Ella Jane Fitzgerald was an American jazz vocalist with a vocal range spanning three
octaves. Often referred to as the "First Lady of Song" and the "Queen of Jazz," she was
noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing and intonation, and a "horn-like"
improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.
Fitzgerald was a notable interpreter of the Great American Songbook. Over the course of
her 60-year recording career, she sold 40 million copies of her 70-plus albums, won
14 Grammy Awards and was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Ronald Reagan and the Presidential
Medal of Freedom by George H. W. Bush.
Early life Fitzgerald was born in Newport News, Virginia,
the daughter of William Fitzgerald and Temperance "Tempie" Fitzgerald. Her parents were unmarried,
and they had separated within a year of her birth. With her mother's new partner, a Portuguese
immigrant named Joseph Da Silva, Ella and her mother moved to the city of Yonkers, in
Westchester County, New York, as part of the first Great Migration of African Americans.
Initially living in a single room, her mother and Da Silva soon found jobs and Ella's half-sister,
Frances Da Silva, was born in 1923. By 1925, Fitzgerald and her family had moved to nearby
School Street, then a predominantly poor Italian area. At the age of six, Fitzgerald began
her formal education, and moved through a variety of schools before attending Benjamin
Franklin Junior High School from 1929. Fitzgerald had been passionate about dancing
from third grade, being a fan of Earl "Snakehips" Tucker in particular, and would perform for
her peers on the way to school and at lunchtime. Fitzgerald and her family were Methodists
and were active in the Bethany African Methodist Episcopal Church, and she regularly attended
worship services, Bible study, and Sunday school. The church would have provided Fitzgerald
with her earliest experiences in formal music making, and she may have also had piano lessons
during this period if her mother could afford it.
In her youth, Fitzgerald wanted to be a dancer, although she loved listening to jazz recordings
by Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and The Boswell Sisters. She idolized the lead singer Connee
Boswell, later saying, "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, her mother died from a heart attack. Following this trauma, Fitzgerald's grades
dropped dramatically, and she frequently skipped school. Abused by her stepfather, she ran
away to her aunt and, at one point, worked as a lookout at a bordello and also with a
Mafia-affiliated numbers runner. When the authorities caught up with her, she was first
placed in the Colored Orphan Asylum in Riverdale, Bronx. However, when the orphanage proved
too crowded, she was moved to the New York Training School for Girls in Hudson, New York,
a state reformatory. Eventually she escaped and for a time she was homeless.
Early career
She made her singing debut at 17 on November 21, 1934, at the Apollo Theater in Harlem,
New York. She pulled in a weekly audience at the Apollo and won the opportunity to compete
in one of the earliest of its famous "Amateur Nights". She had originally intended to go
on stage and dance, but, intimidated by the Edwards Sisters, a local dance duo, she opted
to sing instead in the style of Connee Boswell. She sang Boswell's "Judy" and "The Object
of My Affection," a song recorded by the Boswell Sisters, and won the first prize of US $25.00.
In January 1935, Fitzgerald won the chance to perform for a week with the Tiny Bradshaw
band at the Harlem Opera House. She met drummer and bandleader Chick Webb there. Webb had
already hired singer Charlie Linton to work with the band and was, The New York Times
later wrote, "reluctant to sign her....because she was gawky and unkempt, a diamond in the
rough." Webb offered her the opportunity to test with his band when they played a dance
at Yale University. She began singing regularly with Webb's Orchestra through 1935 at Harlem's
Savoy Ballroom. Fitzgerald recorded several hit songs with them, including "Love and Kisses"
and "(If You Can't Sing It) You'll Have to Swing It". But it was her 1938 version of
the nursery rhyme, "A-Tisket, A-Tasket", a song she co-wrote, that brought her wide public
acclaim. Chick Webb died on June 16, 1939, and his
band was renamed Ella and her Famous Orchestra with Ella taking on the role of nominal bandleader.
