📍U Street, Washington, DC 20009, USA
1899 – 1923“I was born Edward Kennedy Ellington in Washington, D.C., in April 1899, and grew up in the city's Black middle-class neighbourhoods near U Street, in a family that loved me and believed in good manners and dignity. My father, James, was a butler and caterer who sometimes worked at the White House, and my mother, Daisy, played the piano and raised me as if I were a prince. We lived at several addresses near 13th Street, and I went to Armstrong Manual Training School. I took piano lessons as a boy but preferred baseball. Then, at about fourteen, I started sneaking into Frank Holliday's poolroom, where I heard the ragtime pianists of Washington, and I was hooked. I used to say I got one education in the pool hall and one in school. In the summer of 1914, working as a soda jerk at the Poodle Dog Café, I wrote my first composition, Soda Fountain Rag, by ear, since I couldn't yet read music; I could play it in so many tempos that people thought I had a whole repertoire. My friends started calling me Duke for my elegant clothes and manners. I learned from local pianists such as Doc Perry, and soon I was playing for dances around the city, and booking bands myself. In 1923 I left Washington for New York, and at the Cotton Club in Harlem I built one of the greatest orchestras in history, writing thousands of compositions, from Mood Indigo to Take the A Train, with Billy Strayhorn. U Street remembers me, and its Duke Ellington mural and the school for the arts in Georgetown named for me keep my memory alive.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today