According to author John Hasse, "Perhaps during the run of Show Girl, Ellington received what he later termed 'valuable lessons in orchestration from Will Vodery.
'"[4] Author Barry Ulanov wrote of this relationship: "From Vodery, as he (Ellington) says himself, he drew his chromatic convictions, his uses of the tones ordinarily extraneous to the diatonic scale, with the consequent alteration of the harmonic character of his music, its broadening, The deepening of his resources.
It has become customary to ascribe the classical influences upon Duke – Delius, Debussy and Ravel – to direct contact with their music.
Following his time at Fox, Vodery moved back to New York City, where he continued to arrange music for such shows as Shuffle Along of 1933 and several editions of Leonard Harper's revues at the Cotton Club, a cultural landmark located in Harlem.
He died on November 18, 1951, only four months after Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's 1951 Technicolor film version of Show Boat, on which he did not work, had been released.