To Ella, With Love
On the glorious, radical, beautiful, mysterious First Lady of Song, Ella Fitzgerald
My illustration of a photograph of Ella Fitzgerald at Mr. Kelly's nightclub, Chicago, Illinois, 1958. (Photo: Yale Joel)
It is 1999, it is my birthday, I am eleven years old and standing in the middle of the Castle Towers Sanity Music store. In my hands, vacuum sealed in plastic, is Ella sings the Rogers and Hart Songbook. The moment I pick it up I know that it is special. For one thing, it is not formed like other CDs, those envelopes of flimsy plastic that so easily crack if you happen to drop them during an enthusiastic (if not precise) dance break, or if you step on them on the floor of a darkened bedroom as you blearily fumble for the light switch. This album has been crafted to be a cd-sized facsimile of the original record, which was produced and released in the autumn of 1956 by Verve—the record label founded by Norman Granz and eventual home of Nina Simone as well The Velvet Underground.
The album’s exterior is made out of heavy uncoated card, its colours a little duller, and the image of Ella—a sweet shy smile, her head resting on her hands—a little diffuse, showing the tiny little dots of ink that form images on a page, revealing the grain of the paper. The album unfurls like a book too, with a sleeve that holds a small booklet of notes that I will read and reread until the pages come loose from its stitching and are stained white where the ink has lifted onto my fingertips. It is heavier than a normal cd: it makes its presence known. It is, in effect, irresistible to my eleven year old self. I was already infected, already half in love with the object itself and note—by this point—I had yet to hear Ella’s voice. That pleasure was still to come. But that is how I came to discover Ella Fitzgerald.
Ella Fitzgerald sings the Rodgers & Hart Songbook (1956, Verve)
For one who is widely known, alongside Billie Holliday, as the pre-eminent jazz singer of her lifetime, if not in the history of the genre itself, Ella Fitzgerald’s personal biography is decidedly piecemeal, a chiaroscuro of fact and conjecture. For someone so beloved, there are very few critical works on Ella Fitzgerald’s life. As far as I know, there is only one significant biography of Ella Fitzgerald: Ella Fitzgerald: A Biography of the First Lady of Jazz, written by Stuart Nicholson, which is as I write this now, is more than 27 years old (though Nicholson would release a new edition in 2004). The brevity of scholarship of Fitzgerald’s life seems unusual because hers is a voice that most of us—even we aren’t aware of it—know intimately. If you’ve ever watched a rom com set in NYC, you’ve heard her (Nora Ephron was a clear devotee). You’ll have also heard her in advertisements of all stripes and spots that want to impart a jaunty classiness to more base proceedings. Also, in my mind, she is inextricably knitted to the concept of Christmas. If you have been in a cafe, in a shopping centre, in a grocery store, in a cinema during Christmas, you have heard Ella Fitzgerald’s voice. Amid the lugubrious covers of carols you’ve heard a million times before to the point that if you hear another cheap, anodyne cover of ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ you might want to immolate yourself with a particularly pointy Christmas ornament, she often emerges from the aural scrim, with clarion-like freshness.
And yet, despite this, the inner life of the First Lady of Song remains much of a mystery. Most of this, of course, was of her own preference and undertaking. As Frank Rich in the New York Times described in Fitzgerald’s obituary
“Unlike pop icons from Sinatra to Madonna, Fitzgerald didn't turn her private life into a melodramatic sideshow for public consumption…..Her shyness was not an affectation; her spurning of glamour was not an act. In this way -- and this way only -- Ella Fitzgerald departed so radically from the show-business norm that she could almost be called un-American.”
Frank Rich was right. There was something subversive in the ways Ella Fitzgerald eluded show business gossip, the graceful means by which she refused to cater to the overwhelming, unceasing demands that a performer must exsanguinate their inner life for public consumption.
Colourised photograph of Ella Fitzgerald on January 19, 1940 by Carl Van Vechten
That is not to say that Ella Fitzgerald did not have a fascinating or storied history worth inspecting. Indeed, despite the little we know of it, there is enough fodder for a solidly plotted biopic. Born in 1917, Ella Jane Fitzgerald grew up on the streets of Yonkers, the city of seven hills, two miles north of the northernmost point in Manhattan. She never got to meet her father, William Fitzgerald. In 1932 (in the crest of the Great Depression) Ella’s beloved mother, Temperance ‘Tempie’ Fitzgerald died. Ella would claim that her mother died in injuries sustained from a car accident, but her biographer Stuart Nicholson could not confirm this. However the means by which Tempie died, we know that it occurred with devastating swiftness. We do not know what Fitzgerald’s life was like at this moment—we can only imagine how painful, how acute her grief must have been to lose a mother at 15. Nicholson speculates that she might have experienced abuse at the hands of her stepfather Joe, as soon after her mother’s death, and with much readiness, Ella was dispatched to live with her Aunt Virginia, 10 miles south of Yonkers in Harlem, NYC.
