Ella Fitzgerald

• 1. Introduction

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  Ella Jane Fitzgerald walked onto the stage of the Apollo Theater on the 21st of November 1934, planning to dance. She was 17 years old, and she had recently survived a state reformatory, homelessness, and years of grief. She had no professional experience, no agent, and no plan. Then she saw the Edwards Sisters, a local dance duo already waiting in the wings, and she changed her mind on the spot. She would sing instead.

  What followed was one of the most unlikely beginnings in American music history. The girl who stepped forward that night would spend nearly 60 years remaking what a singer could do with a voice. She would win 13 Grammy Awards, earn the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and record a sequence of albums that critics would later describe as among the first serious treatments of individual songwriters on pop records. She would also face violence, poverty, racial discrimination, and decades of declining health.

  How did a teenager from Yonkers who had never formally trained her voice become the woman called the First Lady of Song? And what did the path cost her?

• 2. Rough Beginnings

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  Ella Jane Fitzgerald was born on the 25th of April 1917, in Newport News, Virginia. Her father, William Ashland Fitzgerald, drove a transfer wagon. Her parents were unmarried but shared a home in the East End section of Newport News for at least two and a half years after she was born.

  In the early 1920s, her mother moved to Yonkers, New York, with a new partner, a Portuguese immigrant named Joseph da Silva. By 1925 the family had settled on School Street, a poor Italian neighborhood. Fitzgerald started school at six and was an outstanding student, eventually enrolling at Benjamin Franklin Junior High School in 1929.

  Her first musical influences came from two places: the Bethany African Methodist Episcopal Church, where the family worshipped and where Fitzgerald joined Bible study and Sunday school, and the record player at home. She became devoted to jazz recordings by Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and the Boswell Sisters. She later recalled of Boswell Sisters lead singer Connee Boswell: "My mother brought home one of her records, and I fell in love with it...I tried so hard to sound just like her."

  In 1932, when Fitzgerald was 15, her mother died from injuries sustained in a car accident. Her stepfather took care of her until April 1933, when she moved to Harlem to live with her aunt. Fitzgerald biographer Stuart Nicholson has documented rumors of ill treatment by her stepfather and speculated that da Silva may have abused her. Fitzgerald began skipping school, worked as a lookout at a bordello, and ran errands for a Mafia-affiliated numbers operation. She never spoke publicly about this period.

  The authorities eventually caught up with her. She was placed first in the Colored Orphan Asylum in Riverdale in the Bronx, and when that institution proved too crowded, she was transferred to the New York Training School for Girls in Hudson, New York, a state reformatory. From there she appears to have survived, in part, by singing on the streets of Harlem.

• 3. The Webb Years

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  In January 1935, Fitzgerald won a week's engagement performing with the Tiny Bradshaw band at the Harlem Opera House. Later that year, musician Bardu Ali introduced her to drummer and bandleader Chick Webb. Webb was reluctant. He reportedly described her as gawky and unkempt, a diamond in the rough, but Ali convinced him to let her audition at a dance at Yale University. Audiences and fellow musicians approved, and she joined the orchestra.

  Performing at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom, Fitzgerald recorded several hits with Webb, among them "Love and Kisses" and "(If You Can't Sing It) You'll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini)". The record that changed everything came in 1938. Her version of the nursery rhyme "A-Tisket, A-Tasket", which she co-wrote, became a major hit on radio and one of the biggest-selling records of the decade.

  Webb died of spinal tuberculosis on the 16th of June 1939. The band was renamed Ella Fitzgerald and Her Famous Orchestra, and Fitzgerald, now the nominal leader, continued touring and recording for Decca. The group also appeared at the Roseland Ballroom, where NBC radio broadcasts gave them national exposure.

  Between 1935 and 1942, Fitzgerald recorded nearly 150 songs with Webb's orchestra. She also maintained a side project, Ella Fitzgerald and Her Savoy Eight, and performed with the Benny Goodman Orchestra. In July 1942, with mounting financial disputes inside the band, the group played its final concert at the Earl Theatre in Philadelphia. Fitzgerald stepped out on her own.

