Ella Fitzgerald
1917 – 1996
Known for: The First Lady of Song
“Her voice was pure joy, boundless and eternally free”
Biography
Ella Jane Fitzgerald emerged from poverty in Newport News, Virginia, to become one of the twentieth century's most luminous voices. Born in 1917, she discovered her gift for song almost by accident, winning an amateur contest at the Apollo Theater in Harlem as a shy teenager, and soon caught the ear of bandleader Chick Webb. Her voice possessed a crystalline purity that could slice through any orchestration, yet her greatest gift lay in her absolute command of language-each syllable crystalline, each phrase perfectly weighted, as if she were speaking rather than singing. Critics marveled at her impeccable diction and timing, qualities that set her apart from contemporaries and made even the most challenging material seem effortless.
Throughout a career spanning more than five decades, Fitzgerald became the standard-bearer for American jazz, a "First Lady of Song" whose influence transcended genre and generation. Her scat singing-that remarkable ability to make her voice a horn itself, improvising melodies with the inventiveness of any instrumentalist-demonstrated that jazz vocals could achieve the artistic sophistication of bebop and cool jazz. She recorded nearly two hundred albums, from her famous "songbook" interpretations of Gershwin and Cole Porter to her collaborations with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. When Ella Fitzgerald died in 1996, she left behind not merely recordings, but a blueprint for vocal excellence that continues to inspire singers and audiences alike.