It is in Harlem where she—as many other musicians of her stature would—be discovered, but until a cold November night in 1934, life was only a string of grim promises for 15 year old Ella. Despite being an excellent student in Yonkers, Ella would soon drop out of school in Harlem. She would start making money as a lookout for police for local brothels and mafia, eventually caught by authorities and sent to New York State Training for Girls, a reform school where black girls were segregated from the rest of population, forced to live in the worst, most neglected of accommodations and abused daily by the men who worked there. As described by the school’s last superintendent, during her time at New York State Training for Girls, Ella was "held in the basement…and all but tortured.” Released from reform school, but unable to return to her family, Ella lived an itinerant existence for more than a year, sleeping rough on the “Boulevard of Dreams”, Seventh Avenue between 130th and 140th. But talent nights—contests where amateurs could perform, win money and perhaps more—were an almost daily opportunity and it would be on such a night at the Apollo Theatre, on 21st November 1934, that Ella would first be discovered. That night Ella had drawn straws with two friends on who would strike it out and perform, and had come up with the short straw. She was determined to dance to glory.
The idea of Ella Fitzgerald as a dancer is highly intriguing (if difficult) to conceptualise, because as a public figure, we rarely saw her dance. As a vocal performer Ella was all élan and agility to the very end: melodic jetés were her speciality. But as a young girl, Ella was also a good enough dancer that neighbours at Yonkers would call her “Snakehips Ella”, christened so after the Black dancer Earl "Snakehips" Tucker, whose body so lissome he would be described as the “Human Boa Constrictor”. We can be thankful then that when “Snakehips Ella” went onstage at that night, and glimpsed her competition, her nerves failed her so that she found she couldn’t dance, not at all.
Apollo Theater on Nat King Cole Walk in Harlem where Ella was first discovered. Amateur Nights are still held to this day.
A couple of years ago, in a sort of informal pilgrimage, I visited the Apollo Theater in Harlem. During the theatre’s history tour, I reverently touched the theatre’s elm-tree stump that all performers must pay homage to before they cross Apollo’s stage and wondered—with a more than little bit of awe—if Ella might have touched this too. The Apollo Theater is not as large as it seems on tv, but standing on that stage I imagined the sting of the stage lights, the throng of people, the roar of the crowd, all the elements could have easily paralysed even the most jaded of performers, and thought of the bravery of Ella Fitzgerald, who had been homeless at this point for many months—her appearance so unkempt that she was not invited to sing on the Apollo stage for rest of the week, which was her right as winner that night—who at first was so immobile with fear of the thousand eyes on her, that the stage manager (no doubt used to this flagging of courage) would bark: 'You're up here, do something!’. And so she sang.
As Ella described, the first thing that came to mind was Connee Boswell. Connee Boswell, who grew up and became a singer in New Orleans, the birthplace and hothouse of jazz, who found fame as part of The Boswell Sisters trio, who was reportedly among Bing Crosby’s very favourite duet partners, and who did all this using a wheelchair at a time when living with disability was rarely visible. Before 1934, before Harlem, before reform school, Ella’s mother Tempie would buy records for Ella: records by Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and Connee Boswell, the latter of whom Ella felt she could do an apt imitation of. And so that night, Ella thought of Connee Boswell (and perhaps her mother too) and sung ‘’Judy' in a voice as close to Connee’s as she could muster, and won. When one listens to Boswell’s cover of Jerome Kern’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, one can hear in her velvety cadence, a type of vocal DNA that we would now forever associate with Ella’s. It’s in the open vowel when Boswell sings “replied”, and the sort of girlish tenor as she scoops the words “something here” in the line “I of course replied, something here inside cannot be denied”. When I hear Connee Boswell, I hear the inchoate voice of Ella Fitzgerald, and it feels like a sort of time-travel.
