🇺🇸 Ella Fitzgerald

Biography

On the night of November 21, 1934, a seventeen-year-old girl walked onto the stage of the Apollo Theater in Harlem for Amateur Night and froze. She had entered intending to dance — she was a known dancer among her friends in Yonkers — but when she looked out at the audience, something failed. She stood there, in a dress borrowed from a friend, in shoes that didn't fit, before an audience that was already restless. Then she opened her mouth and sang. The audience went quiet. She won first place. The bandleader Chick Webb heard about it, came to see her perform, and within months had made her the vocalist for his orchestra. She was seventeen, and she had just begun one of the most celebrated musical careers in American history.

Ella Jane Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia. Her parents, William Fitzgerald and Temperance Henry, separated when she was a child; her mother, Temperance, moved the family to Yonkers, New York, where she met and lived with a man named Joseph Da Silva. Ella was close to her mother and her half-sister Frances, and the family's apartment was filled with the music of the radio — Connee Boswell and the Boswell Sisters were Ella's primary vocal models in childhood, and she learned their records by heart, absorbing phrasing, diction, and the art of swinging a lyric in a way that popular music instruction never systematically taught. Her mother died in 1932, when Ella was fifteen, and the years that followed were chaotic: a violent stepfather, a period in an orphanage, a brief and ill-defined stretch in which she was in contact with the numbers runners of Harlem's street economy. By seventeen she had discovered that the one place her life made complete sense was on a stage.

The Apollo win led directly to an engagement with Chick Webb's orchestra at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem — the preeminent swing venue in New York, the place where dancers set the standard and bands competed for the approval of the most discerning dancing audience in the world. Webb was skeptical at first: Ella was seventeen, inexperienced, and, in his words, physically unglamorous. He hired her because she could sing. She could sing in ways that made his orchestra sound better, made the dancers dance harder, made the room feel like something important was happening that needed to be witnessed.

Her first recording, "Love and Kisses," was made in June 1935, when she was seventeen. Three years later, she recorded "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" — a novelty song based on a nursery rhyme that she co-wrote — which reached number one and sold one million copies. She was twenty-one. When Chick Webb died of tuberculosis in 1939, Fitzgerald became the de facto leader of the orchestra, a Black woman fronting a major swing band during a period of American music when both conditions were institutional barriers. She held the ensemble together for two years before it dissolved and she went out on her own.

The collaboration with Norman Granz that began in the 1950s produced the work for which she is best remembered: eight Songbook albums, each devoted to a single American composer — Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington. The Songbooks were not simply performances; they were acts of preservation, recorded arguments that the American popular song was an art form deserving the kind of careful interpretive attention that European classical music received. Fitzgerald approached each song with the precision of a scholar and the instinct of a musician who understood that technique exists to serve emotion, not replace it.

She won thirteen Grammy Awards — including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1967 — and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992. She performed publicly until the early 1990s, when diabetes began to compromise her health. She died on June 15, 1996, in Beverly Hills, California. Her voice, a three-octave instrument of extraordinary purity, agility, and warmth, remains the standard against which jazz vocalists are measured. It always will be.

Timeline

Peers in Perspective