Excuse me, sir, but are you Duke Ellington?”
My high-jumping teammate, Bob Rudrow, and I were talking late at night in a tiny pub inside the Sandringham Hotel in London — just a little room off the lobby. It was 1969. We were both 19 years old and touring the United Kingdom with the Jersey Shore Athletic Club. Bob’s eyes had lit up as he recognized the man standing behind me and asked that question. I turned around, and there approaching the bar was this older gentleman with a million rings under his eyes. He smiled slightly and replied, “Well, I’ve been accused of that!”
Ellington was one of the creators of jazz, that uniquely American art, and a master composer, writing songs and scores that blurred boundaries between the improvisational and the written. He was a pioneer on the musical frontier, his music an undeniable celebration of freedom in racist America. As jazz pianist and educator Billy Taylor summed up Ellington’s life and music, it’s “what we’re about as Americans.”
And it was Duke Ellington, right there, standing in the same old hotel he had probably stayed in many times before. We got to talk with him for 20 minutes about music and sports, about his upcoming concert, about our track team’s travel to the Edinburgh Highland Games.
I had seen Ellington perform on television but regretfully did not know much about his music in that moment. As I became familiar with it, and became a musician myself, I wished I could have a do-over of that chance meeting. Little did I know that night how much my own future in sports and music would intersect with American originals, people who bodied forth an America that celebrates a learn-as-you-go freedom.
The next winter, feeling frustrated with my lack of improvement in the high jump, I switched to a new style that was changing the sport: the Fosbury Flop. I had only seen it on TV in 1968 when Dick Fosbury won the gold medal and set an Olympic record at Mexico City, astounding the world by sailing over the bar on his back. I wasn’t sure exactly how it worked but gave it a try, against my coach’s wishes. I improved almost 8 inches in two months, clearing 7 feet.
The following summer I attended an Olympic training camp at Duke University. I worked with Fosbury’s coach at Oregon State University, Berny Wagner, and trained and became friends with Fosbury’s teammate John Radetich, who would go on to set a world record. I learned why adding a J curve to the approach added torque, and why the greater “bilateral symmetry” of the flop, as Wagner put it, made it a simpler technique to learn than previous styles.
Two years later, I met Fosbury at the NCAA championships in Eugene, Oregon. He lived a few blocks from the Hayward Field stadium and knew of me as an early adopter of the flop. He generously invited me to stay at his house for the next month and a half, when I would be competing in the 1972 Olympic trials in Eugene, aka Track Town USA. We got to be friends.
Fos described to me how the flop had evolved over his high school years. The most common way of high jumping then was known as “the straddle,” which involved approaching the bar from about a 30- to 45-degree angle, jumping from the foot closest to the bar, kicking the other foot high and rolling over the bar face down. But Fos had begun with the older and outmoded “scissors” style, which involved approaching from the other side, taking off with the foot farthest from the bar, and kind of sitting over it with alternating legs swinging scissorlike. I knew that he began bending backwards just to avoid having his backside hit the bar, but I didn’t yet know that he had first tried the flop — half-scissors, half-backbend — during a track meet as a high school sophomore. Though not a particularly good jumper or even athlete — “the worst high jumper in the state,” as he put it — he improved his best mark that day by 6 inches. He said, “I didn’t change my style. It changed inside me.”
Over the next few years, he faced ridicule from fellow jumpers as well as coaches for his unorthodox way of jumping. Yet he persisted, silencing his critics over time with his improvements, especially in the lead-up to the ’68 Olympics, when he improved another half-foot. Biographer Bob Welch called the new method “Dick Fosbury’s One-Man High-Jump Revolution.” The last world record set using the straddle technique was in 1978, almost 50 years ago — and only 10 years after Fosbury won his gold medal. Since then all world records and Olympic medals have been won by floppers.
In the late 1970s Fos visited me in Chicago, where I was a graduate student. A colleague of mine was writing a book on the Olympic movement, and we arranged for Fos to talk to him.
During the interview, Fos mentioned how, when he was 14, he and his younger brother were hit by a drunken driver while bicycling. Dick was uninjured, but his brother was killed. He also described his mixed emotions in Mexico City, receiving his gold medal at a time of great political turmoil in the United States and Mexico. He had just set the Olympic and American records in front of 80,000 spectators who had stayed for this last event, and he described how he had felt and absorbed their energy. Later, as “The Star-Spangled Banner” began, he said, he was flooded with the faces of his family and people from his hometown of Medford, Oregon, who had believed in him and had sent a telegram from the whole town. He smiled, and when the anthem finished, as Welch put it, he “flashed a quick peace sign, then spontaneously raised his right fist in solidarity with his friends Tommie Smith and John Carlos,” Black sprinters and medalists from the U.S. who had raised their gloved fists in protest of American racism four days earlier.
