Throwback Thursday Remembers Billy Strayhorn Living in Duke Ellington’s Shadow

February 26, 2026
HANK ORSO

Behind every great man is a great woman, or so the saying goes. Sometimes, behind some great men are some great queer men, and Throwback Thursday is here to remember one of those greats. As part of The Advocate's ongoing History Is Queer series, writer Trudy King recently profiled Billy Strayhorn, the "right hand" of jazz great Duke Ellington. You've heard his songs, though you may not know his name. Living largely in Ellington's shadow, Strayhorn, King writes, was able to live a largely out-of-the-closet life as he did not have the name recognition or public spotlight thrust upon him.

Strayhorn was born in 1915 in Dayton, OH. He was introduced to the piano on visits to his grandmother's house in NC, where he began playing "as soon as he could reach the keys." Later, after his family moved to Pittsburgh, he found himself to be the only Black member of the high school band. In addition to private piano lessons, he also studied at the Pittsburgh Institute of Music. One of his biggest hits, "Lush Life," covered by the likes of Lady Gaga, was written at this time, when he was still a teen.

Strayhorn first met Ellington after a friend introduced him while the jazz great was in town for a show. Somehow, the young Strayhorn was able to hang out in Ellington's dressing room and display for the master his ability to not only copy Ellington's song stylings but also display his ability to improvise, rearrange, and make them his own.

Brazenly (or naively) the twenty-three-year-old artist demonstrated both a crafty facility with his renowned elder’s idiom and a spirited capacity to expand it through his own sensibility." (David Hajdu writing in Lush Life, his 1996 Strayhorn biography.)

He would join Ellington's band the following year, though what his role would be exactly, neither quite knew. But he would grow to become instrumental in arranging, composing, and filling in on the keyboard. This was huge for the up-and-comer, as it was the 1940s, the height of the Big Band Era, with Ellington being one of the genre's preeminent artists. After WWII, that style of jazz was less in vogue, and Strayhorn set out on his own through much of the Fifties, experimenting with other jazz forms. But he always returned to working alongside Ellington.

But there are several instances of Ellington pushing Strayhorn off to the side, if it meant relinquishing some of the spotlight. He wasn't given full or any credit for many of their collaborations. As Ring points out from a 2007 article in The Advocate, "it was Ellington alone who got the Grammy for the score of Otto Preminger’s movie Anatomy of a Murder, even though Duke spent most of the filming in his hotel while Strayhorn haunted the set and composed underscore.”

This probably wasn't due to any homophobic bend in Ellington, but rather simply an unwillingness to share the fame. As Will Friedwald wrote in a New York Times review of Lush Life, he “was delighted to promote Strayhorn whenever he could — he generally announced the younger man’s name when performing his work and even produced an album by Strayhorn in 1965 — as long as boosting his collaborator took nothing away from him,”

Pushed aside somewhat, but not pushed into the closet. Strayhorn lived fairly openly with his partner, the musician Aaron Bridgers, in their Harlem apartment from 1939-1947, and was with graphic designer Bill Grove until his death in 1967. He also had a close and important personal and professional friendship with singer and actress Lena Horne, who once said she would have married him if he'd been straight.

He may have lived most of his life as the wind beneath Ellington's wings, but he's gotten his due in several outlets since his death. You can find so much more information about this unsung gay musical legend in Hajdu's biography, which is still available. 2007's Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life, which was an episode of PBS's Independent Lens series. won an Emmy, a Peabody, and the Writers' Guild Award. There is also the eight-episode series of shorts, Ever Up and Onward: A Tribute to Billy Strayhorn. Episode one, by musician and bandleader Marlon Martinez, is below. The other episodes are available to view at BillyStrayhorn.com.