Ella Fitzgerald may have found initial fame in a moment primed for showbiz fable, but her life was hardly (if ever) the stuff that dreams were made of. From the very beginning, Ella Fitzgerald was frequently rejected for her appearance, either as a Black woman, or as a woman whose body did not accommodate others’ (often men’s) limited imaginations. Throughout her life (and after it, Stephen Holden in his NYT obituary would describe her as “this hefty, unglamorous woman”), Ella would be routinely described as “frumpy” and “sexless”. Even her biographer, Stuart Nicholson, cannot help but observe that Ella was someone who “transcended her matronly appearance, leaving just the purity of her voice.” Before her next big break—as a feature singer and eventually headliner for Chick Webb's Savoy Orchestra (the orchestra that set hearts a tizzy and foots aflutter at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom)—the titular bandleader Chick Webb declared that he didn’t “want that old ugly thing!" joining his orchestra. Though Webb would eventually take Fitzgerald under his wing, giving her the stability that she so desperately needed, becoming her legal guardian and bequeathing her the leadership of his band after his early death, it must have been incredibly wounding for 17 year old Ella to have been so relentlessly and unjustly censured for her appearance. It is heartrending to read Ella’s own words about her body: "I know I'm no glamour girl", and wonder if Fitzgerald internalised the sexism she endured, with devastating and stifling effects on her self-esteem and sense of self-image. The sexism that Fitzgerald lived with all her life continues to prevail today through contemporary assessments of her work, which often still write within the prism of Fitzgerald’s (to their mind) sexless, maternal presence. As Dwandylan Reece writes in NPR,
“the manner in which critics and fans discussed (Fitzgerald) is coded with preconceptions that detract from her own artistic license. Her physical size was also a frequent topic of discussion, equating the maternal image of a larger woman with a voice absent of sexual desire.”
By the time he died in 1939, Chick Webb had been both lightning-rod and anchor for Ella’s young life, and his death unmoored her. After three years, the band folded and twenty-five year old Ella would venture out, alone again, for further famed waters. Here she would bounce from various bands, learning to scat from Dizzy Gillespie, the trumpeter extraordinaire, and creating records for Decca and later, for jazz impresario, Norman Granz, who would become her producer by the mid-1940s. From 1956 to 1964, collaborating with Granz, Ella would produce the most celebrated part of her career: eight song books from colossuses of American music including Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Duke Ellington and Irving Berlin. Already successful before the song books, Ella would soon move from the relative niche of mid-century jazz to the exposed firmament of mainstream pop.
Ella sings at Downbeat, NYC, ca. September 1947 while Dizzy Gillespie (right) looks on adoringly. (Photo: William P. Gottlieb)
But what was so remarkable about Ella Fitzgerald, the performer? It’s not just the loveliness of her voice as sound: the tonal quality that—for much of her life—always seemed situated in the precipice between girlish blitheness and honeyed, womanly warmth. It’s not just her seemingly perfect (relative) pitch. In his recollections of Ella, Mel Tormé described trying (and failing) to find a song, a moment, where Ella Fitzgerald ever sang a note out of tune. It’s also not just her just-so diction: those crisp, effortless inflections that let a lyric breathe and meant that lyricists often loved her as much as Fred Astaire (for whom many of the songs that Ella would sing in her song books would be written for). It wasn’t also only her virtuosic talents for improvising: the impeccable sense memory that allowed her to scat and extemporise often for 8 minutes at a time, labyrinthine musical phrases of such musicianship, such wit, while never losing her place. It also wasn’t just her often perfect phrasing—the storytelling instinct to know when to pull a word or a note to its margins and the taste to know when not to—or the exquisite rightness of her breathing, her intonation, her unassailable sense of rhythm, her seamless leaps from the lowest reaches to the uppermost heights of her three-octave range. No, it was rather all of it: the miracle that all this talent, instinct and verve should be encompassed by one singular instrument and one performer, who never, in my mind, sang with affectation or with inauthenticity her entire career.
Ella performing in Amsterdam on 19 February 1961. (Photo: Hugo van Gelderen)
In creating and performing the song books, Ella was doing important work not just from artistic imperatives but political ones too. Here she was, a Black woman from Yonkers singing songs primarily written by Jewish men (and one Black composer, Duke Ellington) to mostly white audiences who did not listen to jazz, but unalloyed pop. The fact that Fitzgerald could so elegantly infiltrate the lives of White, middle class Americans who would not have thought twice about the systemic racism so virulently staining the heart of their nation, or of their unassailable superiority based on the colour of their skin, is a radical act in itself.
