Fitzgerald, Ella

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Fitzgerald, Ella

Sex:  Female

Born:  Newport News, Virginia, United States
25 April 1917

Died:  Beverly Hills, California, United States
15 June 1996

Activity/Profession:  Jazz Singer

(b. 25 April 1917; d. 15 June 1996),
jazz singer.

“Ella”—that's all anyone needs to say. Even “First Lady of Jazz” seems redundant at this point; all you need is “Ella.” Ella Fitzgerald is possibly the most admired and technically skilled jazz or popular music vocalist in American history. Everyone who is anyone has praised her skill, from Bing Crosby to Arthur Fiedler to Billy Strayhorn. With an extraordinary vocal range, both perfect and relative pitch, incredible enunciation, and an almost surreal sense of timing, Fitzgerald delighted audiences for more than fifty years, an amazingly long career in a particularly mercurial business.

Ella Fitzgerald, known as the first lady of jazz.

Los Angeles Public Library, Herald-Examiner Collection

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There are many versions of Fitzgerald's early life, much of which remains a mystery. This is probably because Fitzgerald was an extremely private person. It is also possible that she was ashamed of the experiences that marked her early years. No one really knows, because she never spoke officially of her childhood. However, it is now accepted that she was born on 25 April 1917 in Newport News, Virginia. (The year was commonly cited for many years as 1918.) She was the illegitimate daughter of William Fitzgerald and Temperance Williams Fitzgerald. Her father left when she was around four years old, her mother remarried, and the family moved to Yonkers, New York. Some sources report that her mother died in 1932. Her stepfather may have then become abusive. It is believed that, for a time at least, Fitzgerald moved to Harlem to live with her aunt, Virginia Williams. According to Stuart Nicholson, Fitzgerald dropped out of school as a teenager and worked for numbers runners and as a lookout for a “sporting house.” Ultimately, she was sent to Public School 49 at Riverdale-on-Hudson, which had formerly been the Colored Orphan Asylum. She ran away in 1934 and began living on the street. At this point the details of her life become more commonly agreed on.

Winning at the Apollo

On 21 November 1934, Fitzgerald won Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater. She entered the competition intending to dance—her first love—but was stricken by stage fright and intimidated by the Edwards Sisters dance team. She sang instead, brought the house down, and won first prize. She won the contest singing two songs, “The Object of My Affection” and “Judy.” Both were by Connee Boswell, a singer who remained one of the major influences on Fitzgerald's vocal style. The jazzman Benny Carter was in the audience, and he was so impressed that he tried to convince Fletcher Henderson to give the young singer a chance. Henderson, however, wasn't enthusiastic. Three months later she won the amateur night at the Harlem Opera House and landed her first professional job.

There are several stories told about how Fitzgerald got her job singing with the Chick Webb Orchestra. What seems certain is Webb was resistant at first to offering her work. Fitzgerald may not have been the pretty girl singer he had been looking for. Certainly she was poorly dressed and dirty from living on the street. But Webb was finally convinced to give her a chance. Within a few weeks, she had won over Webb and been adopted by his band. Fitzgerald stayed with Webb until his death in 1939, having already signed earlier with his record company, Decca. She made her first recording, “Love and Kisses,” in 1935. By 1937 she had won her first Down Beat magazine award. The following year she cowrote and performed the song that would become her signature, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” After Webb's death Fitzgerald was famous enough to take over the role of bandleader, and the group stayed together until World War II.

Scatting

In the late 1940s Fitzgerald toured for a time with Dizzy Gillespie. This broadened her range, as she began singing bebop in addition to the swing of Chick Webb's band. The time with Gillespie is perhaps even more important to her music because it introduced her to scat singing, a style that she came to perform with unparalleled virtuosity. She told the Washington Post, “Listening to Dizzy made me want to try something with my voice that would be like a horn …. He'd shout ‘Go ahead and blow’ and I'd improvise.”

Singing the American Songbook

In 1946 Fitzgerald made a pivotal move in her career: she began touring with Jazz at the Philharmonic, produced by Norman Granz. This experience began her longtime professional relationship with Granz, who became her manager. Granz is sometimes criticized for exploiting Fitzgerald. Other critics, however, point to the fact that, in addition to introducing her to a worldwide audience, Granz created the famed Songbook series of recordings that ensured Fitzgerald's immortality.

