Duke Ambassadors

The Duke Ambassadors was a student-run jazz big band, active at Duke University from 1934-1964. Student-run big bands continued in 1969 as the Duke Stage Band and from 1971-1974 as the Duke Jazz Ensemble. From 1974 to the present, professional musician-educators have led the Duke Jazz Ensemble.

Music instruction and performance played a relatively minor role in the early years of Duke University (known as Trinity College until 1924). While there was a Glee Club at Trinity in the late 19th century, music was not a part of the formal curriculum. As Trinity College thrived in the early 20th century, so did student music groups. By 1916 Trinity supported a “Music Council” that included three faculty members along with the student leaders of the three campus musical groups: the Glee Club, the University Band, and the Symphony Orchestra.

In 1926, the recently renamed Duke University hired George “Jelly” Leftwich, Jr. as the University’s first director of Instrumental Music; a post he would hold until 1933. Leftwich brought a compelling vision for musical performance to campus and quickly developed the Duke Symphony Orchestra into one of the best collegiate orchestras in the south. In addition to reviving the orchestra, Leftwich started additional groups including Jelly Leftwich and his Blue Devils and the University Club Orchestra.

Leftwich’s ambition and success encouraged numerous students to form their own musical groups in the 1930s, including Johnny Long and the Duke Collegians (founded in 1931), Nick “the Crooning Half-back” Laney and his Blue Devil Orchestra (founded in 1932), Sonny Burke and The Duke Ambassadors (founded in 1934), and Les Brown and His Blue Devils (founded in 1933). The Ambassadors were the longest-lasting group of the four, continuing at Duke from 1934 until 1964, with only a brief war-related sabbatical from 1943-1946.

The Duke Collegians, under Johnny Long’s direction, was considered by many to be the south’s leading collegian orchestra. Long, a violinist and band leader, achieved professional musical success after graduating from Duke through forming and leading The Johnny Long Orchestra. The group initially recorded for Vocalion Records, performing the hit “Just Like That” in 1937. Later in the 1930s, the band signed with Decca Records, for whom they recorded hits such as “In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town,” which sold over one million copies, “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time,” and “Poor Butterfly.” Long continued to lead the band until the 1960s, when he was forced to retire due to poor health.

Nick Laney and His Blue Devil Orchestra played regularly on Duke’s campus and throughout North Carolina in the early 1930s. One of the band’s most significant accomplishments was its selection from over 150 college bands to play with Guy Lombardo at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City during the winter break of 1932-33. Previously, during a summer tour in the northeast in 1932, the band had met an up-and-coming saxophone player by the name of Les Brown. As Brown later recalled the meeting, “In the summer of 1932, I had the good fortune to meet Nick Laney and The Duke Blue Devils in Boston. . . . Although I was headed for the University of Pennsylvania, Nick encouraged me to join his dance band on tenor sax. I did, and spent four wonderful years at Duke.”

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