Ella created the song books during the apex of the 20th century Civil Rights Movement. 1964 would augur the last of her song books, the same year that the Civil Rights Act would be writ into government. With the support of her producer, Norman Granz, Ella could refuse to sing in venues with segregated seating and she would be paid fairly and equally to her white counterparts on Granz’s roster. But in 1964 the work was not done yet (it isn’t done now), and Ella would fight segregation and rampant racial discrimination throughout her career with as much alacrity as she would tackle a song, winning the NAACP Equal Justice Award and the American Black Achievement Award for her civil rights efforts across her lifetime.
An example of an instagram post promoting the largely untrue story about Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe.
I write this tribute to Ella two weeks after George Floyd’s death, in a moment that seems suffused with both fulsome despair and incipient hope. Lately there’s been an anecdote that I’ve seen making the rounds on Instagram and other social media that features Ella Fitzgerald in the context of Black Lives Matter that unnerves me. The anecdote is this: in 1954, Charlie Morrison, manager of Mocambo, a high flying club in LA, is said to have refused to book Fitzgerald on the basis of her race. Marilyn Monroe—freshly minted from the success of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and already one of the biggest stars in the world—is said to have intervened on her behalf, promising, if Morrison booked Fitzgerald, that she, Marilyn, would attend and sit on the front row every night for the duration of Fitzgerald’s appointment. This negotiation Morrison would accept, and the break into Mocambo and the publicity ushered from Monroe’s attendance, would be a boon for Fitzgerald’s career, for which Fitzgerald would forever credit Monroe for initiating. Lately I’ve seen those famous, lovely photographs of Ella and Marilyn sitting side by side, and this anecdote, where Monroe is touted as a shining example of White ally-ship. In my mind, these posts (while perhaps well-intentioned) reflect a rather tone-deaf signal that infers a “what aboutist” and “not everyone was bad” historical perspective on racism, by re-centring on a White saviour narrative rather than the real, unceasing, narrative of systemic racism and individuals who were (are) subjugated by it.
This is particularly apparent when you discover that the heart of this story—that is Fitzgerald was refused by the Mocambo due the fact she was black—is largely apocryphal. According to various Monroe biographers, Morrison was himself a personal fan of Fitzgerald, and had already booked a number of Black performers at the Mocambo long before Ella’s own debut, including Dorothy Dandridge in 1951 and Eartha Kitt in 1952. Morrison’s objections to Fitzgerald performing lay in the way Fitzgerald looked; he felt that she was not glamorous enough (i.e. not thin enough) to win over star-studded crowds of West Hollywood. Some researchers posit primary sources that indicate that Monroe had nothing to do with the Mocambo booking at all, and was likely to have been too busy to be present every night when Ella performed at the Mocambo. The famous photos of Ella and Monroe enshrined in Instagram and Twitter memes were in fact taken at the Tiffany Club, an entirely different venue than the Mocambo. Whatever Monroe’s role ultimately was, it seems clear that Ella was grateful to her and attributed some of her success to Monroe, and in that way Monroe can perhaps be seen as an ally for Fitzgerald, though primarily in supporting Ella’s lifetime struggle against sexism—not racism. I make this point because it seems to me important in the context of Black Lives Matter to correct the untruths of this story, and to re-centre it from Monroe’s (likely fictional) magnanimity to Ella’s (real) bravery and tenacity, and those of the many, many Black performers and artists who we will never know about, who were daily denied these opportunities and of whose painful experiences have been rubbed out from the margins of history.
When you listen to Ella Fitzgerald singing ‘Ridin High’ as she does on one of her most celebrated songbooks: Ella Sings Cole Porter (No more clouds in the sky/how I’m ridin?/I’m ridin’ high), it is difficult to comprehend the fact that this voice of such radiance could have experienced such a Dickensian beginning, a girlhood so virulently enmeshed with violence, and then later, a lifetime of disenfranchisement and exclusion. But that is part of what makes Ella Fitzgerald so unbelievably powerful, so mesmerising to me. For some critics (even those who claim to love her), this is her greatest flaw. According to them, Ella Fitzgerald was incapable of evoking emotion beyond the most sanguine of feelings, joy was her singular register; she sounded happy even when she was supposed to be sad. In 1962, the music critic Nat Hentoff wrote, “And Ella, technically brilliant as she is, is not emotionally open enough in her singing to merit a place in the first rank of jazz singers.” In 1964, Martin Williams writes a similar skewering assessment: “Ella Fitzgerald is not capable of tragedy” and later in 1994, Margo Jefferson wrote: “She's girlish but sexless, cordial but distant, and she has no emotional attachment to the lyrics of her songs.”
