A Harlem orphanage graduate became First Lady of Song
Ella Fitzgerald's pure tone and horn-like scat made her jazz's most celebrated female voice. A-Tisket, A-Tasket with Chick Webb vaulted her to fame; partnerships with Armstrong and Ellington, plus decades of songbook albums, earned the crowns Queen of Jazz and Lady Ella.
Ella Jane Fitzgerald (25 April 1917–15 June 1996) was praised for tone, diction, phrasing, timing, intonation, and improvisational agility. After a turbulent adolescence she found stability with the Chick Webb Orchestra, closely tied to Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. Her take on the nursery rhyme A-Tisket, A-Tasket lifted both her and Webb to national fame; after Webb's death she fronted the band before launching a historic solo career. Film and television appearances filled the later twentieth century, and duets with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and The Ink Spots yielded lasting sides such as Dream a Little Dream of Me and Cheek to Cheek.
Born in Newport News, Virginia, to William Ashland Fitzgerald and Temperance Fitzgerald, she grew up Methodist at Bethany AME Church, where worship and Sunday school gave early musical grounding. She loved dancing and modeled her singing on Connee Boswell after her mother brought home a Boswell Sisters record. Jazz discs by Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and the Boswells shaped her ear.
In 1932 her mother died from car-crash injuries; after time with a stepfather she moved in 1933 to an aunt in Harlem. Grades collapsed as she skipped school, worked as a bordello lookout and with a numbers runner, then entered the Colored Orphan Asylum in Riverdale when authorities intervened. That rough passage makes the later nicknames—First Lady of Song, Queen of Jazz—feel earned rather than public-relations fluff.
Source: Ella Fitzgerald
