Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Jane Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia, to William Fitzgerald and Temperance (Tempie) Williams, an unmarried couple who separated shortly after her birth ^[1]. Her mother moved with her to Yonkers, New York, where they lived with Tempie's partner, Joseph Da Silva, a Portuguese immigrant. The household was poor but stable for a time, and young Ella sang in the choir of the Bethany African Methodist Episcopal Church and absorbed the popular records of the day, especially those of Connee Boswell, whose phrasing she later credited as her earliest model ^[2].

Her adolescence turned harsh. Tempie died in 1932, when Ella was fifteen, and the girl passed between relatives while her school attendance collapsed. She worked as a lookout for a gambling operation and ran errands in Harlem before authorities placed her in the New York State Training School for Girls in Hudson, a reformatory where Black girls were routinely beaten and segregated from the school's choir ^[1]. She escaped, and by 1934 she was living on the streets of Harlem, singing and dancing for tips.

These years left almost no paper trail, and Fitzgerald rarely discussed them in later life. Biographers reconstructed the period only decades afterward, and the contrast between that hidden hardship and her sunny public image became a recurring theme in writing about her ^[3].

The turning point came on November 21, 1934, at the Apollo Theater's Amateur Night. Fitzgerald had planned to dance, but intimidated by a polished dance act ahead of her, she chose to sing instead, performing in the style of Connee Boswell. She won the contest ^[2]. Within months she came to the attention of drummer and bandleader Chick Webb, whose orchestra held court at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. Webb was initially reluctant to hire an unpolished teenager, but audiences responded to her immediately, and she became the band's featured vocalist in 1935 ^[1].

With Webb she recorded steadily for Decca, and in 1938 she co-wrote and recorded "A-Tisket, A-Tasket", a swing novelty built on a nursery rhyme. The record became one of the biggest hits of the era and made the twenty-one-year-old a national name ^[4]. When Webb died in June 1939, the orchestra was renamed Ella Fitzgerald and Her Famous Orchestra, making her one of the few women of the period to front a major big band. She led it until 1942, when wartime pressures and the decline of the big band economy pushed her toward a solo career ^[1].

The mid 1940s reshaped her art. Touring with Dizzy Gillespie's band, she absorbed bebop's harmonic language and developed the horn-like improvised singing that became her signature. Her 1945 recording of "Flying Home" and her 1947 "Oh, Lady Be Good!" displayed a scat technique of such invention and precision that critics began treating her voice as an instrument in its own right ^[4].

Any account of Ella Fitzgerald achievements centers on the songbook project. In 1955 impresario Norman Granz, who had presented her in his Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts since the late 1940s, signed her to his new label, Verve Records. Beginning in 1956 with the Cole Porter volume, she recorded a series of eight songbook albums devoted to the catalogs of Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer ^[5]. The series, completed in 1964, ran to dozens of discs and treated American popular song with a seriousness previously reserved for classical repertoire. Ira Gershwin remarked that he never knew how good the songs were until he heard Fitzgerald sing them, a compliment quoted in nearly every account of the project ^[3].

Her live recordings matched the studio work. Ella in Berlin: Mack the Knife, taped in 1960, captured her improvising new lyrics on the spot after forgetting the words, and the performance won a Grammy ^[5]. At the first Grammy Awards in 1959 she took home two trophies, becoming the first African American woman to win the award, and her lifetime total eventually reached 13 ^[6].

Honors accumulated across her later decades: the Kennedy Center Honors in 1979, the National Medal of Arts in 1987, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992 ^[6]. Estimates of her record sales exceed 40 million albums. Among basic Ella Fitzgerald facts, her range of nearly three octaves, her famously accurate intonation, and her ability to sing convincingly in swing, bebop, ballad, and pop settings explain why musicians as different as Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby spoke of her as the finest singer of their time ^[4].

Fitzgerald married twice. A brief first marriage in 1941 to Benny Kornegay, a dockworker with a criminal record, was annulled. In 1947 she married bassist Ray Brown, whom she had met while both toured with Dizzy Gillespie. The couple adopted a son, Ray Brown Jr., born to Fitzgerald's half-sister Frances, and raised him in Queens, New York. The marriage ended in divorce in 1953, strained by two demanding performing careers, though the pair continued to work together on stage afterward ^[1].

Offstage she was shy, private, and by most accounts lonely, a sharp contrast to the ease she projected in performance. She devoted herself to work, often touring more than 40 weeks a year, and to quiet philanthropy, particularly causes involving child welfare. In 1993 she established the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation to support education, music instruction, and care for disadvantaged children ^[7].

She also carried the burdens of race in mid-century America. Granz insisted on equal treatment for her on tour and dismantled segregated seating at her concerts, and in 1955 she was among the musicians arrested in a Houston dressing room during a Jazz at the Philharmonic stop, an incident her circle regarded as police harassment ^[3]. Marilyn Monroe famously lobbied the Mocambo nightclub in Hollywood to book Fitzgerald in 1955, promising to sit at the front table every night, an intervention Fitzgerald said she never forgot ^[7].

Fitzgerald kept a punishing schedule into the 1980s, recording for Granz's Pablo label with small groups, guitarist Joe Pass, and the Count Basie Orchestra. The Pablo years produced admired late albums, including live sets from the Montreux festival, even as critics noted the gradual darkening and fraying of her voice ^[5].

Her health declined seriously in her final decade. She lived with diabetes, underwent heart surgery in 1986, and suffered worsening eyesight. Complications of the disease led to the amputation of both legs below the knee in 1993, ending her performing career; her last concert had come in 1991 at Carnegie Hall, a venue she played 26 times ^[6].

She spent her final years at her home in Beverly Hills, California, where she died on June 15, 1996, at the age of 79 ^[1]. Tributes came from presidents, musicians, and the general public, and obituaries around the world led with the title she had carried for decades: the First Lady of Song ^[6].

Few singers have shaped their art form as durably. Fitzgerald's songbook albums effectively fixed the canon now called the Great American Songbook, and her scat improvisations set a technical standard that vocal jazz students still study note for note. Singers from Sarah Vaughan's generation to contemporary artists cite her diction, time feel, and joy as the model of jazz singing ^[4].

Her archive and memory are actively maintained. The Smithsonian Institution holds substantial Fitzgerald collections, including her papers and famous stage gowns, and the Library of Congress has added her recordings to the National Recording Registry ^[8]. The Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation continues to fund music education and children's causes, and her centennial in 2017 brought new box sets, concerts, and scholarship, including reassessments of her overlooked early hardships ^[7].

A full Ella Fitzgerald biography ultimately tells a story about craft: a homeless teenager who won an amateur contest, then spent sixty years refining an instrument of unusual purity. That arc, from the Savoy Ballroom to the world's concert halls, keeps her recordings in constant circulation and her name synonymous with American song ^[3].