Lush Life – the Journey of a Song

Jazz Singer I – portrait of Johnny Hartman by Sarah Fenwick

Listen to the story. Read by Sarah Fenwick

Pittsburgh. 1936. 

On the day he created me, cigarette smoke likely curled around Billy Strayhorn’s fingers. He must have coughed as the acrid fumes raked down his windpipe and burned through his 17-year-old lungs. As he wrote my lyrics, maybe his pencil stumbled. 

I used to visit all the very gay places, those come-what-may places 

where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life 

to get the feel of life from jazz and cocktails 

Earlier his father James had staggered down the back road where Billy lived with his parents. Their home at 7212 Tioga Street Rear hid behind the tree-lined houses in the Homewood neighbourhood. White families lived in the prosperous houses on the main road. Black families lived in the shacks in the rear.  

James let himself into the family home, bumping into the wall after he lurched through the front entrance. Once again, he had spent the meagre cash he’d earned from his job as a labourer on alcohol. 

Billy’s mother Lillian opened the door to the room where her son was busy writing; a habit that would later earn him the nickname of Dictionary. Her skirt suit was clean as spring water. She looked him in the eyes. Her raised eyebrow was all he needed to know it was time to leave the house. As Billy closed the front door on his way to work, James’ shouts echoed along Tioga Street Rear.  

Billy had a day job as a clerk at a drugstore. During lulls in business he wrote a song a day, including me. He titled me Life is Lonely. Over time, my name changed to Lush Life.  

Today, I’m one of the oldest living jazz ballads. 

The girls I knew had sad and sullen grey faces 

with distingué traces which used to be there  

you could see where  

they’d been washed away by too many through the day 

twelve o’clock-tails 

Baby Boy Strayhorn might not have lived past his early years. One of nine children, he was a sickly newborn. James and Lillian didn’t give him a name because they didn’t expect him to survive. He certainly wouldn’t have written my music and lyrics if it weren’t for his mother. 

Lillian was an educated woman who had studied at Shaw University and encouraged Billy to learn music. She often sent him away to his grandparents in Carolina to protect him from abuse at home. There he played his grandparent’s piano and developed his musical skills.  

Then you came along with your siren song to tempt me to madness 

I thought for a while that your poignant smile was tinged with the sadness 

of a great love for me 

Ah yes, I was wrong, again, I was wrong 

After a chance meeting with Duke Ellington, Billy moved to New York to work with the legendary bandleader in one of the greatest collaborations in jazz history. In 1939, my openly gay creator fell in love with Aaron Bridges. They broke up when Bridges moved to France.  

Tempo Music published me in 1949. Over the years I got the reputation for being a capricious song, even for the best jazz singers. They loved to sing my younger sibling song, Take the A Train, who was much more popular than I was. Even Frank Sinatra struggled to carry my tune, saying I was difficult enough without Nelson Riddle’s challenging arrangement.  

It’s not that I didn’t want Frankie to sing me with his powerful tenor voice, but he headed straight at my notes instead of wooing them. I wanted him to slide up my intervals and give them the lies, juice and love they needed. It wasn’t meant to be. I was cut from his 1958 album Only the Lonely. Recording sessions of Sinatra’s version of me still exist. You can hear him complaining with a pained laugh about my modulations, saying, ‘Put it aside for about a year!’  

When Johnny Hartman sang me, his phrasing opened out my vowels like an oboe. His rich baritone carried me like sugar carries sweetness. In his solo the master, John Coltrane, twirled my notes into sound butterflies fluttering over the piano chords. I fell in love with them both. 

Of late, women such as Queen Latifah sing me. I appear on her 2004 CD The Dana Owens Album. How does it feel to be sung by a woman? Queen Latifah’s luscious voice stretches my vowels. Her voice is higher and feels gentler than Sinatra’s. The recording was originally meant for the movie Living Out Loud with Holly Hunter and Danny DeVito, but it was cut.  

Life is lonely again and only last year everything seemed so sure 

Now life is awful again, a trough full of hearts could only be a bore 

A week in Paris will ease the bite of it 

all I care is to smile in spite of it 

I’ll forget you I will 

While yet you are still burning inside my brain 

Billy’s heart is imprinted on my every note and word. He recorded me twice. Once in 1961 for Capitol Records The Peaceful Side album, and again for the 1969 album named after me: Lush Life, A Biography of Billy Strayhorn. What an honour. It’s every song’s dream to be the title of an album.   

Billy half-spoke me like a poem. Twelve o’clock ‘tails and cigarettes smoked in my lower notes. He felt his way around the pitch overtones like a violinist.  His voice was frail sometimes and wavered at the end of a phrase.  

Romance is mush stifling those who strive 

I’ll live a lush life in some small dive 

And there I’ll be while I rot with the rest of those whose lives are lonely too 

The drummer’s brushes hissed a hypnotic train-like rhythm under Billy’s confident piano playing. My creator knew all the tricks, expertly quickening and slowing the tempo in my opening verses. He sang my deepest, most indefinable personality trait – my jazziness.  

Coltrane, Hartman and Sinatra are all dead. They live on in my recordings, as vibrant as if they’d performed me yesterday. In 1967, Billy died of oesophageal cancer brought about by excessive smoking and drinking. Life is lonely again. 

Like I always say, a week in Paris will ease the bite of it. 

Listen to Sarah’s version of “Lush Life” on Bandcamp

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