Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie transformed America with their music—and were financially exploited because of their race

The money troubles of Willam James “Count” Basie, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, and Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong made for ideal bellwethers, and are worth a fresh look as the world celebrates Duke’s 125^th birthday, the Count’s 120^th, and the near-100^th of Satchmo’s genre-defining Hot Five recordings.

Ellington gave breakthrough performances in three Paramount films in the 1930s, but was paid just half of what white bandleader Guy Lombardo got in the same era for a single Paramount picture. It was par for the racist course, as Duke knew, and he took great pleasure in knowing that he and the band were so embedded into the plots of those movies that Southern theater owners couldn’t easily cut them out, as was their wont. That same pride showed itself when, during a 1940s recording session at RCA Victor, his producer accidentally left a microphone on and the band heard him say, “Ready for a little Saturday night nigger music.” Instead of making a scene, Ellington quietly instructed his mates, “Gentleman, pack up,” then asked to be released from his contract.

Decca Records signed Basie to a deal that became the epitome of exploitation, paying him a fee of just $30 and no royalties for chart-topping tunes like “Jumpin’ at the Woodside.” His bandmates, meanwhile, were paid less than the modest union scale. “To me it was devastating – for both of us,” said John Hammond, Basie’s white producer and enabler. The Count “earned nothing from record sales.”

‘What’s money anyhow?’

The street-smart Armstrong gave up early on trying to fight back against bigoted record companies, theater managers, and movie producers. Instead, he gave full control over his finances to his “boss man,” white hard-guy Joe Glaser, who gave him all the cash he needed but kept for himself a fatter share than seemed warranted. “What’s money anyhow?” Louis asked wryly.

Even as they slowly made progress in breaking down racial bars, these bandleaders remained, like all musicians of their race, barred from the most lucrative jobs in whites-only hotels, limited in parts they could play in Hollywood and on TV and radio, and squeezed by extortionist management fees. Worse, they had to bite their tongues on the sidelines while wealthy Caucasian imitators brazenly performed the very tunes that the Negro jazzmen had penned. Benny Goodman had the nerve to introduce Basie’s “One O’clock Jump” to a Carnegie Hall audience, while Glenn Miller’s band rang up sales with its rendition of Ellington and Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train.”

For three Negroes raised in poverty or close to it, the millions that Satchmo, Duke, and the Count eventually earned seemed like manna from heaven. But even that amount was grossly unfair given their stature and stardom, and a fraction of what they would have earned if Jim Crow hadn’t shackled their bank accounts.

“Some times I sit around the house and think about all the places me and Lucille have been. You name the country and we’ve just about been there. We’ve been wined and dined by all kinds of royalty. We’ve had an audience with the Pope. We’ve even slept in Hitler’s bed,” said Satchmo. “But regardless of all that kind of stuff, I’ve got sense enough to know that I’m still Louis Armstrong – colored.”

Few bandleaders were able to simultaneously manage their checkbooks and their music. Likewise, the business side of their careers threatened to defeat Ellington, Basie, and Armstrong in ways that were unique to each, and telling reflections of their personalities and circumstances.

Duke had always brought in decent money, going back to his steady and lucrative house-band job at the Cotton Club, together with night after night of bookings at choice venues nationwide. But the ledger was always awash in red ink. The 1929 crash of the stock market hit him hard and he always seemed a short step ahead of the debt collector. It took years just to pay off his mother’s and father’s medical and burial bills. The Internal Revenue Service garnished his concert fees, convinced he was exaggerating his deductions for everything from tips to alcohol and flowers and claiming unwarranted exemptions for cousins, an aunt, and other relatives. He was supporting an estranged wife, a sister who liked mink coats, a son with children of his own, and past and present mistresses, and he helped out long-departed band members and up-and-coming protégés. Duke that he was, he insisted on living beyond his means. Add it up, his son Mercer said only slightly whimsically, and it got “to a point where basically he had about three possessions. He had a white overcoat, he had an electric piano he used to sleep with[,] and a steak sandwich in his pocket.”

The biggest drain on his income, Mercer and everyone knew, was his determination to keep the core of his band intact not just when there were paying gigs, but year-round for more than fifty uninterrupted years. It was partly a matter of loyalty to his musicians, band boys, PR people, barbers, and other footmen, although he was a notorious tightwad when it came to raises. More importantly, he needed his orchestra at hand so he could instantaneously hear his compositions, knowing his longtime sidemen would adjust and improvise until the piece reached tonal perfection.

To pay those salaries, Duke held his nose and became a mouthpiece for Olivetti typewriters (“Duke Ellington at the keys”) and Hammond organs (“it sounds like an organ’s supposed to sound”). He reluctantly and unhurriedly penned a memoir when a publisher offered a $50,000 advance.  He wrote more radio themes than anyone, appeared in eighteen full-length movies, continued doing wearying one-nighters, and churned out a stream of royalty-yielding standards. Most of all, he repeatedly sacrificed his own earnings to cover business costs. He had to, as his ledgers from a representative year like 1944 make clear: he took in an impressive $405,000 ($7 million in today’s dollars), but payroll, rent, legal and accounting fees, and other expenses left him with a meager profit of $11,000. In four of the years between 1953 and 1960, he made no gain at all. “It’s a matter of whether you want to play music,” he explained, “or make money.”

