Ask anyone to name the anthem of the Duke Ellington Orchestra and they will say Take the A Train. Ellington did not write it. It was composed by Billy Strayhorn, a five-foot-three, soft-spoken, openly gay prodigy who spent nearly three decades producing brilliance in the shadow of a giant. This episode traces his childhood in Pittsburgh with a violent alcoholic father, the sanctuary of a grandmother’s piano in Hillsborough, North Carolina, and the teenage composition of Lush Life, a song with shifting tonal centers and chromatic bass lines that mapped European classical harmony onto American popular song.

We explore the 1938 audition where Strayhorn rearranged one of Ellington’s own tunes, how he reverse-engineered the Ellington Effect of writing chords across sections, the credit debate over Masterpieces by Ellington and Satin Doll, and why the Ellington organization may have functioned as a protective fortress rather than exploitation. We also cover his civil rights work with Martin Luther King Jr., his friendship with Lena Horne, the Blue Rose session with Rosemary Clooney, the Anatomy of a Murder score, his one 1965 concert as a leader, and Blood Count, composed from his hospital bed.

• Why the racial barriers of 1930s classical music pushed a harmonic genius toward jazz
• Chelsea Bridge, Debussy-like whole-tone scales, and the Blanton-Webster era
• The recording trick that got an exhausted Rosemary Clooney to sing like she was alone at home
• Ellington’s unaccompanied Lotus Blossom captured while the band packed up around him
• The four moral freedoms Ellington named in his eulogy for his friend