Fitzgerald recorded nearly 150 songs with the orchestra before it broke up in 1942,
"the majority of them novelties and disposable pop fluff".
Decca years
In 1942, Fitzgerald left the band to begin a solo career. Now signed to the Decca label,
she had several popular hits while recording with such artists as Bill Kenny & The Ink
Spots, Louis Jordan, and The Delta Rhythm Boys.
With Decca's Milt Gabler as her manager, she began working regularly for the jazz impresario
Norman Granz and appeared regularly in his Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts. Fitzgerald's
relationship with Granz was further cemented when he became her manager, although it would
be nearly a decade before he could record her on one of his many record labels.
With the demise of the Swing era and the decline of the great touring big bands, a major change
in jazz music occurred. The advent of bebop led to new developments in Fitzgerald's vocal
style, influenced by her work with Dizzy Gillespie's big band. It was in this period that Fitzgerald
started including scat singing as a major part of her performance repertoire. While
singing with Gillespie, Fitzgerald recalled, "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 would later be described by The New York Times as "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!" was similarly popular
and increased her reputation as one of the leading jazz vocalists.
Verve years Fitzgerald was still performing at Granz's
JATP concerts by 1955. She left Decca and Granz, now her manager, created Verve Records
around her. Fitzgerald later described the period as strategically crucial, saying, "I
had gotten to the point where I was only singing be-bop. I thought be-bop was 'it', and that
all I had to do was go some place and sing bop. But it finally got to the point where
I had no place to sing. I realized then that there was more to music than bop. Norman ... felt
that I should do other things, so he produced The Cole Porter Songbook with me. It was a
turning point in my life." Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook,
released in 1956, was the first of eight Songbook sets Fitzgerald would record for Verve at
irregular intervals from 1956 to 1964. The composers and lyricists spotlighted on each
set, taken together, represent the greatest part of the cultural canon known as the Great
American Songbook. Her song selections ranged from standards to rarities and represented
an attempt by Fitzgerald to cross over into a non-jazz audience. The sets are the most
well-known items in her discography.
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book was the only Songbook on which the composer
she interpreted played with her. Duke Ellington and his longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn
both appeared on exactly half the set's 38 tracks and wrote two new pieces of music for
the album: "The E and D Blues" and a four-movement musical portrait of Fitzgerald. The Songbook
series ended up becoming the singer's most critically acclaimed and commercially successful
work, and probably her most significant offering to American culture. The New York Times wrote
in 1996, "These albums were among the first pop records to devote such serious attention
to individual songwriters, and they were instrumental in establishing the pop album as a vehicle
for serious musical exploration." A few days after Fitzgerald's death, The New
York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote that in the Songbook series Fitzgerald "performed
a cultural transaction as extraordinary as Elvis' contemporaneous integration of white
and African American soul. Here was a black woman popularizing urban songs often written
by immigrant Jews to a national audience of predominantly white Christians." Frank Sinatra
was moved out of respect for Fitzgerald to block Capitol Records from re-releasing his
own recordings in a similar, single composer vein.
Fitzgerald also recorded albums exclusively devoted to the songs of Porter and Gershwin
in 1972 and 1983; the albums being, respectively, Ella Loves Cole and Nice Work If You Can Get
It. A later collection devoted to a single composer was released during her time with
Pablo Records, Ella Abraça Jobim, featuring the songs of Antônio Carlos Jobim.
While recording the Songbooks and the occasional studio album, Fitzgerald toured 40 to 45 weeks
per year in the United States and internationally, under the tutelage of Norman Granz. Granz
helped solidify her position as one of the leading live jazz performers.
On March 15, 1955 Ella Fitzgerald opened her initial engagement at the Mocambo nightclub
in Hollywood, after Marilyn Monroe lobbied the owner for the booking. The booking was
instrumental in Fitzgerald's career. The incident was turned into a play by Bonnie Greer in
2005. It has been widely reported that Fitzgerald was the first Black performer to play the
Mocambo, following Monroe's intervention, but this is not true. African-American singers
Herb Jefferies, Eartha Kitt, and Joyce Bryan all played the Mocambo in 1952 and 1953, according
to stories published at the time in Jet magazine and Billboard.