The bottom line, said Ellington biographer and friend Derek Jewell, is that in his later decades “he needed to make at least a million dollars a year to break even.” While he fared well compared with other Negro orchestrators, white big-band leader Kay Kyser pulled down six times more and Glenn Miller five times.

‘We’d pawn everything we had if we were broke’

Count Basie faced equally rough going. In the early years, he booked less fancy venues than Duke did, with smaller fees. And he had ongoing gambling debts and tax troubles. Trumpet player Buck Clayton remembered what it was like in those years: “We’d pawn everything we had if we were broke – suits, radios, anything.” It got so bad in 1940 that, to give himself leverage with his booking agency, Basie planted with the press a story that he was about to break up his band and sign up as featured pianist with Benny Goodman. It was more than a bluff: He was $35,000 in debt and near bankruptcy. By the end of 1940, word circulated that the Count was played out.

The Music Corporation of America stepped in as a short-lived white knight, offering the discipline and direction he needed and boosting his 1941 gross to $300,000. Over the next few years he’d launch his own publishing company, the Basie Music Corporation, take featured roles in Hollywood movies, watch jukebox sales soar, tour Europe, and be crowned the Jump King of Swing. But by the end of that decade hard times were back, for big bands, swing music, and Bill Basie. “Quality bookings were few,” remembered sideman Freddie Green, “forcing Basie to travel the rough road of one-nighters again with a disgruntled band trying to survive on reduced salaries.”

While he conceded that money “is very important,” Basie, like Ellington, said it wasn’t his main motivation, but rather “a part of the dues you have to pay to have the kind of band to make the kind of music you like.”

Satchmo had more money rolling in and less leaking out, partly because he didn’t have to bankroll a big band like Duke and the Count. His background also left him more steeled for hard times. But that didn’t mean it was easy.

He had to supplement his performance fees by plugging products ranging from Pepsi-Cola and Selmer trumpets to Schaefer Beer and Susie Cute Dolls. He appeared in thirty-five feature films and documentaries along with several shorts, earning a colossal $50,000 for eleven days of shooting for the 1959 film The Five Pennies. That let him pay his sidemen well, at least by the standards of other jazz ensembles, and to keep them working even through the Great Depression. What hurt was having so many mistresses and ex-wives: “The divorces cost me plenty. After each one I had to start all over again. Right after Daisy – right after Alpha – right after Lil. Those marriages cost me a fortune not only to make and sustain but to break.”

By the 1960s, all three maestros were in the money, with Louis the richest of all. In his Queens home, a $5,000 Sevres vase perched on a flawless block of pink marble that came from an Italian quarry and now sat across the room from furniture hand-hewn from Germany’s Black Forest. A silver-blue Cadillac Fleetwood with polished fruitwood stretched out in the garage, while the bandleader relaxed upstairs on a red leather recliner, sipping Seagram’s V.O. and munching on sardines and soda crackers. “Pops Armstrong is a millionaire several times over,” Ebony announced in an article titled, The Reluctant Millionaire. The magazine writer got it half right: Louis hadn’t “made less than a half-million bucks in any given year during the past 20 years,” as Joe Glaser attested. But he was hardly reluctant.

‘The richest man of his race’

The boy who’d grown up on an unpaved alley in a New Orleans neighborhood so rough it was called The Battlefield now owned properties not just in New York, but in Accra, Ghana, and Las Vegas. There were insurance trusts and government bonds, paid for by bookings that yielded $5,000 a night domestically and $35,000 for several nights work in Europe. Royalties rolled in on 2,500 recordings. Lucille ordered her clothes from Paris, Rome, and Saks; Satchmo traveled like a fancy man, with forty-eight trunks stuffed with 139 tailored suits and countless silk handkerchiefs, shirts, and mufflers. Louis wanted it both ways when it came to his bankroll. He delighted when authors and journalists crowned him “the richest man of his race” or “the only jazzman – and certainly the only Negro jazzman – who ever made a million dollars.” But he told Ebony that “even if I start making a million bucks a day it won’t make me try to be something different . . . You might eat a little better than the next cat. You might be able to buy a little better booze than some wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat, and when you die you’re just as graveyard dead as he is.”

The Count led a life of relative affluence, too, with five-or-more-figure record contracts instead of the measly two Decca once paid. He finally could buy the bar he’d coveted on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 132^nd Street in Harlem, which he renamed Count Basie’s. “I never would have thought that that place on that corner would ever be mine. Back during those early days I used to walk along that sidewalk and see people going in there, but I never could. You could go in if you wanted to and could afford the prices,” he said. “It was a real gas to be the owner of your own club, especially when it was so popular.”

