The Full Biography
Ella Fitzgerald. Singer. The Yonkers girl who took an Apollo amateur night and made the American songbook sound as if it had been waiting for her particular exactness.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is a smile, a scarf, a scat that turns a syllable into percussion. The First Lady of Song. What the still cannot show is Ella Jane Fitzgerald of Newport News and Yonkers, a mother dead in the 1930s, a stretch of reform school and street, and a long life of Norman Granz’s songbooks, diabetes, and a voice that remained a measuring stick after the body had begun to fail.
She was born on April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia, to William Fitzgerald and Temperance “Tempie” Williams Fitzgerald. The household did not hold. Tempie moved north with the child and settled in Yonkers, New York, with a new partner, Joseph da Silva. There was a half-sister, Frances. The family was working-class and Black in a city that did not treat either fact as a courtesy. Ella danced on street corners for coins. She listened to Connee Boswell on the radio and copied the phrasing until it was hers. In 1932 Tempie died of injuries after a car wreck. The girl was fifteen. The years that followed were not a talent-show preface. She bounced between an aunt in Harlem, the New York State Training School for Girls at Hudson, and stretches of sleeping rough. She ran numbers. She looked at dance halls. She was, for a stretch, a child the city had already filed under trouble.
On November 21, 1934, she went to Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater intending to dance. The Edwards Sisters had just finished a dance act the house would not let her follow. She froze. She sang. The prize was twenty-five dollars. The house heard a voice that was already clean at the center. In January 1935 she won a week at the Harlem Opera House. Chick Webb, the drummer who led one of the tightest bands in the country, heard her at the Yale Club and then at the Savoy. He did not want a girl singer. He hired her anyway. She was seventeen. The Savoy Ballroom became the first parish.
Webb’s band was a swinging machine. Ella learned time from a man who had to fight his own spine to keep a beat. In 1936 she recorded “Love and Kisses” for Decca. In 1938 she and Al Feldman (Van Alexander) turned the nursery rhyme “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” into a national hit — a yellow basket, a lost object, a pop fact that put her on jukeboxes far from Harlem. She was twenty-one. When Webb died of spinal tuberculosis in June 1939, she fronted the orchestra and kept it working into 1942. A young woman as the front of a swinging machine. The town noticed the novelty. Musicians noticed the intonation.
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Decca kept her through the war and the bebop years. She married Benny Kornegay, a dockworker, in 1941; the union was annulled. In December 1947 she married the bassist Ray Brown. Their son, Ray Brown Jr., was born in 1949 — adopted, and raised as theirs. The marriage ended in 1953. The musical partnership lasted longer than the license. She could already scat as if a horn had borrowed her throat. “Flying Home” (1945) and “Oh, Lady Be Good!” (1947) are the records on which the improvisation stops being a trick and becomes a second language. “How High the Moon,” cut live and in the studio across the late 1940s, is the dare a generation of singers still fails. She did not interpret a standard so much as file it, cleanly, so it could be found again. The scat is the part people imitate. The intonation is the part they cannot.
Norman Granz heard that exactness and built a life around it. Jazz at the Philharmonic put her on bills with the men who had invented the modern language — Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie — and treated her as a peer, not a girl singer. Granz fought segregated rooms for her. Hotels that would take the band and not the star learned they would lose the date. In 1955 Marilyn Monroe used her own box-office weight to get Ella a booking at the Mocambo on the Sunset Strip, a room that had not wanted a Black headliner. The two weeks sold out. The West Coast press had to change the sentence. Granz then pulled her off Decca and built Verve Records, in no small part, as a house for her voice.
What came next was not a lucky streak. It was a civic project disguised as a catalog. In 1956 she recorded Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book — two LPs, the songs treated as texts, Nelson Riddle’s kind of care without Riddle’s name on that first box. Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers & Hart Song Book followed the same year. Ella and Louis (1956), with Louis Armstrong and Oscar Peterson’s trio, is a conversation between two American instruments that already knew how to wait. Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book (1957) put her inside Ellington’s own band. Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Song Book (1958). Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Song Book (1959), with Riddle, is the set a lot of people still use as a dictionary. Harold Arlen in 1961. Jerome Kern in 1963. Johnny Mercer in 1964. She did not “cover” those men. She kept them.
The live records are the other monument. On February 13, 1960, at the Deutschlandhalle in Berlin, she forgot the words to “Mack the Knife” and invented new ones in public — names of the band, a laugh, a recovery so complete the lapse became the classic. Ella in Berlin: Mack the Knife won Grammys and taught a generation what grace under a blank mind sounds like. Ella in Rome. Ella in Hollywood. Ella and Basie! (1963), with Count Basie’s band and Quincy Jones’s charts, is a swinging machine she did not have to apologize for joining. She toured as if the road were a parish. Japan. Brazil. The European summer festivals. She was, for a stretch, the most complete jazz singer the American century had hired: pop enough for a hit, exact enough for the horn players, warm enough that a civilian could stay in the room.
