octaves. Often referred to as the "First Lady of Song" and the "Queen of Jazz," she was

noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing and intonation, and a "horn-like"

improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.

Fitzgerald was a notable interpreter of the Great American Songbook. Over the course of

her 60-year recording career, she sold 40 million copies of her 70-plus albums, won

14 Grammy Awards and was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Ronald Reagan and the Presidential

Medal of Freedom by George H. W. Bush.

Early life Fitzgerald was born in Newport News, Virginia,

the daughter of William Fitzgerald and Temperance "Tempie" Fitzgerald. Her parents were unmarried,

and they had separated within a year of her birth. With her mother's new partner, a Portuguese

immigrant named Joseph Da Silva, Ella and her mother moved to the city of Yonkers, in

Westchester County, New York, as part of the first Great Migration of African Americans.

Initially living in a single room, her mother and Da Silva soon found jobs and Ella's half-sister,

Frances Da Silva, was born in 1923. By 1925, Fitzgerald and her family had moved to nearby

School Street, then a predominantly poor Italian area. At the age of six, Fitzgerald began

her formal education, and moved through a variety of schools before attending Benjamin

Franklin Junior High School from 1929. Fitzgerald had been passionate about dancing

from third grade, being a fan of Earl "Snakehips" Tucker in particular, and would perform for

her peers on the way to school and at lunchtime. Fitzgerald and her family were Methodists

and were active in the Bethany African Methodist Episcopal Church, and she regularly attended

worship services, Bible study, and Sunday school. The church would have provided Fitzgerald

with her earliest experiences in formal music making, and she may have also had piano lessons

during this period if her mother could afford it.

In her youth, Fitzgerald wanted to be a dancer, although she loved listening to jazz recordings

by Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and The Boswell Sisters. She idolized the lead singer Connee

Boswell, later saying, "My mother brought home one of her records, and I fell in love

with it....I tried so hard to sound just like her."

In 1932, her mother died from a heart attack. Following this trauma, Fitzgerald's grades

dropped dramatically, and she frequently skipped school. Abused by her stepfather, she ran

away to her aunt and, at one point, worked as a lookout at a bordello and also with a

Mafia-affiliated numbers runner. When the authorities caught up with her, she was first

placed in the Colored Orphan Asylum in Riverdale, Bronx. However, when the orphanage proved

too crowded, she was moved to the New York Training School for Girls in Hudson, New York,

a state reformatory. Eventually she escaped and for a time she was homeless.

Early career

She made her singing debut at 17 on November 21, 1934, at the Apollo Theater in Harlem,

New York. She pulled in a weekly audience at the Apollo and won the opportunity to compete

in one of the earliest of its famous "Amateur Nights". She had originally intended to go

on stage and dance, but, intimidated by the Edwards Sisters, a local dance duo, she opted

to sing instead in the style of Connee Boswell. She sang Boswell's "Judy" and "The Object

of My Affection," a song recorded by the Boswell Sisters, and won the first prize of US $25.00.

In January 1935, Fitzgerald won the chance to perform for a week with the Tiny Bradshaw

band at the Harlem Opera House. She met drummer and bandleader Chick Webb there. Webb had

already hired singer Charlie Linton to work with the band and was, The New York Times

later wrote, "reluctant to sign her....because she was gawky and unkempt, a diamond in the

rough." Webb offered her the opportunity to test with his band when they played a dance

at Yale University. She began singing regularly with Webb's Orchestra through 1935 at Harlem's

Savoy Ballroom. Fitzgerald recorded several hit songs with them, including "Love and Kisses"

and "(If You Can't Sing It) You'll Have to Swing It". But it was her 1938 version of

the nursery rhyme, "A-Tisket, A-Tasket", a song she co-wrote, that brought her wide public

acclaim. Chick Webb died on June 16, 1939, and his

band was renamed Ella and her Famous Orchestra with Ella taking on the role of nominal bandleader.

Fitzgerald recorded nearly 150 songs with the orchestra before it broke up in 1942,

"the majority of them novelties and disposable pop fluff".

Decca years

In 1942, Fitzgerald left the band to begin a solo career. Now signed to the Decca label,

she had several popular hits while recording with such artists as Bill Kenny & The Ink

Spots, Louis Jordan, and The Delta Rhythm Boys.

With Decca's Milt Gabler as her manager, she began working regularly for the jazz impresario

Norman Granz and appeared regularly in his Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts. Fitzgerald's

relationship with Granz was further cemented when he became her manager, although it would

be nearly a decade before he could record her on one of his many record labels.

With the demise of the Swing era and the decline of the great touring big bands, a major change

in jazz music occurred. The advent of bebop led to new developments in Fitzgerald's vocal

style, influenced by her work with Dizzy Gillespie's big band. It was in this period that Fitzgerald

started including scat singing as a major part of her performance repertoire. While

singing with Gillespie, Fitzgerald recalled, "I just tried to do [with my voice] what I

heard the horns in the band doing." Her 1945 scat recording of "Flying Home" arranged

by Vic Schoen would later be described by The New York Times as "one of the most influential

vocal jazz records of the decade....Where other singers, most notably Louis Armstrong,

had tried similar improvisation, no one before Miss Fitzgerald employed the technique with

such dazzling inventiveness." Her bebop recording of "Oh, Lady Be Good!" was similarly popular

and increased her reputation as one of the leading jazz vocalists.

