David Hajdu

David Hajdu approaches music history through the people and working relationships behind familiar songs. Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn restores the composer, pianist, lyricist, and arranger to the foreground of a career long associated with Duke Ellington. First published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1996, the biography follows Strayhorn from Pittsburgh into nearly three decades of collaboration with Ellington. Hajdu documents the authorship and arranging labor behind pieces such as “Take the 'A' Train,” “Chelsea Bridge,” and “Lush Life,” while also examining the unusual creative and business terms that kept Strayhorn publicly overshadowed. The book became a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. Hajdu later wrote major studies of folk music and comics, alongside criticism and journalism. His portrait of Strayhorn established the method visible across that work: extensive interviews, attention to cultural institutions, and a refusal to separate an artist's reputation from the collaborations that helped create it.