BONUS: The Rarest Article About Monk, Upgraded--for Paid Subscribers

In my post about Monk and Bud Powell— https://lewisporter.substack.com/p/monk-did-not-take-the-rap-for-bud — I explained what really happened in 1951, according to the best research. I also mentioned that the story about Monk “taking the rap” for Bud appears to derive from an article written years later, in 1960, by Monk’s wife Nellie, as told to her friend Maely Dufty. I think it’s fair to say that Nellie’s point of view is also Monk’s, because he must have been her source.

This article, from a long-gone newspaper called The New York Citizen Call, is very hard to find, maybe the hardest Monk article to find. (The paper’s first issue was on May 21, 1960, and I think it ended sometime in 1961.) It is discussed by my colleague Robin Kelley in his definitive Monk biography (https://www.amazon.com/Thelonious-Monk-Times-American-Original/dp/1439190461). I am sharing it with paying subscribers, as yet another way of my saying “Thank You”!

As always, please remember that I’m sharing this as a fascinating historical artifact, not because it’s “the truth.” It was written to defend Monk after something had been recently published in another paper, which Dufty calls “the local liberal daily”—that’s The New York Post, which believe it or not was known for liberalism before Rupert Murdoch bought it in 1976.

And the article does not actually say that Monk took the rap instead of Bud—only that Monk himself was totally innocent, according to Nellie and Maely. Somehow that morphed into the general rumor that Monk had “taken the rap” for Bud.