Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Fitzgerald: The Girl Who Meant to Dance

She walked onto the Apollo stage on 21 November 1934 planning to dance. Her name had come out of the weekly raffle; the act immediately before her danced so well that she changed her mind in the wings and sang instead. She chose "Judy," a Hoagy Carmichael tune her mother had liked, learned off a Boswell Sisters record. She won first prize. When the crowd demanded an encore she sang the flip side of the same record, because those were the only two songs she knew.

Newport News to Harlem

She was born on 25 April 1917 in Newport News, Virginia. In 1932 her mother died of injuries from a car accident; Ella was fifteen. What followed is the part of her life she never enjoyed discussing: she moved to Harlem in 1933, and after a period of street work was placed in a reform school. She was seventeen and effectively on her own when her name came out of that raffle.

The Apollo win was not a career. It was an audition nobody had arranged, in front of one of the few audiences in America that could confer legitimacy on a Black singer overnight, and it worked because a seventeen-year-old made a correct tactical decision under pressure.

Chick Webb

The drummer Chick Webb recruited her, and she joined his orchestra in 1935, becoming a fixture at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. Between 1935 and 1942 she recorded nearly 150 songs with the band.

The breakthrough was a nursery rhyme. Her 1938 recording of "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" became a national radio hit and one of the best-selling records of the decade — a swing arrangement of a children's counting song, delivered with the timing of someone who understood that novelty is a discipline. Webb died of spinal tuberculosis on 16 June 1939, and Fitzgerald, twenty-two, took over the band. It ran as Ella Fitzgerald and Her Famous Orchestra until 1942.

Bebop and the Scat

What she did next is the part that convinced musicians. Working with Dizzy Gillespie's big band, she began treating her voice as a horn — improvising wordless lines over the chord changes rather than decorating the melody. Her 1945 recording of "Flying Home" was later described by The New York Times as one of the most influential vocal jazz records of the decade.

Scat was not new. What Fitzgerald did with it was different in kind: she improvised at the harmonic and rhythmic level bebop instrumentalists were working at, in real time, with accurate intonation across an enormous range, quoting other tunes as she went. She was also, in the same years, making straightforwardly commercial records, including four top-charting duets with the Ink Spots — among them "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall." She could do both, which is rarer than doing either.

Granz, Verve, and the Song Books

Norman Granz became her manager in the mid-1940s and eventually founded Verve Records around her, which is an unusual thing for a label to be built on and says something about what he thought he had.

The Song Books are the result: eight albums between 1956 and 1964, beginning with Cole Porter, working through the composers of the Great American Songbook. The *Duke Ellington Song Book* of 1957 is the most remarkable of them — Ellington and Billy Strayhorn actually play on half of its thirty-eight tracks, and contributed two newly composed pieces. The series took a body of songs then regarded as commercial material and made a case for it as a repertoire, which is roughly what the Song Books are still doing.

Granz also used her to break segregation directly. From 1949 he required that venues on the Jazz at the Philharmonic circuit remove "colored" and "white" seating designations, and cancelled shows where they refused. In July 1954 Fitzgerald and her entourage were removed from a Pan-American flight to Australia on racial grounds. They sued, and won on appeal in January 1956.

The Long Run

She recorded three Verve studio albums with Louis Armstrong, including their Gershwin opera album, and worked extensively with Ellington, Count Basie, and later the guitarist Joe Pass, with whom she made four albums. Her private life was brief and mostly unhappy: a 1941 marriage to Benny Kornegay was annulled the following year; she married the bassist Ray Brown in December 1947 and divorced him in 1953; a 1957 Reuters report of a secret marriage in Oslo to a Norwegian named Thor Einar Larsen ended when he was sentenced to hard labour in Sweden.

She performed for nearly sixty years. In 1993, with diabetes advancing, both her legs were amputated below the knee. She gave her last public performance that year.

Why Ella Is Called a Genius

The quality is auditory rather than intellectual in the ordinary sense, and it is precisely identifiable: Fitzgerald could hear harmony the way a first-rate instrumentalist hears it and reproduce it instantly with a voice of near-perfect intonation across a very wide range. That is what makes her scat different from decorative vocal effects. When she improvises over a bebop chord sequence she is not embellishing a tune; she is composing a new melodic line, in tempo, that is harmonically correct against changes moving faster than most listeners can follow. The New York Times' verdict on "Flying Home" — one of the most influential vocal jazz records of the decade — was a judgment about technique, not charm.

The second component is range of application. The same instrument that improvised with Gillespie's band sold a nursery rhyme to the whole country in 1938 and then delivered eight volumes of Porter, Gershwin and Ellington clearly enough that Ellington and Strayhorn turned up to play on the record themselves.

The honest counter-case: she wrote almost nothing. Her monument is a series of albums of other people's songs, assembled by a manager who built a record label around her, and the Song Books are curatorial as much as creative. Nor is her standing unanimous: Rolling Stone placed her 45th in its 2023 ranking of the 200 greatest singers, which is not where a list puts an artist it regards as supreme. What is not in dispute is the ear. No one has made a serious case for a better one.

Legacy

She died of a stroke at her home on 15 June 1996, aged seventy-nine, and was buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery in California. Hours later, at the launch of the Playboy Jazz Festival, the Hollywood Bowl marquee read: "Ella We Will Miss You."

The trophies came steadily: thirteen Grammy Awards, the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1967, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Kennedy Center Honors, the National Medal of Arts, and the NAACP's inaugural President's Award. At the first Grammy ceremony in 1959 she became the first African-American woman to win one.

Most of it is now in Washington. Fitzgerald bequeathed her personal effects, artifacts and photographs to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, which holds her 1979 Kennedy Center Honor medallion and all thirteen Grammys — a collection assembled by a woman who, sixty years earlier, had walked onto a stage in Harlem with two songs and a plan to dance.

Achievements

• Presidential Medal of Freedom — 1992
• National Medal of Arts
• Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award — 1967
• National Women's Hall of Fame — 1995
• Kennedy Center Honors — 1979
• Instruments: piano and voice
• Genres: jazz, swing and traditional pop