Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie came of age in a deeply segregated country, battling racism to become celebrated musicians, composers, and band leaders whose music lives on. Joining me this week to discuss the lives and careers of these three musical geniuses is writer and journalist Larry Tye, author of The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America.
Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Riverside Blues,” performed by King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band in 1923; the song is in the public domain and available via the Internet Archive. The episode images are: “Count Basie,” taken by James J. Kriegsmann in 1955, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; “Louis Armonstrong,” Herbert Behrens / Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons; and “Duke Ellington,’’ Associated Booking (management), 1964, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Additional Sources:
The Reconstruction Era & its Aftermath
The Southern Plantation System
Slavery & Incarceration in New Orleans
Negro League Baseball
Log Cabin Republicans and the Gay Right
American Posture Panic
The History of DARE
Alice Roosevelt Longworth
Eleanor Roosevelt's Visit to the Pacific Theatre during World War II
Eliza Scidmore
Foreign Missionaries & American Diplomacy in the 19th Century
Tammany Hall, FDR & the Murder of Vivian Gordon
The Combahee River Raid of 1863
The History of Ice in the United States
The History of Blue Jeans
The History of Pinball
The History of US Foreign Disaster Relief
LSD, the CIA & the History of Psychedelic Science
Clotilda: The Last U.S. Slave Ship
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