Verve years Fitzgerald was still performing at Granz's

JATP concerts by 1955. She left Decca and Granz, now her manager, created Verve Records

around her. Fitzgerald later described the period as strategically crucial, saying, "I

had gotten to the point where I was only singing be-bop. I thought be-bop was 'it', and that

all I had to do was go some place and sing bop. But it finally got to the point where

I had no place to sing. I realized then that there was more to music than bop. Norman ... felt

that I should do other things, so he produced The Cole Porter Songbook with me. It was a

turning point in my life." Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook,

released in 1956, was the first of eight Songbook sets Fitzgerald would record for Verve at

irregular intervals from 1956 to 1964. The composers and lyricists spotlighted on each

set, taken together, represent the greatest part of the cultural canon known as the Great

American Songbook. Her song selections ranged from standards to rarities and represented

an attempt by Fitzgerald to cross over into a non-jazz audience. The sets are the most

well-known items in her discography.

Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book was the only Songbook on which the composer

she interpreted played with her. Duke Ellington and his longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn

both appeared on exactly half the set's 38 tracks and wrote two new pieces of music for

the album: "The E and D Blues" and a four-movement musical portrait of Fitzgerald. The Songbook

series ended up becoming the singer's most critically acclaimed and commercially successful

work, and probably her most significant offering to American culture. The New York Times wrote

in 1996, "These albums were among the first pop records to devote such serious attention

to individual songwriters, and they were instrumental in establishing the pop album as a vehicle

for serious musical exploration." A few days after Fitzgerald's death, The New

York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote that in the Songbook series Fitzgerald "performed

a cultural transaction as extraordinary as Elvis' contemporaneous integration of white

and African American soul. Here was a black woman popularizing urban songs often written

by immigrant Jews to a national audience of predominantly white Christians." Frank Sinatra

was moved out of respect for Fitzgerald to block Capitol Records from re-releasing his

own recordings in a similar, single composer vein.

Fitzgerald also recorded albums exclusively devoted to the songs of Porter and Gershwin

in 1972 and 1983; the albums being, respectively, Ella Loves Cole and Nice Work If You Can Get

It. A later collection devoted to a single composer was released during her time with

Pablo Records, Ella Abraça Jobim, featuring the songs of Antônio Carlos Jobim.

While recording the Songbooks and the occasional studio album, Fitzgerald toured 40 to 45 weeks

per year in the United States and internationally, under the tutelage of Norman Granz. Granz

helped solidify her position as one of the leading live jazz performers.

On March 15, 1955 Ella Fitzgerald opened her initial engagement at the Mocambo nightclub

in Hollywood, after Marilyn Monroe lobbied the owner for the booking. The booking was

instrumental in Fitzgerald's career. The incident was turned into a play by Bonnie Greer in

2005. It has been widely reported that Fitzgerald was the first Black performer to play the

Mocambo, following Monroe's intervention, but this is not true. African-American singers

Herb Jefferies, Eartha Kitt, and Joyce Bryan all played the Mocambo in 1952 and 1953, according

to stories published at the time in Jet magazine and Billboard.

There are several live albums on Verve that are highly regarded by critics. Ella at the

Opera House shows a typical JATP set from Fitzgerald. Ella in Rome and Twelve Nights

in Hollywood display her vocal jazz canon. Ella in Berlin is still one of her best selling

albums; it includes a Grammy-winning performance of "Mack the Knife" in which she forgets the

lyrics, but improvises magnificently to compensate. Verve Records was sold to MGM in 1963 for

$3 million and in 1967 MGM failed to renew Fitzgerald's contract. Over the next five

years she flitted between Atlantic, Capitol and Reprise. Her material at this time represented

a departure from her typical jazz repertoire. For Capitol she recorded Brighten the Corner,

an album of hymns, Ella Fitzgerald's Christmas, an album of traditional Christmas carols,

Misty Blue, a country and western-influenced album, and 30 by Ella, a series of six medleys

that fulfilled her obligations for the label. During this period, she had her last US chart

single with a cover of Smokey Robinson's "Get Ready", previously a hit for The Temptations,

and some months later a top-five hit for Rare Earth.

The surprise success of the 1972 album Jazz at Santa Monica Civic '72 led Granz to found

Pablo Records, his first record label since the sale of Verve. Fitzgerald recorded some

20 albums for the label. Ella in London recorded live in 1974 with pianist Tommy Flanagan,

guitarist Joe Pass, bassist Keter Betts and drummer Bobby Durham, was considered by many

to be some of her best work. The following year she again performed with Joe Pass on

German television station NDR in Hamburg. Her years with Pablo Records also documented

the decline in her voice. "She frequently used shorter, stabbing phrases, and her voice

was harder, with a wider vibrato", one biographer wrote. Plagued by health problems, Fitzgerald

made her last recording in 1991 and her last public performances in 1993.

Film and television

In her most notable screen role, Fitzgerald played the part of singer Maggie Jackson in

Jack Webb's 1955 jazz film Pete Kelly's Blues. The film costarred Janet Leigh and singer

Peggy Lee. Even though she had already worked in the movies, she was "delighted" when Norman

Granz negotiated the role for her, and, "at the time....considered her role in the Warner

Brothers movie the biggest thing ever to have happened to her." Amid The New York Times

pan of the film when it opened in August 1955, the reviewer wrote, "About five minutes suggest

the picture this might have been. Take the ingenious prologue ... [or] take the fleeting

scenes when the wonderful Ella Fitzgerald, allotted a few spoken lines, fills the screen

and sound track with her strong mobile features and voice." Fitzgerald's race precluded major

big-screen success. After Pete Kelly's Blues, she appeared in sporadic movie cameos, in

St. Louis Blues, and Let No Man Write My Epitaph. Much later, she appeared in the 1980s television

drama The White Shadow. She made numerous guest appearances on television

shows, singing on The Frank Sinatra Show, The Andy Williams Show, The Pat Boone Chevy

Showroom, and alongside other greats Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Mel Tormé, and many others.

She was also frequently featured on The Ed Sullivan Show. Perhaps her most unusual and