One of the most popular American musicians and composers of any race of the 20th century, and the most popular jazz musician, he defined American music in the 1930s and much of the music of the 1940s as well. He composed over 1000 pieces, the most—and most recorded—of any jazz musician ("Duke Ellington"). He led a jazz orchestra from 1923 until his death, conducting from his keyboard. They played early on at Harlem’s famous Cotton Club, which broadcast performances over the first radios, then for decades playing and recording all over the world, until just two months before his death. Ellington received a posthumous Special Pulitzer Prize for music in 1999 (1999 Winner - Duke Ellington).
Billie Holiday
(1915-1959)
As the most famous African-American female jazz and swing singer of the early 20th century, she began recording at age 20. Holiday sang early on for the famous African-American bandleader Count Basie, and then for the white bandleader Artie Shaw—becoming one of the very few African-Americans singing at that time in a white band ("Billie Holiday"). Her 1939 song Strange Fruit, about lynching, was deemed too controversial by her mainstream record label to record, but another company picked it up, and the song became one of the top 20 bestsellers of the 1930s and Holiday’s best-selling record (Amoako). The 1972 movie about her life, Lady Sings the Blues—taken from the title of one of her songs—starred Diana Ross as Holiday. She was posthumously inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1973.
