Billy Strayhorn’s

“Lush Life”

Composer Billy Strayhorn began writing “Lush Life”—easily among the most emotionally complex standards in the Great American Songbook—in 1931, when he was just 16 years old. He revisited the song a number of times over the following five years, slowly nudging the poetry into place, performing it for friends, sharpening its bite, before revealing it publicly as a duet with singer Kay Davis during a November 13, 1948 Carnegie Hall concert with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

It’s an intricate torch song—Frank Sinatra attempted to record it, but gave up, exclaiming that he would return to it at a later date (he never did)—and one Strayhorn didn’t conceive of as anything more than a personal hymn and party favor. “You know, you have your private projects? Well, that was ‘Lush Life,’ ” he once explained, “I never intended for it to be published.” Strayhorn’s diaristic approach may help to explain the song’s profound emotional impact, as singer/pianist Andy Bey said—lightly jabbing Sinatra’s spirit and underlining the song’s maudlin aspect—“it’s not about ‘ring-a-ding-ding’ when you do ‘Lush Life.’ ” David Hajdu, the author of Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn, calls the song “a masterpiece of fatalist sophistication” and, ultimately, “a prayer” from a prodigious young talent who dreamed of escaping his working-class environs—Strayhorn was raised in the rough Homewood area of Pittsburgh—for “jazz and cocktails” in Paris. The composer could have also been giving poetic form to a homosexuality that he was still learning to embrace—he was openly gay the majority of his life—with some looking at the opening line, “I used to visit all the very gay places,” as a double-entendre that slyly referenced his orientation. However most disagree that this was the case as “gay” as a synonym for homosexuality didn’t enter the common lexicon until much later, and it's unlikely that a teenager from Homewood would have known of it in that context. But there are other coded indications that Strayhorn was exploring his sexuality in the song, including the fact that the lyrics dispense with identifying males or females (with the singular exception of the “girls with sad and sullen gray faces” who are little more than drab wallpaper in “come-what-may places”); the idea that a “poignant smile” would be “tinged with a sadness of a great love,” which reveals unusual complications beneath an emotion usually represented as pure joy; and his heartache at reading, not for the first time, a smile incorrectly: “Ah yes, I was wrong. Again, I was wrong.”

The young Strayhorn’s head was stuffed in dark, dark clouds and his miraculous escape from Homewood contains nothing of the world-conquering teenagers often daydream of, but rather a mysteriously cultivated cynicism that imagines his fantasy as nothing more than another corner. In this stunning piece of music he joins the jet set in style, but can’t escape his overbearing sense of loneliness.

The first jump in time places the composer into the jet style lifestyle he craves with only loneliness there to meet him. He’s haunted these nightclubs and bars for so long that he now seems to do it only out of habit, when suddenly something different, someone new “with a siren song” appears. But the storm clouds break for only an instant, mere seconds, before quickly regathering (“I was wrong”). In a blink Strayhorn jumps from what could be yesterday to one year out, reminiscing about when—as the music leaps briefly to a more hopefully key—“everything seemed so clear,” but again optimism is short-lived as the language turns ugly (“life is awful again”) and he declares that even a gutter-full of hearts would do little to snap his melancholy. In order to move on he eventually fabricates a silver lining in the form of the old yarn that “Romance is mush / Stifling those who strive,” before turning his future “lush life” as a drunk in “some small dive” into a bitter resignation, understanding he’ll have the jazz, and he’ll have the cocktails, but he’ll never have love: “There I’ll be / While I rot with the rest of those whose lives are lonely, too.” 

Strayhorn originally titled the song “Life Is Lonely,” before swapping it for the more evocative, “Lush Life,” saying, “when anyone wanted me to play it, they asked for ‘that thing about lush life,’ ” and of course, that title stands as one of music’s greatest as it both skillfully plays with the notion of a “lush life” brimming with romantic excess (all oxblood crushed velvet smoking jackets, spur of the moment trips to Paris, etc.), but also betrays the alcoholism that would trouble the composer later in his life.

In 1938 Duke Ellington heard Strayhorn perform the song. Impressed he requested the young composer write up an arrangement for the Ellington band, which he did the very next day under the title “Lonely Again.” It was never performed by Ellington’s band, but the meeting did spark one of the most inventive collaborations in all of music history as Ellington and Strayhorn would go on to work closely for years (some even believe a brief romantic relationship existed between the two), resulting in a string of jazz classics including “Take the A Train,” “Chelsea Bridge,” and “Satin Doll” (the latter of which Strayhorn was un-credited for), though they would never record Strayhorn’s most popular composition. (“Lonely Again” can be found on the 2003 release, So This Is Love: More Newly Discovered Works of Billy Strayhorn by the Dutch Jazz Orchestra.)

Ten years after Strayhorn scribbled his first arrangements for Ellington, Norman Granz, founder of the Clef, Norgran, and Verve labels, heard him perform “Lush Life” and insisted he record it for a compilation album he was putting together. Strayhorn evidently did record the song, and though it was ultimately left off the compilation (and seemingly lost to time), the studio was visited that day by Nat “King” Cole, who was so impressed by the song he recorded it himself. His 1949 exotica-touched rendition, which took tiny liberties with the music and lyrics—skittering bongos here, swapping “stifling” for “strifling” there—upset the generally unflappable Strayhorn, and a friend of the composer recalled him screaming, “Why the fuck didn’t they leave it alone?” But in a flash of serendipity, on their way to a one-day recording session on March 7, 1963, saxophonist John Coltrane and singer Johnny Hartman heard Cole’s “Lush Life” on the radio and decided to include it in the day’s line-up, Hartman remarking, “That is a fantastic song.” Recorded in one take—as most of the material for 1963’s John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman was—Coltrane’s artful ballad style, coupled with Hartman’s mature baritone and naturalistic approach lend appropriate gravity to the song’s sophisticated grief, and their recording stands as definitive. It is also said to have been Strayhorn’s favored rendition of his best-known song.