Ella Fitzgerald Biography Quotes 4 Report mistakes

Overview
Ella Jane Fitzgerald (1917, 1996), celebrated worldwide as the First Lady of Song, was an American vocalist whose purity of tone, flawless intonation, rhythmic agility, and imaginative improvisations reshaped the possibilities of jazz singing. Over a career spanning six decades, she moved from swing to bebop and beyond, collaborating with the greatest bandleaders and instrumentalists of the 20th century and creating definitive interpretations of the American popular song canon.

Early Life and Beginnings
Fitzgerald was born in Newport News, Virginia, and raised primarily in Yonkers, New York, after her family moved north during her childhood. Her early years were marked by hardship: her parents separated, her mother died while Ella was a teenager, and she endured periods of instability that included time in a reform school and stretches of homelessness. Music offered a lifeline. She loved the records of Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby, and she absorbed the pulse of Harlem in the 1930s, where swing bands, gospel, and blues mingled in dance halls and theaters.

Apollo Breakthrough and Entry into Professional Music
In 1934, still in her teens, Fitzgerald entered Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem intending to dance, but when stage fright changed her plan she chose to sing instead. Her poised performances brought the house to its feet. The Apollo triumph led to engagements around Harlem and, crucially, to an introduction to drummer and bandleader Chick Webb through saxophonist and arranger Benny Carter. Webb, whose orchestra headlined the Savoy Ballroom, hired Fitzgerald as a featured vocalist, giving her a professional home and an education in phrasing, time, and showmanship.

Chick Webb Orchestra and Breakthrough
With the Chick Webb Orchestra, Fitzgerald recorded and toured relentlessly. In 1938 she scored a national hit with A-Tisket, A-Tasket, a playful reworking of a nursery rhyme created with arranger Van Alexander. The record made her a star, showcased her irrepressible swing, and helped the band become a top draw. When Webb died in 1939, the band briefly continued as Ella Fitzgerald and Her Famous Orchestra, a testament to the singer's rising stature.

Decca Years and the Bebop Turn
Fitzgerald signed with Decca Records and broadened her reach with everything from elegant ballads to novelty tunes. Notable among her successes were collaborations with the Ink Spots, yielding hits that crossed genre lines and expanded her audience. In the mid-1940s she absorbed the innovations of bebop through close association with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and encounters with musicians in his orbit, including Charlie Parker. Bebop's harmonic daring and rhythmic elasticity catalyzed her own evolution; she developed a dazzling scat-singing vocabulary that used the voice like a horn, crafting solos of wit, swing, and structural coherence.

Norman Granz and the Global Stage
A turning point came when impresario Norman Granz, founder of Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP), became her manager. Granz championed integrated concerts and insisted on equal treatment for his artists on the road, a stance Fitzgerald supported and benefited from during an era of entrenched segregation. Through JATP, she shared stages with an elite roster, and Granz's strategic stewardship secured high-profile tours and recordings that burnished her international reputation.

Verve Era and the Songbooks
In the mid-1950s, Granz established Verve Records, and Fitzgerald embarked on the landmark series known as the Songbooks. Across albums devoted to Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer, she partnered with top arrangers and orchestras, among them Nelson Riddle and Buddy Bregman, and delivered performances that combined crystalline diction with unerring swing. These recordings became reference points for the interpretation of American popular song. She also forged enduring collaborations: with Louis Armstrong she made a trilogy of warm, conversational albums that balanced her silken clarity with his gravelly geniality; with Duke Ellington she explored suites and standards; with Count Basie she reveled in brassy, up-tempo charts. A pinnacle of her live artistry, Ella in Berlin (1960), captured her virtuosity and humor, most famously her spontaneous reinvention of lyrics during Mack the Knife, earning her further acclaim and awards.

Later Career: Small Groups and Intimate Mastery
As tastes changed in the 1960s and 1970s, Fitzgerald continued to command audiences worldwide. Under Granz's later Pablo label, she recorded intimate albums that spotlighted her conversational phrasing and deep musicality, including duos with guitarist Joe Pass and sessions with pianist Oscar Peterson. Longtime pianist and musical director Tommy Flanagan helped shape the elegant balance of swing and balladry that defined her concerts in this period. Whether fronting a big band or singing with a trio, she maintained immaculate time, inventive scat flights, and a gift for telling a song's story without affectation.

Artistry and Technique
Fitzgerald's artistry fused technical perfection with joy. Her pitch control and intonation were famously exact; her rhythmic feel allowed her to sit anywhere in the beat with natural ease; her range, timbre, and breath support enabled ringing high notes and plush low ones. In scat, she constructed choruses with motivic development, quoting tunes with sly humor and navigating harmonic changes with the fluency of a horn player. Yet virtuosity never obscured meaning: on ballads she favored directness, clarity, and emotional honesty. Peers from Armstrong to Ellington praised her musicianship, and generations of singers and instrumentalists have studied her recordings as textbooks in swing, phrasing, and improvisation.

Personal Life
Fitzgerald's private life remained comparatively guarded. She married briefly in the early 1940s before the union was annulled, and later married the eminent jazz bassist Ray Brown in 1947; though they divorced in the 1950s, they remained professionally allied and together adopted Ray Brown Jr. Her demanding schedule meant constant travel, but she cultivated close working relationships that doubled as support networks, figures like Norman Granz, Tommy Flanagan, Joe Pass, and Oscar Peterson were collaborators as well as companions on the road. Deeply mindful of the opportunities music had afforded her, she established a charitable foundation later in life to support music education, literacy, and underserved communities.

Honors, Health, and Final Years
Recognition followed her wherever she sang. Fitzgerald won numerous Grammy Awards across decades, including honors at the very first Grammy ceremony and a Lifetime Achievement Award. She received the Kennedy Center Honors, the National Medal of Arts, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, reflecting her status as a cultural treasure. Chronic health issues, especially diabetes and heart problems, eventually curtailed her touring; in the early 1990s she suffered serious complications that led to the amputation of both legs below the knee. Even as illness advanced, she remained a beloved figure, her recordings continuously reissued and celebrated by new audiences. She died in 1996 in California.

Legacy
Ella Fitzgerald's legacy is both musical and civic. Artistically, she stands as the consummate jazz singer, merging swing-era buoyancy with bebop sophistication and setting an enduring standard for interpretive honesty. Historically, her career illustrates how excellence, wise stewardship by allies like Norman Granz, and principled insistence on dignity could breach segregated barriers. Across collaborations with Chick Webb, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, and many others, she left a recorded map of American song at its zenith. From concert halls to classrooms, her voice continues to teach that technical mastery and generosity of spirit can coexist, and that singing, at its best, can be an instrument of freedom.

Our collection contains 4 quotes who is written by Ella, under the main topics: Never Give Up - Music - New Beginnings.

Other people realated to Ella: Nat King Cole (Musician), Hugh Hefner (Publisher), Benny Green (Musician), Carl Van Vechten (Writer), Louis Jordan (Musician), Ray Brown (Musician), Billy Strayhorn (Composer)