Duke's Sister Passes

[clandy44]

Amusing anecdote about Duke at the end. He sounds like he was quite devoted to his sister.

Ruth Ellington Boatwright, 88, the Sister of Duke Ellington, Dies

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: March 11, 2004

uth Ellington Boatwright, Duke Ellington's only sibling, who for many years took care of his business affairs, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 88.

Her son Michael James said her death came after she had been sick for some time.

Ruth Dorothea Ellington was born on July 2, 1915, in Washington, and her first memory of her brother, who was 16 years older, was hearing him perform on the radio.

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In 1930 Ellington, by then highly successful, summoned his sister and parents from Washington to live with him in an apartment on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem.

"He was the only brother I had, and I was his only sister," Mrs. Boatwright said in an interview with Ebony in 1999. "He took care of me from the time I was 12, and he's still taking care of me."

Ellington died in 1974; Mrs. Boatwright oversaw his copyrights, contracts and other business matters for many years afterward.

In 1991 she sold a large number of his musical scores and manuscripts to the Smithsonian Institution, and in 1995 she sold 51 percent of Tempo Music, the company that owns most of Ellington's compositions, to a New York publisher.

After high school in Manhattan, she graduated from Columbia University in 1939 with a degree in biology, planning to teach it. She then went to Europe to learn languages and write a thesis comparing the teaching of biology in Paris and New York. She stayed with Josephine Baker, the singer and her brother's friend.

In 1941 Ellington formed Tempo Music to oversee his interests and named his sister president. He also bought her a four-story house on Riverside Drive, where she maintained his trophy room of medals and honors.

In the 1950's she was host of a radio program on WLIB in New York on which she interviewed guests including the writer Ralph Ellison.

She was also active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and was a founder of the jazz ministry of St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Manhattan, where Ellington was a friend of the first designated jazz pastor, the Rev. John Garcia Gensel.

Her first marriage, to Daniel James, a journalist and political scientist, ended in divorce. Her second husband, McHenry Boatwright, an operatic baritone, died in 1994.

Mrs. Boatwright is survived by her sons Michael and Stephen James, both of Manhattan.

At some special occasions Ellington brought her as his official escort. Michael James said this was because Ellington thought it honored his sister; she once offered another explanation.

"He took me to the White House because he didn't want his women to be upset," she said to Ebony. "If he picked one, all the rest of them would have screamed. Imagine a song like `Sophisticated Lady.' I imagine he told every woman that he knew that she was the inspiration for that song."

[maren]

Thanks for posting this, Clandy! That last paragraph was a good one!

Keep an eye on THIS THREAD, too, in case Chris A. (Christiern) adds an anecdote.