There are several live albums on Verve that are highly regarded by critics. Ella at the
Opera House shows a typical JATP set from Fitzgerald. Ella in Rome and Twelve Nights
in Hollywood display her vocal jazz canon. Ella in Berlin is still one of her best selling
albums; it includes a Grammy-winning performance of "Mack the Knife" in which she forgets the
lyrics, but improvises magnificently to compensate. Verve Records was sold to MGM in 1963 for
$3 million and in 1967 MGM failed to renew Fitzgerald's contract. Over the next five
years she flitted between Atlantic, Capitol and Reprise. Her material at this time represented
a departure from her typical jazz repertoire. For Capitol she recorded Brighten the Corner,
an album of hymns, Ella Fitzgerald's Christmas, an album of traditional Christmas carols,
Misty Blue, a country and western-influenced album, and 30 by Ella, a series of six medleys
that fulfilled her obligations for the label. During this period, she had her last US chart
single with a cover of Smokey Robinson's "Get Ready", previously a hit for The Temptations,
and some months later a top-five hit for Rare Earth.
The surprise success of the 1972 album Jazz at Santa Monica Civic '72 led Granz to found
Pablo Records, his first record label since the sale of Verve. Fitzgerald recorded some
20 albums for the label. Ella in London recorded live in 1974 with pianist Tommy Flanagan,
guitarist Joe Pass, bassist Keter Betts and drummer Bobby Durham, was considered by many
to be some of her best work. The following year she again performed with Joe Pass on
German television station NDR in Hamburg. Her years with Pablo Records also documented
the decline in her voice. "She frequently used shorter, stabbing phrases, and her voice
was harder, with a wider vibrato", one biographer wrote. Plagued by health problems, Fitzgerald
made her last recording in 1991 and her last public performances in 1993.
Film and television
In her most notable screen role, Fitzgerald played the part of singer Maggie Jackson in
Jack Webb's 1955 jazz film Pete Kelly's Blues. The film costarred Janet Leigh and singer
Peggy Lee. Even though she had already worked in the movies, she was "delighted" when Norman
Granz negotiated the role for her, and, "at the time....considered her role in the Warner
Brothers movie the biggest thing ever to have happened to her." Amid The New York Times
pan of the film when it opened in August 1955, the reviewer wrote, "About five minutes suggest
the picture this might have been. Take the ingenious prologue ... [or] take the fleeting
scenes when the wonderful Ella Fitzgerald, allotted a few spoken lines, fills the screen
and sound track with her strong mobile features and voice." Fitzgerald's race precluded major
big-screen success. After Pete Kelly's Blues, she appeared in sporadic movie cameos, in
St. Louis Blues, and Let No Man Write My Epitaph. Much later, she appeared in the 1980s television
drama The White Shadow. She made numerous guest appearances on television
shows, singing on The Frank Sinatra Show, The Andy Williams Show, The Pat Boone Chevy
Showroom, and alongside other greats Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Mel Tormé, and many others.
She was also frequently featured on The Ed Sullivan Show. Perhaps her most unusual and
intriguing performance was of the "Three Little Maids" song from Gilbert and Sullivan's comic
operetta The Mikado alongside Joan Sutherland and Dinah Shore on Shore's weekly variety
series in 1963. A performance at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London was filmed and shown on
the BBC. Fitzgerald also made a one-off appearance alongside Sarah Vaughan and Pearl Bailey on
a 1979 television special honoring Bailey. In 1980, she performed a medley of standards
in a duet with Karen Carpenter on the Carpenters' television program Music, Music, Music.
Fitzgerald also appeared in TV commercials, her most memorable being an ad for Memorex.