Porgy and Bess (1957) with Armstrong is the opera treated as a set of songs. Ella Swings Lightly (1958). Hello, Dolly! (1964) put her on a title the whole country already knew. She recorded Beatles tunes when the parish asked for them and did not pretend they were Porter. Misty Blue in 1968. The first Grammys, in 1958, sat on the Porter and Ellington books; she would collect thirteen competitive statues before the body quit. She became an American citizen in a life that had already been an American fact. She sang at the White House. She sang in rooms that had needed Granz’s lawyer to open. Both nights were the same job: find the center of the tune.
Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.Ella Fitzgerald
The turn is the Songbooks and the long health file. She had already been a star for twenty years when Granz handed her the American song as a job of conservation. A lot of swing singers became nostalgia acts. She became the record you put on to remember what in-tune means. The body, meanwhile, began to keep a different set of books. Diabetes arrived and did not leave. She sang through it because the parish still needed a downbeat.
Six things most people never knew
- The Apollo night was supposed to be a dance. She froze. She sang. The career is a changed mind in public.
- The years after her mother died were institutions, not a montage. Yonkers to the stage is not a straight line. The training school at Hudson is in the file.
- She led Webb’s band after he died. 1939. A young woman as the front of a swinging machine, not a mascot.
- The Songbooks are a national filing system. Granz’s idea, her instrument. Porter to Mercer, cleaned and kept.
- Granz made the rooms desegregate or lose the date. The touring life includes that fight, night after night, in houses that wanted the voice and not the woman.
- Diabetes took the body in pieces. Eyes, then circulation, then the legs. She sang through as much of it as the parish allowed.
Ray Jr. and the household have had to share a voice the size of a century. Friends from the road describe a woman who could be shy at a table and absolute on a downbeat. She liked cookbooks, soap operas, and a kitchen that did not require a gown. The smile was real. The standard was not negotiable. She could be generous to a young singer and brutal to a tempo that drifted. Both are the life.
The later years
Home, by the 1970s, was a house on Whittier Drive in Beverly Hills and a calendar that still looked like a tour manager’s. Granz had sold Verve. He built Pablo Records and kept her working: Take Love Easy (1973) with Joe Pass, a guitar-and-voice room that is as intimate as the Songbooks are civic; Fine and Mellow (1974); Ella and Oscar (1975) with Oscar Peterson; the Montreux sets of 1975 and 1977; duets with Pass that treat a standard as a conversation you do not interrupt. She played Carnegie Hall as if it were a neighborhood room. She played neighborhood rooms as if they were Carnegie. The Kennedy Center Honors arrived in 1979. The National Medal of Arts in 1987. The Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992. Thirteen competitive Grammy Awards across the decades, plus a Lifetime Achievement Grammy, plus a place in the DownBeat hall that jazz people treat as a parish register. Yale gave her an honorary degree. Harvard did too. Dartmouth. Princeton. She accepted the hoods the way she accepted a downbeat: politely, and then she went back to work.
She did not become a Las Vegas waxwork. She became, instead, the visiting master a festival put on last so the night would have a center. In 1986 a heart attack slowed the road. Cataract surgery stole time from the eyes. The diabetes, which she had carried for years, began to take the circulation in her legs. She recorded All That Jazz in 1989 and 1990 — Gershwin, Mercer, a voice that had narrowed and was still exact. In 1991 she gave a concert at Carnegie Hall for her seventy-fourth birthday. In 1992 she sang at Radio City. Those are among the last public nights. The voice was not the 1956 instrument. It was still a measuring stick.
In 1993 both legs were amputated below the knee. She did not tour again. The house in Beverly Hills became the parish. Ray Jr. was in and out. Friends sat. The records did the traveling she could not. She died on June 15, 1996, at home, of the diabetes that had been editing the body for decades. She was seventy-nine. The funeral was private. The catalog did not notice. It still has not. Yonkers is the first room. The Apollo is the hinge. Beverly Hills was the last address. The Songbooks are the weather.
What she did in those last decades was not a farewell tour with a logo. It was the same job she had taken in 1935: show up, find the center of the tune, leave the room cleaner than she found it. Honorary degrees and Kennedy Center nights are civic objects. The Pablo records and the last Carnegie sets are the work. A listener who puts on the Cole Porter book in 1994 and a listener who puts it on now are doing the same thing. She had already finished the filing.
After she was gone
Every American singer who treats a standard as a text is in her house. The Songbooks are still how a lot of people learn Porter. The Berlin “Mack the Knife” is still a dare. The scat is still a trick students try and a language almost none of them speak. The Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation, set up from her estate, has sent money toward music education, toward people with diabetes, toward the kinds of rooms that once had to be argued into letting her in. Ray Brown Jr. has had to be a son and a curator. The Smithsonian and the Library of Congress keep the paper. Verve and Pablo keep the sound.
She came out of Newport News and Yonkers, froze at the Apollo, led a dead man’s band, filed the songbook, toured rooms that had to change their rules, and sang until the legs quit. If you only remember the scat, you have the trick. If you remember the amateur night, Granz, the Songbooks, and the last Carnegie downbeat, you have her.
Portrait: Carl Van Vechten · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons