The great American composer Duke Ellington would have been the first African-American composer to win a Pultizer Prize for Music back in 1965 had the award board agreed with its own jury. This week, scholar Ted Gioia has been raising awareness of this oversight in judgement and support for pressing the Pulitzer Prize board to reverse this decision.
He describes the decision in his post, “Let’s Give Duke the Pulitzer Prize He Was Denied in 1965.”
That missing award from 1965 has long been a source of disappointment and frustration to jazz fans, and a genuine disgrace in the history of the Pulitzer. The jury that judged the entrants that year decided to do something different—they recommended giving the honor to Duke Ellington for the “vitality and originality of his total productivity” over the course of more than forty years.
This was an unusual move in many ways. First, the Pulitzer usually honors a single work, much like the Oscar for Best Picture or other prizes of this sort. In this instance, the jury recommended that Ellington get the honor for his entire career. But even more significant, it would be the first time a jazz musician or an African American received this prestigious award.
But it never happened.
The Pulitzer Board refused to accept the decision of the jury, and decided it would be better to give out no award, rather than honor Duke Ellington. Two members of the three-person judging panel, Winthrop Sargeant and Robert Eyer, resigned in the aftermath.
If I have my facts right, the only African American with a Pulitzer before 1965 would have been poet Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950.
Reading Classics: Two books argue for reading Socrates and other classics and for “literature [as] a proven path to character formation.”
Resist or Compromise? “In 1981 I was sitting on a washing machine in Willow Grove, Pa., reading a Bible, when an elderly man approached and struck up a conversation. We spent the whole washing and drying cycle on chairs outside the laundromat, him telling me in detail of the persecution of Christians under the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945) and of his imprisonment along with others who refused to bow to the Shinto shrine.”
Prufrock: Micah Mattix’s arts & literature roundup is now on Substack. He explains the reason here.
Poetry: Reading “rhythmic poetry” can help you handle stress, according to some biofeedback responses. Surely hymns would fit this pattern too. (via Miller’s Book Review)
Poetry: Irish poet Eamon Grennan says in a recent interview, “Of course, at the bottom of all is your engagement with the language itself. Loving that, loving and being able to admire how words make sense, how they fit into rhythms that give them a different kind of heft: the potential music of language, I suppose, needs to be part of your breathing.”
This kind of thinking gives him lines like this:
“Moonwhite the garden lightens
And the moon, a pealed clove of garlic, pales.”
Aliens in UFOs: Ron Capshaw says Jordan Peele’s “NOPE” captures the horror and wonder of an old-school UFO movie but doesn’t quite payoff in the end because we’ve seen many aliens who want to kill us over the years.
Photo: Cream Castle sign in Sikeston, Missouri, 1979. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.