A voice worth returning to

Ella Jane Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia, and grew up in Yonkers, New York. Orphaned young and briefly in difficult circumstances, she entered an amateur-night contest at the Apollo Theater in Harlem on November 21, 1934 — she was seventeen — and won it. The prize was supposed to change everything, but not quite yet: the talent scouts missed her that night. What she did gain was momentum, and within months she was singing with the Chick Webb Orchestra, the house band of the Savoy Ballroom, after joining them in 1935.

With Webb’s swinging big band behind her, Fitzgerald became the orchestra’s star vocalist. In 1938 she co-wrote and recorded “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” a nursery-rhyme adaptation that hit number one and sold more than a million copies — one of the biggest hits of the decade. When Webb died in June 1939, the band briefly carried on as “Ella Fitzgerald and Her Famous Orchestra,” with the young singer — barely in her twenties — leading it. Her Decca recordings from 1935 to 1955 made her famous, but the second act of her career made her immortal.

That second act began with the impresario Norman Granz, who became her manager and founded Verve Records around her; she signed in 1956. Granz understood what the market did not yet quite know: that a jazz singer could record the finest popular songs in the American repertoire with full orchestral care, and that the results would last. Between 1956 and 1964 Fitzgerald recorded her celebrated Songbook series — eight sets devoted to Cole Porter (1956), Rodgers & Hart (1956), Duke Ellington (1957), Irving Berlin (1958), George and Ira Gershwin (1959), Harold Arlen (1961), Jerome Kern (1963), and Johnny Mercer (1964). They are widely regarded as the most critically acclaimed work of her career, and the Gershwin Songbook of 1959 is often called the standout.

In the same period she made three landmark albums with Louis Armstrong: Ella and Louis (1956), Ella and Louis Again (1957), and a selection from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (recorded in the autumn of 1957, released in 1959). Her pure, precise tone and Armstrong’s gravelly warmth proved an ideal contrast, and the recordings remain the standard-bearers of jazz vocal duets. Then came the night that showed the world what she could do without a net: on February 13, 1960, at the Deutschlandhalle in Berlin, she forgot the lyrics to “Mack the Knife” mid-song and improvised her way through it so brilliantly that the recording won her a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

Listen to Fitzgerald with one idea in mind: she never forced a song to bend to her. Her diction was so clear that every word arrived intact; her pitch was so sure that she could scat through chord changes like a horn player and land exactly where she intended. Across more than seventy albums and some forty million records sold, she treated popular songs as serious music — and made serious music feel effortless.

The honours followed accordingly: thirteen Grammy Awards, the National Medal of Arts from President Reagan, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George H. W. Bush in 1992, and the Kennedy Center Honors in 1979. She died on June 15, 1996, in Beverly Hills, leaving the titles “First Lady of Song” and “Queen of Jazz” undisputed.

Follow the years