Interesting Emendations: Stanley Crouch's Great "The Duke's Blues"

Stanley Crouch (Photo by Martine Bisagni)

Stanley Crouch, who died September 16, 2020, wrote a great New Yorker piece called “The Duke’s Blues” (April 29 & May 6, 1996). It’s a celebration of Duke Ellington’s music. Crouch said,

Ellington maintained such a commanding touch with his art and the world that his fifty years of development constitute what just might be the most impressive evolution in the American arts. The blues was the key, and Ellington was surely the greatest manipulator of blues form and blues feeling that jazz has ever known. He understood the blues as both music and mood. He knew that those who thought of the blues as merely a vehicle for primitive complaint had their drawers or their brassieres on backward. The blues knows its way around. It can stretch from the backwoods to the space shuttle, from the bloody floor of a dive to the neurotic confusion of beautifully clothed woman in a Manhattan penthouse. The blues – happy, sad, or neither – plays no favorites.

That “He knew that those who thought of the blues as merely a vehicle for primitive complaint had their drawers or their brassieres on backward” is pure Crouch; it makes me smile every time I read it. 

An interesting variation on “The Duke’s Blues,” called “Duke Ellington: Transcontinental Swing,” appears in Crouch’s wonderful 2006 essay collection Considering Genius. In this piece, the above-quoted New Yorker passage reads as follows:

Considering himself “the world’s greatest listener,” Ellington maintained such commanding touch with his craft and the culture of the world at large that his fifty years of development constitute what is perhaps the single most comprehensive evolution in all of American art. Much of this has to do with something as American as the bandleading composer himself. Ellington was the greatest manipulator of blues form and blues feeling. He understood it as music and as mood. He knew that those who thought of the blues as merely a vehicle for primitive complaint had their drawers or brassieres on backward. The blues always knows its way around. It can stretch from the backwoods to the space shuttle, from wet blood on the floor of a dive to the neurotic confusion of a beautifully clothed woman in a penthouse overlooking the very best view of Manhattan. The blues, happy or sad or neither, plays no favorites.

The New Yorker version seems tighter, but the book version strikes me as slightly bluesier. Both pieces swing, enacting the rhythm of the music they describe.