“Royal Ancestry”

This chapter discusses the popular methods of African American scriptural interpretation that formed the early religious context that Duke Ellington represented through his jazz artistry. In these biblical interpretations, African American Protestants in the twentieth century’s early decades read the Hebrew and Christian scriptures in concert with constructing their own history as descendants of the African continent. Ellington brought into his musical profession a relationship to the Bible as a sacred African document that portrayed African and black people as the great founders of ancient civilizations and as contributors to the foundation of modern civilization. By publishing and promoting books on history and biblical interpretation, writing editorials, answering reader questions in regular black press columns, staging pageants, and even through long- and short-form jazz compositions, middle-class black Protestants, along with black academics who studied ancient North Africa, the Near East, and East Africa, invested their intellectual and artistic energy into racializing sacred Hebrew figures and sacralizing non-Hebrew peoples as venerable contributors to the development of religion. These Afro-Protestant racializations of sacred texts and ancient religions, alongside their sacralizations of African identity, involved their embrace of both monotheisms and polytheisms.