Edith “Cue” Hodges

Early Life & the Cotton Club

From Paducah to Harlem’s most famous stage

She was born Edith Louise Fitzgerald on 4 September 1913 in Paducah, Kentucky, the daughter of Ellis Fitzgerald and Genevell Wallace Fitzgerald. The name by which the jazz world would know her, “Cue,” did not come from Johnny at all — it was the surname of an earlier marriage. By 1938 she was recorded as Edith Louise Cue, and “Cue” stayed with her for the rest of her life.

By the late 1930s she was a chorus dancer at the Cotton Club in Harlem — the celebrated nightspot where Duke Ellington’s orchestra, with Hodges in the saxophone section, had made its name. It was in that world of late nights and high glamour that she and Johnny met; he began appearing publicly with her around 1937, as his first marriage, to Savoy Ballroom hostess Bertha Pettiford, was coming to an end.

Marriage to Johnny Hodges

A partnership of nearly thirty years

Johnny and Cue married in a civil ceremony in Chicago on 10 January 1944 — he was thirty-six, she was thirty, and she became his second wife. (They chose Illinois for its twenty-four-hour waiting period.) Nearly a quarter of a century later, on 26 July 1968, they married again in a religious ceremony at St Paul’s Church in New York so that the union would be recognised by the Catholic Church.

By every account it was a happy and durable marriage. Cue travelled with her husband as much as she could — a habit documented as early as Barry Ulanov’s 1946 biography of Ellington, which places her on band train journeys, playing cards with Johnny and the other musicians. They remained together until his death in May 1970. Cue outlived him by more than two decades, dying in late 1993.

The Woman Who Managed Rabbit

Her hand in his biggest career decisions

Cue was far more than a bandleader’s wife; she had a direct hand in the most consequential decision of his career. In 1951 Hodges left Ellington to strike out as a leader in his own right, a move she encouraged — and when the venture proved less lucrative than hoped, it was Cue who steered him back to the Ellington fold. Hodges was too proud to ask for his old chair himself, so, as Ellington remembered it, “His wife called up and asked if I wanted an alto player.” Ellington said yes at once.

She was also a famously sharp-tongued protector of his standing. It was Cue, by Ellington’s own account, who saddled the immaculate bandleader with the teasing nickname “Dumpy.” And she kept a firm hand on the household purse: after a shopping spree on a South American tour, a dazed Johnny was found wandering a hotel lobby waving a fistful of Brazilian banknotes, joking that he’d dreamt he had money.

Her Songbook

The tunes she wrote for Johnny Hodges

Cue had a natural gift for melody. Though not a performing instrumentalist, she wrote a string of blues-based tunes tailor-made for Johnny’s singing tone, and he recorded them on his own dates through the 1950s and 60s. On the 1965 album Everybody Knows Johnny Hodges she is credited as co-composer with her husband on “Little Brother” and “Sassy Cue,” and one of her tunes, “Duke’s Jam,” was even taken up by the Ellington orchestra. Her writing is an overlooked thread running right through the Hodges discography — eleven of the albums there carry one of her compositions.

Here are her compositions as recorded by Hodges, each shown with the album it first appeared on. You can also hear and play her music: a free transcription of “Blues O’ Mighty” is available to download.

The Hodges Family

Two children, both performers

Johnny and Cue had two children. Their daughter, Lornar “Lorna” Hodges (born 3 June 1942), followed her mother into dance: she performed at the 1964 New York World’s Fair and led her own Mafata Dance Company, and after her father’s death she held the copyrights to 112 of his compositions. She died in 2018. Their son, John C. Hodges II (born 18 May 1947), nicknamed “Brother,” became a drummer; still a teenager, he deputised for Sam Woodyard on the Ellington band’s live dates in 1964–65 and can be heard on Everybody Knows Johnny Hodges and the organ-combo album Blue Pyramid. He died in 1984.

Because Cue so often travelled with Johnny, the children spent long stretches in New York in the care of his mother. Everybody Knows Johnny Hodges was, fittingly, a family record — father on alto, son on drums, and Cue’s tunes in the book.

Cue’s story is one of the illustrated jazz tales told in It Was A Sound — the book pairs original alto-saxophone pieces in the Hodges style with the human stories behind the music, hers among them.

Biographical detail on this page draws on Con Chapman’s Rabbit’s Blues: The Life and Music of Johnny Hodges (Oxford University Press, 2019), the principal biography of Hodges and the fullest published source on Cue.