Ella Fitzgerald, a voice that set America’s standard
Ella Fitzgerald was born in 1917 in Newport News, Va., but spent most of her childhood in a poor section of Yonkers, N. Y. Her father, a longshoreman, left the family when she was young. Her mother did domestic work, and toiled in a commercial laundry.
Ella didn’t make it past junior high. She worked briefly as a lookout for a brothel, and was arrested for truancy. She spent time in an institution for troubled youth. She later told a relative she had been molested as a girl. She thought she might become a dancer.
Her break came when she was 17, at an amateur night at the Apollo Theater. She got over a bad case of stage fright and sang a Hoagy Carmichael song, “Judy.” A young Benny Carter was the musical director that night. Among those taken with her in the shows to come was the band leader Chick Webb, whose music had a hot, powerful style. He hired her.
“Big- band girl singers were fresh bait in those days,” Margo Jefferson has written, “dangled in front of audiences to soothe their souls and stir their hormones.” Some thought Fitzgerald was too plain-looking for the role. But her multi- octave voice and high spirits removed all doubts. Her first hit was “A- Tisket Atasket,” which teased jazz out of a nursery rhyme.
In “Becoming El la Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song,” Judith Tick recounts, almost concert by concert, how Fitzgerald was thrown straight into the deep end. In 1938, at the Savoy Ballroom, Count Basie’s band faced off against Webb’s in a battle of the bands. Billie Holiday was singing with Basie, so it was a battle of vocalists as well. Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman were in the audience.
In his novel “The Interrogative Mood” ( 2009), the one in which every sentence is a question, Padgett Powell asks, “Have you decided yet what historical moment you would have most like to have witnessed with your own eyes and ears?” That night at the Savoy would surely be high on many lists.
A slew of recording sessions and a lot of travel followed. Goodman tried to poach Fitzgerald from Webb. After Webb died of tuberculosis in 1939, at 34, Fitzgerald briefly led his band.
Before long, she was recording with Armstrong, whom she learned to lovingly imitate, and touring with Dizzy Gillespie. She performed in the all- star concert series Jazz at the Philharmonic. Oscar Peterson played with her, and in his memoir he recounted her “imperturbable musical confidence.” She was fronting the greatest jazz musicians alive, but she was unfazed:
On the finale each night, she courageously took on the front line horns, regardless of who they were … Ella traded fours, eights, sixteens or whatever they wanted with them and never got hurt. As a matter of fact, on various nights when some of the horns got a smidgen careless, Fitz would run up over them and keep right on going.
Fitzgerald stared down the jazz critics, too, who felt that vocalists ( especially female vocalists) cheapened jazz, diluted it and stole attention from the playing.
Tick is a professor emerita of music history at Northeastern University whose books include a biography Ruth Crawford Seeger, the modernist composer who also happened to be Pete Seeger’s stepmother. She chronicles the slights and insults Fitzgerald faced as a Black woman on tour, especially in the South. During the civil rights era, some wished Fitzgerald had been more outspoken. She felt she spoke more clearly through her work.
Tick’s biography builds toward, and finds its sweet spot in, Fitzgerald’s eight initial “Song Book” albums for Verve, recorded between 1956 and 1964. She had impeccable taste. She revisited and modernized songs by Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer. In the process, Tick writes, “she laid the foundational stones for what would soon be known as the Great American Songbook.”
Fitzgerald has proved to be a difficult subject for biographers. She could be remote in person, and withholding in interviews. A previous biography, by Stuart Nicholson in 1994, devolved in its second half into a blur of concert dates. Tick’s book delivers the same blur. It’s as if a Bob Dylan archivist were dryly printing every set list on his Never Ending Tour. Like Dylan, Fitzgerald was a hardened road warrior, as if performing nonstop would keep depression, and even death, at bay. There are decades of television appearances, on every talk and variety show from Glen Campbell’s to Flip Wilson’s, to chronicle as well. None of this takes us closer to her.
Academic language creeps like mold into this biography. ( Aretha Franklin’s song “Respect” is an “intersectional anthem.”) Elsewhere the verbiage is as impersonal as a rental car agreement: “Black variety entertainment flourished in a separate cultural milieu through entrepreneurial adaptation and new social relationships.” Tick clearly reveres Fitzgerald’s music, but her prose is buttoned- up. She can’t quite transmit her enthusiasms or make her distinctions stick.
Many listeners, then and now, find Fitzgerald’s recordings to be aloof and impersonal. In her introduction to a 2016 book on Billie Holiday, Zadie Smith, channeling Holiday, writes: “All respect to Ella, all respect to Sarah, but when those gals open their mouths to sing, well, to you it’s like someone just opened a brand- new Frigidaire. A chill comes over you.”
It doesn’t matter that Tick doesn’t use Smith’s comment. But there is a sense of easy layups missed. There are relatively few female voices in this book, which makes one miss Margo Jefferson’s devastatingly fine writing on Fitzgerald. Jefferson has described being embarrassed to watch Fitzgerald on television when she was a teenager, because Fitzgerald would sweat onstage. The perspiration threatened to “drag her back into the maw of working- class Black female labor.”
In a book short on humanizing detail, I was surprised to find a single sentence devoted to Fitzgerald’s cookbook collection. Tick doesn’t describe this collection, nor tell you that the 300 or so titles are housed at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library. Apparently, Fitzgerald didn’t cook from these books, but simply loved to read them, which makes her a kindred spirit to me. It’s poignant to note that she had diabetes, so she surely could not always have eaten what she longed to.
She annotated her cookbooks in the margins. Who would not want to know, in two or three paragraphs, what she put there? Tick doesn’t say. Nor does she note that Fitzgerald was said to have floor- to- ceiling bookshelves in every room in her house, and that she kept letters and other things inside her books.
It’s poor sportsmanship, perhaps, to write about what isn’t in a book as opposed to what is. But even browsing a Sotheby’s catalog of Fitzgerald memorabilia auctioned in 1997 gives you a deeper sense of her personal style than Tick manages to convey. According to The Chicago Tribune, a pair of her fake eyelashes sold for $ 900.
Nor does Tick describe Fitzgerald’s Beverly Hills house, though there are many photos online — it looks a bit like Larry David’s place on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” — or her rare and elegant cars. ( She didn’t drive, but enjoyed being chauffeured.) Unanalyzed too is what catnip Fitzgerald was to many of the last century’s most incisive photographers, including Lee Friedlander and Annie Leibovitz. Her supposedly plain looks were a blank canvas, of a sort, into which others read volumes.
Tick’s book warms again as she approaches the end of Fitzgerald’s life, in 1996. When she was in failing health, she liked to listen to her old records and try to remember everything. On one of her last days, her son hired a trio of excellent musicians to play for her. They were downstairs, she was upstairs, and the beautiful sound traveled up to find her.