BmoreArt

The following interview was edited for length and clarity.

Jazz and race are so deeply intertwined in American history and in your own personal history. Do you think your love of jazz music opened you to dating someone outside of your own race?

No, I never thought about it. That’s why I was so surprised when my father objected to our marriage because we were used to having all kinds of people in our home. We lived in Japan, in Europe. My father prided himself on being a liberal person. It was not unusual to see Black folks in our house, Asian folks, all kinds of people.

When we were ready to get married, I told Ethel that it’d be no problem and she looked at me skeptically and said, ‘We’ll see.’ 

Turned out to be a big problem with my father. It took him nine years to wrap his head around it. He was a stubborn man, so it was hard for him to admit that he was wrong. 

In your book, you mention that Ethel and her family were not on the front lines leading civil rights protests. They were more behind the scenes.

Downtown department stores were segregated, and Black people couldn’t use the bathrooms. Well, Ethel and her mom were downtown, and she had to go. Her mother took that little girl and marched right through to that bathroom. And that impressed Ethel, but she herself was not like that.

No, but it seems she did things in her own way, using joy and self-expression as an act of resistance.

Just by her very example. She didn’t categorize people, and she took people at their individual value. She was very spiritually oriented that way. ‘We’re all the same. We’re all in this together.” She used music that way too.

In Baltimore, where things can still be so segregated, I feel like one of the ways people can come together is through art. Music, especially.

It’s been that way for a long time, particularly jazz. 

We were so familiar with the New York jazz club model—a small place, filled with tiny tables and chairs. Move them in, move them out. The place we created, Ethel’s Place, was the antithesis of that.

My parents got to see Wynton Marsalis at Ethel’s Place. If it was still open, who do you think would be playing there today?

I always called it jazz-oriented music, right? We mixed up national and international performers with local performers. It wouldn’t be that much different today. 

That place would’ve been successful if we would’ve been able to survive a few more years. People were starting to come up from the Carolinas or even down from New York because they knew that you could really listen to great music in a comfortable environment with food.

Baltimore had never seen anything quite like that. If anything, it had a European model. 

It was always my thought that it would be nice for Ethel to have a performance home where she could invite her peers. She was recognized, if not by the general public, then by her peers as a great singer.

I never had to get on the phone to book anybody. People wanted to come there. George Shearing. Dizzy Gillespie.

Ethel got to perform among so many of her idols, it seems she was really living her dream while remaining true to herself.

I wouldn’t say that Ethel dreamed of fame or success. She admired Ella Fitzgerald. When Ethel was a middle school student at Booker T. Washington, Ella came to visit the school and she got her autograph. That’s the only time she ever did that. Ethel was not starstruck. She didn’t have idols. As far as she was concerned, people were just people and she could admire talent, and she did.

She never spoke negatively of people either. I was a critic in several venues through The Sun and Maryland Public Television, so I was always a little uncomfortable in those rooms, but Ethel was not.

We used to go out to the University of Idaho every year. They had a big jazz festival and there were singers from California who did some scatting. Ethel was very skeptical of scatting. She thought if you’re going to do that, you’ve got to do it well. Well, this singer asked Ethel what she thought of her scatting and Ethel was honest, ‘I don’t think you should do that.’ But that was very unusual for her. 

As a writer, who do you admire like Ethel did Ella Fitzgerald?

I admire a lot of writers. I like clarity. There are certain French writers like Camus that were very clear on what they would and wouldn’t do. On the other hand, I like writers who are able to create sagas and epics that are generational. I have that kind of complex imagination. 

I live in a little rowhouse, not too far from Mondawmin. I have 4000 books in that house and I’ve already given away 1000. So I’ve always been bookish, and I’ve always been eclectic. I like to call myself an omnivore when it comes to food. I’m the same when it comes to books.

Ethel performed at Richard Nixon’s inauguration in 1973. You said that your politics didn’t line up with those of the Republican Party. In 2025, artists don’t really have the privilege to be patriotic without being political. Do you think we’ll ever be able to return to that place—where it’s an honor to honor your country regardless of the party in power?

If I were invited to the White House today, I would not go.

The relationship with Nixon came through [Spiro] Agnew, and we didn’t know Agnew when he was the governor of Maryland.

Suddenly the phone rings, ‘Can you talk to the Vice President?’ and Ethel goes ‘The Vice President of what?’ And the operator said, ‘These United States.’ That’s when she handed me the phone. It turns out he had some of her records. 

He was having a dinner for the state governors and he was interested in knowing whether she would perform. Everyone is always willing to perform. We really had no allegiances one way or the other; we avoided politics. 

At the Republican Convention, Nixon and Agnew were nominated. Agnew said, ‘Would you like to sing the national anthem at the convention?’ We started asking our Democratic friends, ‘Well… what do you think?’

We went down to Miami and she sang the national anthem. Her version of it made a big stir. When Nixon won the election, she was asked again. At that convention, we were in Agnew’s private box. I was sitting right next to Frank Sinatra. As a journalist, I was used to watching. So, here I am, in the glare of all this publicity, people cheering and clapping at the appropriate moments. I wasn’t doing any of that. I was uncomfortable. Sinatra starts getting ticked with me and he’s looking at me and says, ‘What’s wrong with you!’ So, I feebly start clapping. Carrying on.

After she sang at the Inauguration in DC, we went to meet all the Supreme Court justices and all the dignitaries. And then we drove home to Baltimore, and she cleaned out the refrigerator.

She did it in her own way. She was not singing for the Republicans, but in a way, she was singing a lullaby. Kind of lamenting for Vietnam and all the things the country was going through.

The only front-page story I ever wrote was about my experience at the Inauguration. There were a few people who thought that it violated journalistic ethics because The Sun didn’t note that I was Ethel’s husband. I always thought it was so funny, neither Agnew nor Nixon ever realized that I was a newspaper reporter.

Within a few months, they were gone. Both of them. That was our joke, that she sang them out of the White House.

What’s your hope for Ethel’s legacy? For your own legacy?

I think Ethel will be remembered as one of Baltimore’s greatest singers… in the same breath as Billie Holliday. She deserves that. There are a few signs that she will become more famous in death than she was when she was living. 

I have no hopes for my own legacy, except for maybe this book. It’s one of the reasons to write a book, but here’s our story for anybody who is interested in it—the two of us, for better or for worse. There’s nothing made up. It’s all there.

Pick up or order your copy of A Jazz Romance: Ethel Ennis, Baltimore & Me at your favorite local bookstore.