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 wh ...