Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Jane Fitzgerald was born in Newport News, Virginia, on the twenty-fifth of April 1917. Her family moved to Yonkers, New York, in her early childhood. Her mother died when Ella was fifteen; she lived briefly in a New York State reform school and then on the streets of Harlem before entering the amateur-night contest at the Apollo Theater on the twenty-first of November 1934. She won the twenty-five-dollar first prize.

She joined the Chick Webb Orchestra at the Savoy Ballroom the following year. After Webb's death in 1939 she led the band under her own name through 1942.

Across the next five decades she produced the canonical American jazz vocal repertoire. The eight Verve Records "Song Book" recordings she made between 1956 and 1964 — Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington (also placed in this archive), Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer — established the great American Songbook as a defined musical canon. Each Songbook was issued as a multi-disc set; each remains continuously in print.

She won thirteen Grammy Awards, the National Medal of Arts (1987), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1992), and the Kennedy Center Honors (1979). She recorded with Louis Armstrong (their Ella and Louis sessions of 1956-57 remain the most-cited jazz duo recordings of the twentieth century), Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Joe Pass — also placed in this archive's broader register.

Her technical resources — three-octave range, perfect intonation, the scat improvisation that her contemporary critics called instrumental, and a quality of dignity in interpretation that survived the changes of style across her sixty-year career — made her, by consensus, the singer who shaped what came next.

She died in Beverly Hills on the fifteenth of June 1996, age seventy-nine.

She is honored here as the First Lady of Song.