In the commercials, she sang a note that shattered a glass while being recorded on a Memorex
cassette tape. The tape was played back and the recording also broke the glass, asking:
"Is it live, or is it Memorex?" She also starred in a number of commercials for Kentucky Fried
Chicken, singing and scatting to the fast-food chain's longtime slogan, "We do chicken right!"
Her final commercial campaign was for American Express, in which she was photographed by
Annie Leibovitz. Collaborations
Fitzgerald's most famous collaborations were with the vocal quartet Bill Kenny & The Ink
Spots, trumpeter Louis Armstrong, the guitarist Joe Pass, and the bandleaders Count Basie
and Duke Ellington. From 1943 to 1950, Fitzgerald recorded seven
songs with The Ink Spots featuring Bill Kenny. Out of all seven recordings, four reached
the top of the pop charts including "I'm Making Believe" and "Into Each Life Some Rain Must
Fall" which both reached #1. Fitzgerald recorded three Verve studio albums
with Armstrong, two albums of standards, and a third album featured music from the Gershwin
musical Porgy and Bess. Fitzgerald also recorded a number of sides with Armstrong for Decca
in the early 1950s. Fitzgerald is sometimes referred to as the
quintessential swing singer, and her meetings with Count Basie are highly regarded by critics.
Fitzgerald features on one track on Basie's 1957 album One O'Clock Jump, while her 1963
album Ella and Basie! is remembered as one of her greatest recordings. With the 'New
Testament' Basie band in full swing, and arrangements written by a young Quincy Jones, this album
proved a respite from the 'Songbook' recordings and constant touring that Fitzgerald was engaged
in during this period. Fitzgerald and Basie also collaborated on the 1972 album Jazz at
Santa Monica Civic '72, and on the 1979 albums Digital III at Montreux, A Classy Pair and
A Perfect Match. Fitzgerald and Joe Pass recorded four albums
together toward the end of Fitzgerald's career. She recorded several albums with piano accompaniment,
but a guitar proved the perfect melodic foil for her. Fitzgerald and Pass appeared together
on the albums Take Love Easy, Easy Living, Speak Love and Fitzgerald and Pass... Again.
Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington recorded two live albums, and two studio albums. Her Duke
Ellington Songbook placed Ellington firmly in the canon known as the Great American Songbook,
and the 1960s saw Fitzgerald and the 'Duke' meet on the Côte d'Azur for the 1966 album
Ella and Duke at the Cote D'Azur, and in Sweden for The Stockholm Concert, 1966. Their 1965
album Ella at Duke's Place is also extremely well received.
Fitzgerald had a number of famous jazz musicians and soloists as sidemen over her long career.
The trumpeters Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie, the guitarist Herb Ellis, and the pianists
Tommy Flanagan, Oscar Peterson, Lou Levy, Paul Smith, Jimmy Rowles, and Ellis Larkins
all worked with Ella mostly in live, small group settings.
Possibly Fitzgerald's greatest unrealized collaboration was a studio or live album with
Frank Sinatra. The two appeared on the same stage only periodically over the years, in
television specials in 1958 and 1959, and again on 1967's A Man and His Music + Ella
+ Jobim, a show that also featured Antônio Carlos Jobim. Pianist Paul Smith has said,
"Ella loved working with [Frank]. Sinatra gave her his dressing-room on A Man and His
Music and couldn't do enough for her." When asked, Norman Granz would cite "complex contractual
reasons" for the fact that the two artists never recorded together. Fitzgerald's appearance
with Sinatra and Count Basie in June 1974 for a series of concerts at Caesars Palace,
Las Vegas, was seen as an important incentive for Sinatra to return from his self-imposed
retirement of the early 1970s. The shows were a great success, and September 1975 saw them
gross $1,000,000 in two weeks on Broadway, in a triumvirate with the Count Basie Orchestra.
Later life and death In 1985, Fitzgerald was hospitalized briefly
for respiratory problems, in 1986 for congestive heart failure, and in 1990 for exhaustion.
In 1993, she had to have both of her legs amputated below the knee due to the effects
of diabetes. Her eyesight was affected as well.
