington’sspeech. “Tentative Outline of Jump for Joy, A Musical Revue,” Duke Ellington Collection.

JUMP FOR JOY 57

Now, every Broadway colored show,According to tradition,Must be a carbon copyOf the previous edition,With the truth discreetly muted,And the accent on the brasses.The punch that should be presentIn a colored show, alas, isDisinfected with magnoliaAnd dripping with molasses.In other words,We’re shown to youThrough Stephen Foster’s glasses.

Then the orchestra swung into “Stomp Caprice” featuring saxophon-ist Johnny Hodges, as Al Guster tap-danced atop a city skyline.172 Inan early performance, Guster slipped and landed on his rear. In thetradition of the blues, he was down, but not for long. It was a momentof “dissonance” that worked so well the move became part of theroutine. In the war years, the cities of the North and the West beck-oned with both great opportunity and great disappointment, but asEllington played his chords and Guster, dancing in a chartreuse tophat and tails, jumped for joy, this Los Angeles story pulsed with thecurrents of migratory hope and racial pride in a time of uncertaintyand war.

172. Hodges is indicated at the top of the “Stomp Caprice” manuscript, Duke Ellington Collection.Ellington’s son Mercer is credited as composer in the Jump for Joy program, 1941, Duke EllingtonCollection and in Mercer Ellington with Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington in Person: An IntimateMemoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 94. “Stomp Caprice” ended up moving around therevue, including to a position near the end of the second act. Production notes, Duke EllingtonCollection.


By Benjamin Cawthra · DUKE ELLINGTON’S JUMP FOR JOY AND THE FIGHT FOR EQUALITY IN WARTIME LOS...

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