By 1953 Fitzgerald's career was on an incredible and long-lasting upswing. That year she began her record-breaking, eighteen-year run as Down Beat magazine's best female singer. (She won the Reader's Poll Best Female Vocalist award a total of twenty-one times.) The following year she performed at the first Newport Jazz Festival. Her live performances during this period are particularly important because they strengthened Fitzgerald's reputation in a way that her records did not. Decca was not giving her the material that would have showcased her talent in the best light. Instead, the company had her recording light pop tunes and novelty songs. All this changed in 1955 when she left Decca and moved to Granz's company, Verve. In total Fitzgerald made 230 recordings for Decca. Many of those recordings have been reissued by MCA as The Best of Ella Fitzgerald, Ella Swings the Band, and Princess of the Savoy.

When Fitzgerald joined Verve, she and Granz made history. For the next eight years she recorded the songs of the greatest popular composers in America. With brilliant arrangements by Paul Westin and Nelson Riddle, the Songbook series included albums of songs by Cole Porter (1956), Rodgers and Hart (1956), Duke Ellington (1957), George and Ira Gershwin (1958–1959), Irving Berlin (1958), and Harold Arlen (1960). With these albums Fitzgerald essentially created the definitive history of American popular music. In so doing she received critical acclaim and became a household name.

In 1958, at the first Grammy Awards ceremony, Fitzgerald received her first two Grammy awards. She won in the pop genre category for Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook and in the jazz category for Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook. Amazingly, Fitzgerald won two Grammy awards per year for the next two years. But perhaps the greatest accolade came from one of the composers himself; Ira Gershwin remarked of the Gershwin songbook, “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.”

Jazzing Up Pop—and Jazz

Fitzgerald increased her audience still further by performing on television in the 1950s. Over the next thirty years she appeared more than two hundred times on programs in both Europe and the United States. She was a particular favorite on Bing Crosby's and Dinah Shore's shows and appeared on Swing into Spring in 1958 and 1959. She also made a few appearances in movies, starting with Ride 'Em Cowboy in 1940. She had more screen time in Pete Kelly's Blues (1955), St. Louis Blues (1958), and Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1960).

In the 1960s Fitzgerald survived the rock and roll invasion and continued to win awards, sell records, and attract new fans. This may have been because of her openness to new music. Her “Stone Cold Dead in the Market” was the first Calypso-influenced piece to be a mainstream jazz hit. She also introduced the bossa nova to jazz fans. From the Beatles to “These Boots Are Made for Walking,” she seemed open to trying anything. Her version of Stevie Wonder's “Sunshine of My Life” began to rival “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” as her most popular song.

Even as Fitzgerald was transforming popular songs into jazz standards, she continued to perform and record traditional jazz. She worked with all of the gods of the genre, including Count Basie, Oscar Peterson, and Duke Ellington. Her work with Louis Armstrong is considered some of her best, particularly their album of Porgy and Bess. An incredibly hardworking woman who was on tour and onstage almost every day of the year, she began to slow down slightly when she had eye surgery in 1971. However, slowing down for Fitzgerald meant remaining busy. Over the next three years, she performed with at least forty symphony orchestras, including the Boston Pops. She won her seventh and eighth Grammy awards, both in the Best Jazz Vocal Performance category, in 1976 and 1979 for Fitzgerald and Pass…Again and Fine and Mellow, respectively.

In the 1980s Fitzgerald continued to perform and record despite increasing complications from diabetes. She won three more Grammy awards during the decade, all for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Female. In 1986 she underwent quintuple bypass surgery. Yet three years later Pamela Bloom, reviewing a concert at Radio City Music Hall, wrote,

"All night long, Ella was taking risks right and left with her scats. In “God Bless the Child,” she pulled out high operatic hoots, angry belts, even trumpet-like whines woo-wooed with a wa-wa mute. In “Honeysuckle Rose,” she segued from high little yelps to crazy syllables that tumbled over each other like kids just released from detention. (Contemporary Musicians, Ella Fitzgerald entry)"

She could inspire audiences, whether performing live or on a record, and whether an album was new or a rerelease. For example, the 1958 album Ella in Rome was rereleased in 1988 and became the best-selling jazz album of the year. Two years later she won her thirteenth and final Grammy award for an album of new work titled All That Jazz.