In 1996, tired of being in the hospital, she wished to spend her last days at home. Confined
to a wheelchair, she spent her final days in her backyard of her Beverly Hills mansion
on Whittier, with her son Ray and 12 year old granddaughter Alice. "I just want to smell
the air, listen to the birds and hear Alice laugh," she reportedly said. On her last day,
she was wheeled outside one last time, and sat there for about an hour. When she was
taken back in, she looked up with a soft smile on her face and said, "I'm ready to go now."
She died in her home on June 15, 1996 at the age of 79. A few hours after her death, the
Playboy Jazz Festival was launched at the Hollywood Bowl. In tribute, the marquee read:
"Ella We Will Miss You." Her funeral was private, and she was buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery
in Los Angeles. Personal life
Fitzgerald married at least twice, and there is evidence that she may have married a third
time. In 1941, she married Benny Kornegay, a convicted drug dealer and local dockworker.
The marriage was annulled after two years. Her second marriage, in December 1947, was
to the famous bass player Ray Brown, whom she had met while on tour with Dizzy Gillespie's
band a year earlier. Together they adopted a child born to Fitzgerald's half-sister,
Frances, whom they christened Ray Brown, Jr. With Fitzgerald and Brown often busy touring
and recording, the child was largely raised by her aunt, Virginia. Fitzgerald and Brown
divorced in 1953, bowing to the various career pressures both were experiencing at the time,
though they would continue to perform together. In July 1957, Reuters reported that Fitzgerald
had secretly married Thor Einar Larsen, a young Norwegian, in Oslo. She had even gone
as far as furnishing an apartment in Oslo, but the affair was quickly forgotten when
Larsen was sentenced to five months hard labor in Sweden for stealing money from a young
woman to whom he had previously been engaged. Fitzgerald was also notoriously shy. Trumpet
player Mario Bauzá, who played behind Fitzgerald in her early years with Chick Webb, 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, later
in her career, the Society of Singers named an award after her, Fitzgerald explained,
"I don't want to say the wrong thing, which I always do but I think I do better when I
sing." Fitzgerald was a quiet but ardent supporter
of many charities and non-profit organizations, including the American Heart Association and
the City of Hope Medical Center. In 1993, she established the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable
Foundation. Discography and collections
The primary collections of Fitzgerald's media and memorabilia reside at and are shared between
the Smithsonian Institution and the US Library of Congress
Awards, citations and honors
Fitzgerald won thirteen Grammy Awards, including one for Lifetime Achievement in 1967.
Other major awards and honors she received during her career were the Kennedy Center
for the Performing Arts Medal of Honor Award, National Medal of Art, first Society of Singers
Lifetime Achievement Award, named "Ella" in her honor, Presidential Medal of Freedom,
and the George and Ira Gershwin Award for Lifetime Musical Achievement, UCLA Spring
Sing. Across town at the University of Southern California, she received the USC "Magnum Opus"
Award which hangs in the office of the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation. In 1990,
she received an honorary doctorate of Music from Harvard University.
Tributes and legacy
The career history and archival material from Ella's long career are housed in the Archives
Center at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, while her personal music
arrangements are at the Library of Congress. Her extensive cookbook collection was donated
to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, and her extensive collection of published
sheet music was donated to UCLA. In 1997, Newport News, Virginia created a
music festival with Christopher Newport University to honor Ella Fitzgerald in her birth city.
