![]() After Webb died in 1939, the young singer was the band's nominal leader until mid-1942, when it broke up. Miss Fitzgerald made her first recording in 1935 ("Love and Kisses," with Chick Webb), and had her first hit with "A-Tisket, A-Tasket," a song she helped write, adapting the lyric, she later explained, from "that old drop-the-handkerchief game I played from 6 to 7 years old on up." The record became a popular sensation and made her a star. "I thought my singing was pretty much hollering," she recalled many years later, "but Webb didn't." 21, 1934, she made her stage debut in an amateur contest at the Apollo Theater, singing two songs, "The Object of My Affection" and "Judy," in the style of Connee Boswell. Then in 1932, her mother died suddenly, and she went to live with an aunt in Harlem. "I tried so hard to sound just like her."Īs a teen-ager, Miss Fitzgerald developed a dance routine with a friend, Charles Gulliver, which they performed in local clubs. "My mother brought home one of her records, and I fell in love with it," she recalled many years later. But she also sang and was attracted to the recordings of Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and the Boswell Sisters, in particular the group's lead singer, Connee Boswell. The couple separated within a year of her birth, and with her mother and a Portuguese immigrant named Joseph Da Silva, she moved to Yonkers.Īs a child, Miss Fitzgerald dreamed of being a dancer. ![]() She was the product of a common-law marriage between William Fitzgerald and Temperance Williams Fitzgerald. "I never knew how good our songs were," Ira Gershwin once said, "until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them."Īlthough most biographies give her birth date as 1918, her birth certificate and school records show her to have been born a year earlier, on April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Va. But her perfect intonation, vocal acrobatics, clear diction and endless store of melodic improvisations - all driven by powerful rhythmic undercurrents - brought her nearly universal acclaim. (The jazz historian Barry Ulanov traced the term be-bop to her spontaneous interpolation of the word "re-bop" in her 1939 recording of "T'Ain't What You Do, It's the Way That You Do It.") She was sometimes criticized for a lack of bluesiness and emotional depth. Miss Fitzgerald was renowned both for her delicately rendered ballads and her pyrotechnical displays of scat improvisation. At her jazziest, her material became a springboard for ever-changing, ebullient vocal inventions, delivered in a sweet, girlish voice that could leap, slide or growl anywhere within a range of nearly three octaves. ![]() ![]() Her repertory encompassed show tunes, jazz songs, novelties (like her first major hit, "A-Tisket A-Tasket," recorded in 1938), bossa nova, and even opera ("Porgy and Bess" excerpts, recorded with Louis Armstrong). Over the decades, Miss Fitzgerald performed with big bands, symphony orchestras and small jazz groups. Her apparent equanimity and her clear pronunciation, which transcended race, ethnicity, class and age, made her a voice of profound reassurance and hope. Where Holiday and Frank Sinatra lived out the dramas they sang about, Miss Fitzgerald, viewing them from afar, seemed to understand and forgive all. Even when handed a sad song, Miss Fitzgerald communicated a wistful, sweet-natured compassion for the heartache she described. Stylistically she was the polar opposite of her equally legendary peer, Billie Holiday, who conveyed a wounded vulnerability. In a career that spanned six decades, Miss Fitzgerald stood above the emotional fray of the scores of popular standards she performed. ![]()
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