Age and ill health finally took its toll, however, and Fitzgerald finally retired from performing in 1992—but not before gathering an amazing roster of jazz musicians for the concert “Hearts for Ella,” a benefit for the American Heart Association. The musicians who joined her onstage included Dizzy Gillespie, David Sanborn, Oscar Peterson, Stan Getz, Ray Brown, Itzhak Perlman (with whom Fitzgerald performed a duet), and Louis Bellson. The bandleader was Benny Carter. Lena Horne and Perlman served as hosts. A year later, in celebration of her birthday, all of the recordings in the Songbook series, as well as the recording with Chick Webb, were issued on CD. That same year Fitzgerald had both legs amputated because of complications from diabetes. She died at her home in Los Angeles three years later on 15 June 1996.

During her lifetime Fitzgerald won an amazing number and variety of awards, both inside and outside the music business. In 1960 she was given an honorary membership into Alpha Kappa Alpha, the oldest and largest African American sorority in the United States. She was the first woman to be given the Los Angeles Urban League's Whitney M. Young Jr. Award and also the first woman and first jazz musician to receive the Lincoln Center Medallion, which had traditionally gone to classical musicians. In 1974 the University of Maryland named its school of performing arts after her in her honor. In 1987 she received the National Medal of Arts, and in 1992 President George H. W. Bush presented her with the Medal of Freedom Award. In 1998, two years after her death, the Smithsonian Institute's Museum of American History opened an exhibit titled “Ella Fitzgerald: First Lady of Song.”

Fitzgerald's nonmusical life was much less dramatic than her professional life. Offstage she was shy and somewhat insecure; she wanted nothing more than to be left alone. She was married twice. In 1941 she married Benny Kornegay, who may have been a petty criminal. The marriage was annulled in 1942, and Fitzgerald once said that she married the man on a bet. Six years later she married the famous jazz bassist Ray Brown, but the marriage did not last. They divorced in 1953 yet continued to work together occasionally for the rest of her career. In 1951 Fitzgerald adopted her half-sister's child, naming him Raymond Brown Jr. It is also reported that she raised her half-sister's two daughters. In addition, for many years she paid the maintenance costs for a day care center in Watts.

Fitzgerald was, and still is, a genuine titan in the music world. One of the best-selling jazz performers in history, she sold, it is estimated, a quarter of a million records each year throughout the course of her career. She is not without her critics, however. She has sometimes been accused of a lack of depth in her interpretations. Her fans might reply that she approached a song with openness, purity, and joy of life. Jay Cocks expressed it most poetically when he wrote in Time magazine, “There was something about her voice that glistened, that refracted off an up-tempo number like a sudden shot of sun or shone off a ballad like a sidelong beam of moonlight.” Her pitch-perfect voice and clear diction were too childlike, argued some critics. Those who sing Ella's praises have pointed to her impeccable technical skill as well as her range, not only in terms of notes but also in terms of genres. The comparison has always been made to Billie Holiday, who was certainly a darker and more emotional singer. Cocks notes, “Billie Holiday's music was a lifeline. She lived out all the suffering of her songs. For Ella Fitzgerald, music seemed more like a safe harbor, a home from which she rarely ventured.”

Ironically, at the end of her career, Fitzgerald, while losing the perfection of her voice, was gaining some of the depth that she had been lacking. Granz, her longtime manager, wrote, “Ella's voice has clearly changed, as has her range. But it has acquired a deeper and richer quality over the years.” Finally, no one, not even her worst critics, can argue with the fact that Fitzgerald was the master of scat. Mel Torme explained it quite well:

"Anyone who attempts to sing extemporaneously—that is, scat—will tell you that the hardest aspect is to stay in tune. You are wandering all over the scales, the notes coming out of your mouth a millisecond after you think of them …. Her notes float out in perfect pitch, effortlessly and, most important of all, swinging. (191)"

Whatever the arguments of her critics, Fitzgerald was not just admired by her fans; she was loved. In her joyful renditions she made a connection with her audience that was uniquely personal. She is possibly one of the most loved and respected performers in the music business as well, in which she was admired almost as much for her professionalism, humility, and humanity as for her unrivaled talent.

See also Jazz.

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