I felt that Fos was revealing to us, though he did not say so, the driving energies that had propelled him to transform high jumping and win gold. His turn to the flop began only a year and a half after his brother’s death, a very troubled time for him and his family. His parents divorced, and he never cried or spoke about his brother’s death then, or for years afterward.
That trauma had lived in him and driven him, and perhaps it partially explained why he felt exhausted and depressed for some time after the Olympics. His greatest strength was mental focus, without which his jumping lagged. But he also wanted more than high-jumping celebrity and took stands for racial justice and against the Vietnam War, devoted himself to completing his degree in civil engineering and became a lifelong supporter of the Special Olympics.
Fos passed away in 2023. He was a warmhearted, modest guy who lived a life of learn-as-you-go freedom.
As a blues harmonica player, I was fortunate enough to be able to perform with many of the musicians who created the Chicago Blues, and who had made their way up from the Mississippi Delta during the Great Migration while fighting poverty and racism. And I got to know and perform with a South Bend musician, Billy “Stix” Nicks, a drummer born in 1934 in Greenwood, Mississippi, not far from where 14-year-old Emmett Till would be murdered in 1955. Billy had founded the band that would later become Junior Walker and the All Stars, drumming on many Motown hits such as “How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You.”
In 1956, South Bend’s WNDU-TV hired Billy Nicks and the Rhythm Rockers — with Junior Walker on saxophone, Fred Patton on keyboards and Willie Woods on guitar and vocals — for a regular Saturday dance show called Club 46. This began connections between Nicks and Notre Dame that lasted over 50 years, including his stints as a radio disc jockey and drum teacher in the music department. After two years in the U.S. Army, Billy returned home from Germany in 1959 to play jazz with pianist Jackie Ivory, recording for Atlantic Records. In 1966, he rejoined Junior Walker with a tour that began at the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem. The two became bandmates for another 10 years.
One of Billy’s many compelling stories recalled a train trip from the Deep South to South Bend when he was in the Army. He boarded an empty coach in uniform. At some point, a white conductor told him he needed to leave that car, as it was for whites only. Billy refused to get up. He realized later the conductor could have stopped the train at the next stop and had him beaten — or worse. This is how things were, and Billy was well aware of it.
He explained why his family had moved to South Bend in 1943. His father had been a sharecropper, that system of economic exploitation that subjected African Americans to the racist whims of white landowners. One day the family’s landowner threatened to beat his father, and his father stood up to him, forcing the man to back off. Billy’s parents understood they needed to leave immediately or risk his father’s being beaten or killed.
Billy also recalled traveling to Mississippi for family reunions as a child. The train departing from Chicago was segregated — not because of Illinois law, but because of the rigid Jim Crow system they entered once they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. But racism was also local, as he said elsewhere: “Back during that time, I don’t care who you were. If you were a congressman, if you were African American, you were not allowed to stay in a hotel in downtown South Bend.”
I once did a gig with Billy at Rosa’s Lounge in Chicago. After we finished a song, our singer asked Billy if he knew “Caldonia,” the song Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five first recorded in 1945. I leaned over between them and joked, “Yeah, he knew her personally.” To which Billy replied, “Yes, I toured with her in 1960; did about 15 gigs with her.”
What the. . . ? I wondered. But it was time to start the song, and I had to play the intro on harmonica. I was familiar with the tune from touring with piano legend Pinetop Perkins but had never imagined that “Caldonia” was an actual person. Now I was realizing that, yes, of course, a lot of tunes with name titles are about real people.
After we went on break, Billy elaborated. Caldonia was a singer and contortionist named Estelle Young who had performed with Jordan. The bandleader had started calling her Caldonia on stage. Young had her own touring band on the chitlin circuit called “Caldonia’s Review.”
She was about 65 when Billy knew her, and she could still sing on one leg with the other wrapped behind her head, he said. “The guy that wrote the song had broken up with her and was still angry about it.” Billboard record reviewer Maurie Orodenker once described “Caldonia” as “rock and roll,” one of the first print uses of the term. My jest had turned into a fantastic music history lesson for me.
Billy once invited my family and me to his Olivet African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Bend, where, at one point, he performed an amazing version of the gospel song “Wade in the Water” as a solo on the trap drum set. As the jazz trumpeter, music professor and Olivet member Charles Ellison said of Billy, “He loved everyone. His life was a model of love.”
That was Billy, always fully present, alive in the encounter, always glad to see you. He died in 2017. I remember his story now as the Trump administration attempts to erase the history of racism in the military and in the country, to cancel American voices from speaking freely. I will not forget these American originals who lived and voiced that freedom and refused to be silenced.
Eugene Halton is an emeritus professor of sociology at Notre Dame and the author of The Great Brain Suck: And Other American Epiphanies.