The Ella Fitzgerald Music Festival is designed to teach the region's youth of the musical
legacy of Fitzgerald and jazz. Past performers at the week-long festival include: Diana Krall,
Arturo Sandoval, Jean Carne, Phil Woods, Aretha Franklin, Freda Payne, Cassandra Wilson, Ethel
Ennis, David Sanborn, Jane Monheit, Dianne Reeves, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Ramsey Lewis,
Patti Austin, and Ann Hampton Callaway. Callaway, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and Patti Austin
have all recorded albums in tribute to Fitzgerald. Callaway's album To Ella with Love features
fourteen jazz standards made popular by Fitzgerald, and the album also features the trumpeter
Wynton Marsalis. Bridgewater's album Dear Ella featured many musicians that were closely
associated with Fitzgerald during her career, including the pianist Lou Levy, the trumpeter
Benny Powell, and Fitzgerald's second husband, double bassist Ray Brown. Bridgewater's following
album, Live at Yoshi's, was recorded live on April 25, 1998, what would have been Fitzgerald's
81st birthday. Austin's album, For Ella features 11 songs
most immediately associated with Fitzgerald, and a twelfth song, "Hearing Ella Sing" is
Austin's tribute to Fitzgerald. The album was nominated for a Grammy. In 2007, We All
Love Ella, was released, a tribute album recorded for the 90th anniversary of Fitzgerald's birth.
It featured artists such as Michael Bublé, Natalie Cole, Chaka Khan, Gladys Knight, Diana
Krall, k.d. lang, Queen Latifah, Ledisi, Dianne Reeves, Linda Ronstadt, and Lizz Wright, collating
songs most readily associated with the "First Lady of Song". Folk singer Odetta's album
To Ella is dedicated to Fitzgerald, but features no songs associated with her. Her accompanist
Tommy Flanagan affectionately remembered Fitzgerald on his album Lady be Good ... For Ella.
Fitzgerald is also referred to on the 1987 song "Ella, elle l'a" by French singer France
Gall, the 1976 Stevie Wonder hit "Sir Duke" from his album Songs in the Key of Life, and
the song "I Love Being Here With You", written by Peggy Lee and Bill Schluger. Sinatra's
1986 recording of "Mack the Knife" from his album L.A. Is My Lady includes a homage to
some of the song's previous performers, including 'Lady Ella' herself. She is also honored in
the song "First Lady" by Canadian artist Nikki Yanofsky.
In 2008, the Downing-Gross Cultural Arts Center in Newport News named its brand new 276-seat
theater the Ella Fitzgerald Theater. The theater is located several blocks away from her birthplace
on Marshall Avenue. The Grand Opening performers were Roberta Flack and Queen Esther Marrow.
In 2012, Rod Stewart performed a "virtual duet" with Ella Fitzgerald on his Christmas
album Merry Christmas, Baby, and his television special of the same name.
In 2013, Google paid tribute to Ella by celebrating her 96th birthday with a Google Doodle on
its US homepage. There is a bronze sculpture of Fitzgerald
in Yonkers, the city in which she grew up, created by American artist Vinnie Bagwell.
It is located southeast of the main entrance to the Amtrak/Metro-North Railroad station
in front of the city's old trolley barn. A bust of Fitzgerald is on the campus of Chapman
University in Orange, California. On January 9, 2007, the United States Postal Service
announced that Fitzgerald would be honored with her own postage stamp. The stamp was
released in April 2007 as part of the Postal Service's Black Heritage series.
References
General
Nicholson, Stuart. Ella Fitzgerald: 1917-1996. London: Indigo. ISBN 978-0-575-40032-0.
Further reading Nicholson, Stuart. Ella Fitzgerald. Gollancz;
ISBN 0-575-40032-3 Gourse, Leslie. The Ella Fitzgerald Companion:
Seven Decades of Commentary. Music Sales Ltd.; ISBN 0-02-864625-8
Johnson, J. Wilfred. Ella Fitzgerald: A Complete Annotated Discography. McFarland & Co Inc.;
ISBN 0-7864-0906-1 External links
Ella Fitzgerald at the Internet Movie Database Ella Fitzgerald at the Internet Broadway Database
Ella Fitzgerald at Find a Grave Ella Fitzgerald at the Library of Congress
'Remembering Ella' by Phillip D. Atteberry Listen to Big Band Serenade podcast, episode
6 Includes complete NBC remote broadcast of "Ella Fitzgerald & her Orchestra" from the
Roseland Ballroom