The late great Billy Strayhorn was such a cultural giant, there’s not just one Hall of Fame that can contain him. Strayhorn was the legendary orchestra leader Duke Ellington’s key right-hand-man collaborator for nearly three decades, creating a body of work that landed him in halls of fame for the Great American Songbook, Songwriters, Tap Dance and the International Society of Jazz Arrangers and Composers.
Strayhorn will add one more to his tally this month, when he is inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame on Oct. 15 as part of its 2026 class. Given that Srayhorn was born in Ohio, grew up in Pittsburgh and lived most of his adult life in New York City, that might seem odd. Despite never living fulltime in North Carolina, however, Strayhorn spent enough time in the Orange County town of Hillsborough to qualify as a North Carolina expatriate.
“He wasn’t native-born but spent summers here with his grandmother, and he had really significant memories here,” says Tony Lopez, proprietor of Volume Records & Beer in Hillsborough. “He wrote a lot of all-timers, songs like ‘Take The “A” Train’ and ‘Lush Life.’ Maybe those songs were in his head while he was walking around this town.”
Lopez’s establishment at 226 S. Churton St. in Hillsborough pays tribute to Strayhorn with a bright pastel mural on its north-facing exterior wall, painted in 2019 by NC Public Art director Max Dowdle. The mural is right down the street from a state historical marker in honor of Strayhorn, whose musical accomplishments were immense even though he was just 51 years old when he died of esophageal cancer.
If Hillsborough wasn’t Strayhorn’s literal birthplace, you could say it’s where his legacy started taking shape. Strayhorn was the fourth of nine children in a Pittsburgh household without electricity or indoor plumbing, a hard place for a sensitive child. He was subject to violence at home. So he spent much of his childhood starting at age 5 with his paternal grandparents in Hillsborough, which was formative enough for Strayhorn biographer David Hajdu to call the town “his spiritual home.”
“Hillsborough has an outsized importance in Billy Strayhorn’s life because of the impact of his experiences there at an early stage of his development,” says Hajdu, author of 1996’s acclaimed and essential “Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn.” “He was exposed to ideas that opened up his mind and changed his life. His grandmother was the church pianist and a spiritual person who instilled those core values in him. She would sit him at the piano with her while she played spirituals for him.”
It wasn’t just family that influenced young Strayhorn in North Carolina, but also the literal surroundings. His grandparents’ house (which was torn down long ago, alas) stood catty-corner to a slave cemetery where he frequently walked. Hajdu thinks those surroundings stirred thoughts and feelings that later made Strayhorn a major civil-rights activist who played frequent fund-raising events and was close friends with Martin Luther King, Jr.
Equally formative were the long walks Strayhorn took along the Eno River, where he was able to experience nature in ways that just weren’t possible in Pittsburgh. That, too, was an influence that showed up later in much of his work.
“Johnny Mercer’s central theme was the vagaries of male-female relationships, but for Billy Strayhorn it was flowers,” says Hajdu. “He wrote tune after tune about the beauty, wonders and complexities of nature and flowers — ‘A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing,’ ‘Violet Blue,’ ‘Passion Flower.’ He really embraced that as a central theme of his work as an artist.”
Later on when Strayhorn resolved to pursue music as a career, he initially wanted to be a classical composer. A goal like that was almost unheard of for artists of color in the days of Jim Crow, an era whose racial attitudes made that impossible. So Strayhorn made his way into jazz instead.
He crossed paths with Ellington in 1938, playing an audacious audition in which he rearranged one of Ellington’s own songs. Duly impressed, Ellington hired Strayhorn, who was then all of 23 years old. They scaled the heights together, creating one of the 20th century’s most durable bodies of work.
That audition would make an amazing scene in a biopic movie about Strayhorn, and Hajdu’s “Lush Life” has been optioned by a number of filmmakers over the years without ever being made. But a film version of Strayhorn’s life story based on Hajdu’s book might finally be coming together, nearly 60 years after his death. A team including “I Am Not Your Negro” director Raoul Peck and Oscar-winning “BlacKKKlansman” screenwriter Kevin Willmott is working on bringing it to the screen.
“It’s a real blue-chip group, and I feel like it’s in the right hands,” says Hajdu. “I’m not co-writing the script, but Kevin Willmott and I have been having a lot of back and forth. We’ve talked a lot about Strayhorn’s Hillsborough years, too. I don’t know how much of that will make it in, but we’ll see.”
Billy Strayhorn will be inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 15, at the Charles Mack Citizen Center in Mooresville. Arrogance, Barry Poss, MC SHA-ROCK, Sugar Bear and George Clinton will also be honored. For ticket details, see the Hall of Fame website.
