Ellison’s first collection of essays, Shadow and Act, contains several of the most important pieces in the canon of jazz writing, and first and foremost among them are those based on his childhood and adolescence in Oklahoma City. It was there that Ellison was encouraged by many of the men who were to become iconic national figures and have a profound influence on the music: Lester Young, Charlie Christian, Hot Lips Page, and Jimmy Rushing. This chapter will explore not only the way that Ellison captured the particularities of their Southwestern swing, but also how it may have influenced his writing style.

While Ralph Ellison left Oklahoma City after high school and visited only a handful of times after moving away, he always considered himself an Oklahoman. This chapter includes Ellison’s formative experiences of Oklahoma City as a working-class boy in a segregated town and includes touchstone experiences that influenced his work—such as his exposure to jazz and his awareness of local smokers like the one in “Battle Royal”—as well larger historical contexts that brought his parents’ generation to the Territory. Source materials for this chapter include existing biographies, Ellison’s own writings about OKC, archival documents, and local oral histories.