Welcome to significant others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien and today we're hearing about a

musician whose most famous composition has been linked in popular consciousness to someone else.

This time on significant others, meet Billy Strayhorn. It is impossible to overstate the greatness of Edward Kennedy, Duke Ellington.

Inlessly innovative, he has been called America's greatest composer,

compared more than once to Shakespeare,

and thought by some to have created the first entirely American

style of music.

European critics dubbed him the American Bach.

Winton Marsalis said,

he invented a new system of harmony,

only musical forms,

and that he wrote music in all 12 known keys

and some keys that are still unknown.

He authored more than a thousand songs and countless orchestrations.

Toured six continents, provided careers for dozens of brilliant musicians, broke the color barrier

on multiple counts, and became a household name.

For five decades he sustained what, to him was two careers, bandleader and

composer and for nearly 30 of those years he had a secret weapon whose life and work is almost impossible to tease apart

from Ellington's own. That secret weapon was a diminutive, a spectacled man from

Pittsburgh who spoke Ellington's musical language fluently.

This story can be a bit of a hot button topic in some circles.

Anyone who worships at the shrine of a particular artistic genius

...