Edna thompson duke ellingtons wife

Emily Wunderlich of Gotham Books just sent me the final version of the front cover of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington.

Edna thompson duke ellingtons wife

I posted an earlier version a couple of months ago, but the new image is the real thing: Duke will look like this when you see it in bookstores in October.

It was Steven Lasker, the great Ellington scholar-collector, who first showed me this rarely reproduced image and suggested that it would make an ideal cover for Duke, not only because it’s so visually striking but because it shows the scar on Ellington’s left cheek more clearly than any other photograph I know.

Ellington acquired that scar in 1929, not long before he made his sound-film debut in Black and Tan, and in Duke I explain how he got it.

Here’s the story, straight from the as-yet-unpublished pages of Duke.

It is, if I do say so myself, quite a tale.

* * *

Black and Tan marked–literally–a transition in Ellington’s private life.