I find that these beliefs (of which the critic Dwandylan Reece writes, are still being promulgated) to be wantonly lacking in imagination. Singers have always had a wide emotive palette by which to evoke the (often painful) vicissitudes of lived experience. Billie Holiday's melancholy, the chasm of grief expressed in her vocal quality is as inimitable (though lots of people have tried and failed) as it is devastating, but it need not be the only model or standard by which we judge the emotional power of a performance (indeed, I am sure that male singers of Ella’s stature were not nearly as derided as Ella Fitzgerald for their appearance or seeming emotive shortcomings). Not only do I believe that these assessments of Ella’s apparent inadequacies to be of limited imagination, I also find them rooted in latent misogynist (if not racist) prejudice. Why is it easier for these (notably white) critics to imagine that Ella was a talented if vacant automaton or forever-child who didn’t understand (or care) about the words she was singing, rather than a subtle and discerning performer who chose often (but not wholly) the sometimes radical qualities of joy? In my mind, the failure lies not in Ella Fitzgerald’s own lack of emotional understanding, but in the failure of such critics to meet hers.
I love Billie Holiday, Sam Cooke or even Frank Sinatra for their melancholy, and for the palpable frisson of grief that seems knitted into their vocal qualities. But there is a type of profundity too in singing with unalloyed pleasure and without restraint, when the world has told you, since you were very young, that due to your body, your sex and your skin, that you were made for pain and disenfranchisement. When I hear Ella Fitzgerald sing, I hear the voice of resilience, a voice that has transmuted the not inconsiderable traumas of her life into a defiant embrace of beauty and pleasure. In such a way, she has been a lodestar for so many, including myself. And that is why I love her, above all other voices, most of all.
(June 2020)
Bibliography and Further Reading
Bernstein, N. (1996). Ward of the State; The Gap in Ella Fitzgerald's Life. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/23/weekinreview/ward-of-the-state-the-gap-in-ella-fitzgerald-s-life.html
Cunniffe, T. (2017). Ella Fitzgerald at 100. Jazz History Online. https://jazzhistoryonline.com/ella-at-100/
Gleason, H. (2019). The Joy Of Ella Fitzgerald's Accessible Elegance. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/05/749021799/the-joy-of-ella-fitzgeralds-accessible-elegance
Holden, S. (1996). Ella Fitzgerald, the Voice of Jazz, Dies at 79. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/16/nyregion/ella-fitzgerald-the-voice-of-jazz-dies-at-79.html
Jefferson, M. (1994). Books of The Times; A Jazz Legend and How She Grew. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/01/books/books-of-the-times-a-jazz-legend-and-how-she-grew.html
Morgan, M. (2012). Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed: New edition: revised and expanded. Hachette UK.
Nicholson, S. (2014). Ella Fitzgerald: A biography of the first lady of jazz. Routledge.
Reich, H. (1996). Jazz Legend Ella Fitzgerald Dies. Chicago Tribune. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1996-06-16-9606160314-story.html
Reece, D. (2019). Ella Fitzgerald, Ethel Waters And The Colors Of Sound. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/04/749024869/ella-fitzgerald-ethel-waters-and-the-colors-of-sound
Rich, F. (1996). Journal: How High the Moon. New York Times.
Rosman, F.R. (2012). Ella Fitzgerald, first lady of humanity. National Museum of American History. https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/2012/06/guest-blog-ella-fitzgerald-first-lady-of-humanity.html
Saunders, C. (2018). Marilyn & Ella: the "truth" behind Ella's booking at the Mocambo. Stars and Letters: Letters from Hollywood's Golden Age. https://starsandletters.blogspot.com/2018/05/marilyn-ella-truth-behind-ellas-booking.html
Siegel, S. (1983). Ella, the 'Lady Be Good’. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1983/06/04/ella-the-lady-be-good/c1236c19-ae85-42c3-af6e-bdf88ebad243/
Stamberg, S.(2017). Early Hardship Couldn't Muffle Ella Fitzgerald's Joy. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2017/04/25/524726767/early-hardship-couldnt-muffle-ella-fitzgeralds-joy
Thompkins, G. (2019). The World Of Ella Fitzgerald: A Turning The Tables Playlist. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/03/749012255/the-world-of-ella-fitzgerald-a-turning-the-tables-playlist
Vitale, T. (2017). Remembering Ella Fitzgerald, Who Made Great Songs Greater. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2017/04/25/525583944/remembering-ella-fitzgerald-who-made-great-songs-greater