More important, he had enough to afford the caretakers his daughter Diane needed. He could cover most gambling debts now without bankrupting the band or hocking Catherine’s minks. And he could pay for the hotels or apartments he rented when Katy kicked him out for philandering, then shower her with gifts so she’d take him back. There was even enough to buy the cigars he loved puffing and the model trains that let him relax.

Duke viewed money as a marker of status more than an end in itself. The amount he was paid mattered less than that it topped big-band rivals like Benny Goodman and Count Basie. That generally was the case, with venue fees as well as record contracts. It became clear how little the cash itself had meant – his muddled financial-management meant he seldom even knew how much there was – “when they were trying to clean up his apartment after he passed away,” says his granddaughter Mercedes Ellington. “They found in the closet shopping bags full of cash. It was a mess.”

One gauge of his prosperity was his sartorial splendor. Tailors in Chicago, California, and New York spun out double-breasted suits, along with tailcoats with cuffs but without pockets, in bright whites, blues, and salmons. Time magazine counted “100-plus suits of clothes,” pronouncing him “fastidious to the point of frivolity.” Although he already had a thousand neckties, he’d travel twenty miles to buy just the right one for the next performance, generally fat and knitted, in orange or perhaps apricot. His favorite starched shirt had a Barrymore collar with long points. His wide-cuffed trousers stood two inches above the shoe line to show off his red socks, while his custom-made footwear ranged from black ballet slippers to shoes in blue suede or crimson, squared-toe or rounded. A corset tightened his gut. Talcum powder and toilet water sweetened his smell. “They may not like our music,” he would say as the audience gasped. “But we sure look pretty.”

Let others worry whether the royalties were enough to balance the books, Duke reasoned. “The thing that sets him apart from most of the bandleaders and composers . . . [is] sooner or later, they let economics get in the way of creativity,” said Mercer. “Ellington never did.”

These Bible-reading bandleaders surely knew the Parable of the Rich Fool, and they remembered their own penniless pasts. So rather than hoarding their wealth, they gave away more than their managers wanted.

‘Duke paid for all of it’

Duke covered distant family members’ medical bills and loaned money to band members and mistresses, never expecting them to make good. On Wednesday mornings needy musicians and artists knew they could stop by for $10, while relatives could count on $100 anytime he saw them. He saved his pocket change for kids. And on Duke’s order, said sister Ruth, “our chauffeur was going around the city delivering . . . money and this and that” to “people that we don’t even know about.”

As for Billy Strayhorn, “he had no bills: no hotel bills, no apartment bills, no food bills, no clothes or tax bills. He didn’t have a salary, either. He just signed a tab. Duke paid for everything. If Strays decided that he wanted to go to Paris and have breakfast, he’d just get on a plane – fly to Paris and have breakfast and come back,” said trumpeter Clark Terry. “Duke paid for all of it.”

Not everyone received such favored treatment. Prized trumpet player Cootie Williams left to join Benny Goodman when Duke wouldn’t hike his weekly pay by $25. Rex Stewart threatened to quit over a similar $25 request, only this time Duke relented at the last instant. “[Ellington] is both generous and stingy; thoughtful and inconsiderate; dependable and irresponsible . . . Duke’s generosity or lack of it does not follow a pattern. He often picks up the tab for a large party, but will cadge cigarettes,” Stewart observed. “On reflection, and I’ve given this a lot of thought, Ellington is the most complex and paradoxical individual that I’ve ever known. He is completely unpredictable, a combination of Sir Galahad, Scrooge, Don Quixote and God knows what other saints and sinners.”

Basie was less complex but equally charitable. Trumpet player Dave Stahl remembers him occasionally covering the band’s hotel bills even though that wasn’t his responsibility, and he did it Basie-like, with “no fanfare.” Quincy Jones recalled that when he was struggling, the Count cosigned a loan, and when he needed direction, Basie offered lessons to live by. “Basie was family to me, an idol, a father, a brother, a mentor, a manager, whatever he had to be,” said Jones. ‘“Learn to deal with the valleys, the hills will take care of themselves,’ he advised. ‘And always be fair.’”

“Money,” Basie explained in his memoir, “has never really been a very big consideration with me personally. I really would rather not get into any discussion about it.”

Satchmo was the softest touch of all. He’d send TVs or radios to bare acquaintances, buy oil paints for poor kids eager to create, peel off $20 bills for needy cases who lined up outside his hotel or dressing room, and, just before Christmas at the height of the Great Depression, dispense three hundred tons of coal to needy Baltimoreans. He knew people were taking advantage but didn’t care. Civil rights groups benefited from his generosity. So did the Colored Waifs’ Home and the widow of an old-time musician who got $50 a week for years. “We don’t tell too many people this, but it’s no lie. Pops actually gives away – I mean gives away – $500 to $1,000 every damn week,” Joe Glaser told Ebony magazine. “He honestly gets his biggest thrill just giving away dough. He just gives it away – no strings attached.”

It’s simple, Louis said: “I greases a few palms here and there. What good is all the dough doing me and Lucille just laying around accumulating?”

From the book THE JAZZMEN by Larry Tye. Copyright © 2024 by Larry Tye. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.