Lecture Date: February 19, 2026
The Davenport & Company Lecture
This is the story of three revolutionary American musicians, the maestro jazzmen who orchestrated the chords that throb at the soul of twentieth-century America:
- Duke Ellington, the grandson of slaves who was christened Edward Kennedy Ellington, whose story is as layered and nuanced as his name suggests and whose music transcended category.
- Louis Daniel Armstrong born in a New Orleans slum so tough it was called The Battlefield. His first musical instrument, a ten-cent tin horn that drew buyers to his rag-peddling wagon, set him on the road to elevating jazz into a pulsating force for spontaneity and freedom.
- William James Basie, too, grew up in a world unfamiliar to white fans—the son of a coachman and laundress who dreamed of escaping every time the traveling carnival swept into town, and who finally engineered his getaway with help from pianist and composer Fats Waller.
What is far less known about these groundbreakers is that they were bound not just by their music or even the discrimination that they, like nearly all Black performers of their day, routinely encountered. Each defied and ultimately overcame racial boundaries by opening America’s eyes and souls to the magnificence of their music. In the process they wrote the soundtrack for the civil rights movement.
Speaker: Larry Tye
Larry Tye is a New York Times bestselling author whose first book, The Father of Spin, is a biography of public relations pioneer Edward L. Bernays. His seven other books cover topics as diverse as the modern-day Jewish diaspora; Black men who worked on George Pullman’s railroad sleeping cars and helped kick-start the Civil Rights movement; star baseball pitcher Satchel Paige and politicians Robert F. Kennedy and Joseph McCarthy.
From 1986 to 2001, Tye was an award-winning reporter at The Boston Globe, where his primary beat was medicine. He also served as the Globe’s environmental reporter, roving national writer, investigative reporter, and sports writer. Before that, he was the environmental reporter at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, and covered government and business at The Anniston Star in Alabama. A graduate of Brown University, Tye was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1993-94. He taught journalism at Boston University, Northeastern, and Tufts.