The idea for "It's All True" began in conversations between Welles and Duke Ellington in July 1941, the day after Welles saw Ellington's stage revue "Jump for Joy" in Los Angeles. Welles invited Ellington to his office at RKO and told him, "I want to do the history of jazz as a picture, and we'll call it "It's All True"." Ellington was put under contract to score a segment with the working title, "The Story of Jazz", drawn from Louis Armstrong's 1936 autobiography, "Swing That Music". "I think I wrote 28 bars, a trumpet solo by Buddy Bolden which, of course, was to be a symbol of the jazz," Ellington later recalled. A lot of research was done and Ellington was paid up to $12,500 for his work, but Welles never heard the piece and Ellington lost track of it. "I tried to recapture some of it in "A Drum Is a Woman"," Ellington wrote.