It’s a generally handy flaw of human perception that our eyes have difficulty focusing on two objects in separate planes at the same time.  If one thing is in front of your face – something big, vastly colorful, and full of motion – it takes a bit of effort to see something else in the background, especially if it’s tiny, understated, and impassive.  Few, if any musical collaborations of the 20th century were more uniquely fruitful and influential than the extraordinary partnership of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, yet none was more severely misperceived, if only because the looming figure of Ellington long dominated the public’s view.

From post-boomers who regard “Take the ‘A’ Train” as wedding-reception corn to jazz-conference attendees who trade 35mm slides of Barney Bigard’s house, many people have ideas about Ellington and Strayhorn drawn from well over half a century of mythology.  Pick a myth: (a) Duke Ellington wrote all of his orchestra’s music himself, and Billy Strayhorn was merely an assistant, no more than the apprentice who mixed oils for Michelangelo; (b) Strayhorn was Ellington’s secret ghostwriter and actually composed all the famous man’s greatest hits; (c) without Strayhorn, Ellington would have been nothing more than another big-band leader, the black Glenn Miller; (d) without Ellington, Strayhorn would have been nothing but a struggling show-tune lyricist; (e) their relationship was fundamentally extramusical, because they were really gay lovers.

Not one of those propositions is accurate, and they filled the vacuum of our ignorance about Strayhorn for decades.  Indeed, for most of the ninety-four years since his birth in Dayton, Strayhorn was an enigma to many who loved his music (without necessarily knowing it is Strayhorn’s work they loved).  He was a misunderstood and under-appreciated master of American music, a genius long overshadowed by the outsize presence of Ellington.

Raised with five siblings on one of the four-room alley shacks heaped behind the white people’s houses in Depression-era Pittsburgh, where his family moved when he was a toddler, Strayhorn was singled out by his maternal grandmother and tutored in matters of culture that she learned at a finishing school for young African-American women in North Carolina. His grandmother also bought Strayhorn the piano that was one of two or three pieces of furniture in their living room.  At his high school graduation, Strayhorn capped the ceremony with a performance of the Grieg Piano Concerto with full orchestra.

“Billy really wanted to be a concert performer,” recalled Strayhorn’s best friend in his youth, Harry Herforth (who grew up to be a classical trumpeter).  “But he told me that he realized his color would not permit that, and he had to find something else to do in music.”

Strayhorn found a way of his own, as he would continue to do in his life and his work.  He turned to songwriting and created the music, the lyrics, the orchestrations, and the book for an original musical Fantastic Rhythm.  First produced in Pittsburgh in 1933, when Strayhorn was eighteen, the show would run successfully for almost ten years, until World War II, and included “My Little Brown Book,” which Strayhorn later resurrected for the Ellington Orchestra.  Full of idiosyncratic tunes and continental wordplay, Fantastic Rhythm included one number with a chorus that could have served as Billy Strayhorn’s sutra: “Nature has a certain way of making golden silence seem to say much more than a persuasive voice.  Didn’t you know?”

Strayhorn went as far in Pittsburgh as Pittsburgh could take him.  He composed sophisticated instrumental pieces merging jazz and the classical tradition; played bar piano all around town; led his own jazz trio; arranged for half a dozen local bands (black, white, and mixed); and composed some songs that eventually become jazz standards, including “Something to Live For,” “Your Love Has Faded,” and his signature piece, “Lush Life.”  Highly regarded by those who knew him, Strayhorn lost ground through two provincial forces: His trio and one big band he had worked with extensively (both mixed-race groups) were forced to disband after incidents of prejudice against Strayhorn, because he was African-American, and he was fired from the best black band in town, because he was gay.

Aiming to make his first big-time contact in the music business, Strayhorn introduced himself to Duke Ellington after an Ellington performance at Pittsburgh’s Stanley Theatrer in 1938.  The local prodigy has a clear affinity for Ellington, who had beoome an international sensation by pioneering a refined union of popular and serious music akin to the one Strayhorn was pursuing on his own.  Strayhorn played a few pieces for Ellington on the piano in his dressing room, and Ellington, duly impressed, told Stayhorn to come see him in Manhattan.  Ellington scribbled out directions to get to his Harlem apartment by subway, and Strayhorn took the notes home and set them to music that would become Ellington’s theme song and the lietmotif of the swing era: “Take the ‘A’ Train.”