• 4. Bebop and the Voice as Horn

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  Working for Decca Records through the 1940s, Fitzgerald found collaborators in Bill Kenny and the Ink Spots, Louis Jordan, and the Delta Rhythm Boys. Four of her seven recordings with the Ink Spots featuring Bill Kenny reached the top of the pop charts, including "I'm Making Believe" and "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall", both of which hit number one.

  The collapse of the swing era forced jazz to reinvent itself, and Fitzgerald moved with it. Her work with Dizzy Gillespie's big band drew her into bebop and pushed her toward scat singing. She later described the approach simply: "I just tried to do with my voice what I heard the horns in the band doing."

  Her 1945 scat recording of "Flying Home", arranged by Vic Schoen, drew a notable assessment from The New York Times: "one of the most influential vocal jazz records of the decade....Where other singers, most notably Louis Armstrong, had tried similar improvisation, no one before Miss Fitzgerald employed the technique with such dazzling inventiveness." Her bebop recording of "Oh, Lady Be Good!" in 1947 extended that reputation further.

  Producer Norman Granz became her manager in the mid-1940s after she began appearing on his Jazz at the Philharmonic concert series. Granz would shape the next stage of her career, and the terms of that partnership would carry consequences far beyond the recording studio.

• 5. Verve and the Song Books

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  In July 1954, Fitzgerald traveled to Australia for a tour organized by promoter Lee Gordon, the first of Gordon's "Big Show" package promotions, which also featured Buddy Rich, Artie Shaw, and comedian Jerry Colonna. The tour set a new box office record in Australia, but it opened with a serious incident.

  Fitzgerald, her pianist John Lewis, her assistant and cousin Georgiana Henry, and manager Norman Granz all held first-class tickets on a Pan-American Airlines flight from Honolulu to Australia. After they had already boarded, they were ordered off the aircraft and refused permission to retrieve their luggage and clothing. They spent three days stranded in Honolulu before securing another flight. Fitzgerald, Henry, Lewis, and Granz filed a civil suit for racial discrimination against Pan-Am in December 1954. They won on appeal in January 1956. In a 1970 television interview, Fitzgerald described receiving what she called a "nice settlement".

  By 1955, Granz had left Decca and founded Verve Records specifically to record her. On the 15th of March 1955, after Marilyn Monroe lobbied the owner for the booking, Fitzgerald opened an engagement at the Mocambo nightclub in Hollywood. The booking was widely credited as a turning point, though historical records show that African-American performers Herb Jeffries, Eartha Kitt, and Joyce Bryant had all played the Mocambo in 1952 and 1953, as reported in Jet magazine and Billboard at the time.

  The first of eight Song Book sets, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book, was released in 1956. Fitzgerald recorded the sets at irregular intervals through 1964. She described the shift in direction as crucial to her survival as a performer, recalling later that she had reached a point where she was only singing bebop and was running out of places to perform. She credited Granz with persuading her to expand: "Norman...felt that I should do other things, so he produced Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book with me. It was a turning point in my life."

  The Duke Ellington Song Book stands apart from the others because Ellington himself performed on it. He and his longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn appeared on exactly half of the set's 38 tracks and wrote two new pieces for the album: "The E and D Blues" and a four-movement musical portrait of Fitzgerald. The New York Times, writing in 1996, described the Song Book albums as "among the first pop records to devote such serious attention to individual songwriters."

  Frank Rich, writing in The New York Times in the days after Fitzgerald's death, described what she accomplished in the Song Books as a cultural transaction comparable to Elvis Presley's integration of white and African-American musical traditions. He characterized it as a black woman popularizing songs often written by immigrant Jews to a national audience of predominantly white Christians. Frank Sinatra, out of respect for Fitzgerald, prohibited Capitol Records from re-releasing his own recordings in separate albums devoted to individual composers in the same way.

  While recording the Song Books, Fitzgerald toured 40 to 45 weeks per year, domestically and internationally. In 1961, she bought a house in the Klampenborg district of Copenhagen after beginning a relationship with a Danish man. The relationship ended after a year. She sold the house in 1963 and returned permanently to the United States.

  Verve Records was sold to MGM in 1960 for three million dollars. MGM failed to renew Fitzgerald's contract in 1967, and for the next five years she moved between Atlantic, Capitol, and Reprise. The surprise success of the 1972 album Jazz at Santa Monica Civic '72 prompted Granz to found Pablo Records, his first label since selling Verve. Fitzgerald recorded some 20 albums for Pablo, including Ella in London in 1974 with pianist Tommy Flanagan, guitarist Joe Pass, bassist Keter Betts, and drummer Bobby Durham.

• 6. Civil Rights and Private Life

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  Fitzgerald lived from 1949 to 1956 in the St. Albans neighborhood of Queens, New York, a prosperous African-American enclave where her neighbors included Illinois Jacquet, Count Basie, and Lena Horne.

  Norman Granz recruited her for the Jazz at the Philharmonic tour in 1949 with a specific intent: targeting segregated venues and requiring promoters to guarantee that no "colored" or "white" seating arrangements would be enforced. Granz also insisted on equal pay and equal accommodations for Fitzgerald regardless of her race or sex. If conditions were not met, concerts were cancelled. Bill Reed, author of Hot from Harlem: Twelve African American Entertainers, described Fitzgerald as a "Civil Rights Crusader".

  Fitzgerald was, by her own account and those of her colleagues, profoundly shy. Trumpet player Mario Bauzá, who performed behind her in the Chick Webb years, remembered that "she didn't hang out much. When she got into the band, she was dedicated to her music...She was a lonely girl around New York, just kept herself to herself, for the gig." When the Society of Singers named an award after her, Fitzgerald said she didn't want to say the wrong thing, "which I always do but I think I do better when I sing."

  She married at least twice. Her first marriage, in 1941, was to Benny Kornegay, a convicted drug dealer and local dockworker; it was annulled the following year. In December 1947, she married Ray Brown, the bass player she had met on Dizzy Gillespie's tour. They adopted a child born to Fitzgerald's half-sister Frances, christened Ray Brown Jr. The couple divorced in 1953 under the pressure of both their touring careers, though they continued to perform together. Reuters reported in July 1957 that Fitzgerald had secretly married a young Norwegian named Thor Einar Larsen in Oslo; the relationship ended swiftly when Larsen was sentenced to five months' hard labor in Sweden for theft.

  In 1993, Fitzgerald established the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation, directing grants toward academic opportunities for children, music education, basic care for the less fortunate, and medical research focused on diabetes, heart disease, and vision impairment. She also supported the American Heart Association, the City of Hope, and the Retina Foundation.

• 7. Legacy

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  Fitzgerald received an honorary doctorate of music from Yale University in 1986 and a second from Harvard four years later. She won 13 Grammy Awards and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1967. In 1959, she became the first African-American woman to win at the inaugural Grammy ceremony. She also received the Kennedy Center Medal of Honor, the National Medal of Arts, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the first Society of Singers Lifetime Achievement Award, which was named "Ella" in her honor.

  Her health deteriorated steadily through the late 1980s and 1990s. She was hospitalized in 1985 for respiratory problems, in 1986 for congestive heart failure, and in 1990 for exhaustion. In 1993, both of her legs were amputated below the knee due to diabetes. That same year, after nearly 60 years performing, she gave her last public performance. She died at her home from a stroke on the 15th of June 1996, at age 79. A few hours after her death, the Playboy Jazz Festival opened at the Hollywood Bowl. The marquee read: "Ella We Will Miss You."

  The tributes that followed came from across music. Ann Hampton Callaway, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and Patti Austin all recorded albums in her honor. Bridgewater's album Dear Ella, released in 1997, featured musicians closely associated with Fitzgerald's career, including pianist Lou Levy, trumpeter Benny Powell, and her second husband Ray Brown. In 2007, the tribute album We All Love Ella, recorded for what would have been her 90th birthday, gathered artists including Michael Bublé, Natalie Cole, Chaka Khan, Diana Krall, and Queen Latifah.

  Her primary archival collections are shared between the Smithsonian Institution and the US Library of Congress. Her cookbook collection went to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, and her published sheet music to UCLA. In Yonkers, the city where she grew up, a bronze sculpture by Vinnie Bagwell marks one of 17 stops on the African American Heritage Trail of Westchester County. In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked her at number 45 on their list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time. In Newport News, the city where she was born, the Downing-Gross Cultural Arts Center named its 276-seat theater the Ella Fitzgerald Theater in 2008, located several blocks from her birthplace on Marshall Avenue.