Ellington invited Strayhorn to move into his penthouse apartment in Harlem’s tony Sugar Hill district, where Strayhorn lived like family with Ellington’s girlfriend Mildred Dixon, Ellington’s only sibling, Ruth, and his sole offspring, his son Mercer.  The new partners made a dramatic contrast: Ellington, tall and commanding, a palpably brilliant scholar of the streets whose vaguely ironic regal air and grandeloquence had the exhilerating charm of an irresistibly impossible con; Strayhorn, tiny, demure, a listener, warm, a culture buff who relished New York (as well as Paris, eventually) and devloped a taste -- and an oversized appetite -- for high style in food, fashion, and nightlife.

The benefits of their partnership proved exquisitely mutual.  Ellington gained a second set of gifts to help expand his musical palette and take him beyond the big-band idiom into the worlds of the concert stage and the theater; Strayhorn, in turn, now had a world-class vehicle for his music and the freedom to compose without bearing public scrutiny and the risk of rejection for his homosexuality.  That Strayhorn would work largely behind the scenes, often contributing anonymously to the ever-broadening Ellington canon, worked to both their advantages.

That Ellington may not have needed the young man’s assistance would quickly become moot; they grew reliant upon each other.  “His approval was like going out with your armor on instead of going out naked,” Ellington said.  “We had a relationship that nobody else in the world would understand.”  Though Strayhorn would ultimately be tempted by other offers, including an opportunity to join Frank Sinatra’s organization, he never ventured far from Ellington’s reach.  The composers worked together from 1939 to 1967 -- often closely, ocassionally one picking up where the other left off, perhaps one suggesting a single chord change, at times one simply smiling or chuckling in approval.  Wherever in the world his orchestra was booked to perform, Ellington called Strayhorn, and they worked by phone virtually every day.  Their collaborative output includes dozens of jazz masterworks, from songs such as “Day Dream” and “The Star-Crossed Lovers” and long-form jazz-orchestra pieces such as “The Deep South Suite” and “Suite Thursday” to the Broadway musical Beggar’s Holiday, the ballet Road of the Phoebe Snow and the scores to the films Anatomy of a Murder and Paris Blues.

Part of Strayhorn’s aversion to the public eye was certainly connected to his homosexuality.  So comfortable with his sexual orientation that he made no effort to deny it or to play-act straight in the company of “beards,” as many gay men in the performing arts felt pressured to do in the 1940s and ‘50s.  At the same time, Strayhorn recognized that with his fearless choice of openness came grave liabilities.  He made a great compromise.  In order to be true to himself as a gay man, he sacrificed wide-scale public attention, giving up not merely the physical accoutrements of fame but the satisfaction of being recognized by the people who listened to his music.  “By avoiding a great deal of attention at a time when public expectations were quite different from those of [a later day], Billy was able to be entirely himself at all times,” said the cabaret singer and pianist Bobby Short.  “For that, I envy him.”

Strayhorn died of esophogal cancer at the age of fifty-one on May 31, 1967.  “Duke refused to talk about him,” remembered their mutual friend Marion Logan, whose husband, a physician, treated both Ellington and Strayhorn.  “After the funeral, he seemed to act as if Strays never existed.  He didn’t like to look back.”  A year later, Logan led a small group to the Manhattan’s 79th Street boat basin, from which their friend’s ashes had been poured into the Hudson River.

“We said a few prayers, and a boatkeeper came up and asked what we were doing there,” said Logan.  He said, ‘I was just curious, because another fellow had been here a little while ago.’  We looked down the walkway, and there was Duke, all alone in the distance, walking along the river.”  What could have honored Billy Strayhorn more fittingly than with the eloquence of anonymity?

David Hajdu is the author of Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn and a professor at Columbia University.  This essay is adapted from Hajdu’s writing on Strayhorn for The Village Voice and Vanity Fair.