On the cover of Judith Tick’s groundbreaking biography of Ella Fitzgerald, a sepia-toned photo shows an elegant woman poking her head through a doorway with a playfully expectant expression on her face. Her almond-shaped eyes look sideways, as though spotting someone in the room—a fellow musician, perhaps. Her half-smiling lips seem about to say, “Hurry up, the band is waiting!” If you play music, you may imagine yourself being summoned. Other readers may imagine other scenarios. The photo invites curiosity, which fits perfectly with the author’s meticulous care in addressing a host of questions about the greatest American singer of the twentieth century.
This claim of greatness is not extravagant. Along with critical and commercial success, Fitzgerald won the esteem of musicians of every stripe and in every tradition. Henry Pleasants, the renowned author of several books about the vocal art of prominent singers in opera and popular song, wrote this about her rare gift:
She has a lovely voice, one of the warmest and most radiant in its natural range that I have heard in a lifetime of listening to singers in every category. She also has an impeccable and ultimately sophisticated rhythmic sense, and flawless intonation. Her harmonic sensibility is extraordinary. She is endlessly inventive. Her melodic deviations and embellishments are as varied as they are invariably appropriate. And she is versatile, moving easily from up-tempo scatting…to the simplest ballad gently intoned over a cushion of strings.
The frontispiece of Tick’s book presents a picture of the singer accompanied by the following caption: “Fitzgerald as a young girl, the earliest known photo. Undated, probably before 1932. Courtesy of Dorothy Johnson (Ella’s first cousin).” Can this scruffy teenager with the rakish grin be the same songbird rhapsodically described by Pleasants? Obviously, yes. But Tick, a professor emerita of music history at Northeastern University, leaves no doubt that “becoming Ella Fitzgerald” took not just a rare gift but rare grit—and luck.
The grit came from Fitzgerald’s mother, Temperance (Tempie) Williams, a native of North Carolina who was working as a cook in Newport News, Virginia, when the singer was born, in 1917. Ella’s father, William Fitzgerald, left when his daughter was two, so she never knew him. In the early 1920s, Tempie and a new common-law husband, an immigrant from the Cape Verde Islands, moved to Yonkers, New York. It was there, in the poorest section of that city, that Fitzgerald recalled growing up among “Hungarians, blacks, Spanish, and Italian, everybody,” and learning that “nobody was better than anyone else.”
Tick reports that despite their poverty, the family was made up of “strivers” committed to “pursuing self-reliance” and “middle-class ideals,” and that later in life, Fitzgerald’s “co-workers and friends sometimes made fun of her sense of propriety, her aversion to obscenity, and the importance she attached to good manners.” But as Tick explains, those attributes were rooted in a “politicized etiquette that bolstered pride and stiffened resistance” to the many-layered prejudices of the time.
Not every third grader impresses her teachers as “ambitious,” but Fitzgerald did. Encouraged by her mother, who sang along with opera, blues, and jazz on the radio and phonograph, young Ella won applause for her performances in school plays. But that applause led to a rebuke: “I got a little big head,” she said in a 1986 interview, “and one day somebody spoke to me in the street, and I turned my head up, and I thought I was great, and my mother slapped me.” The lesson was clear: Never snub anyone, because the day might come when that “very person…could be in a position to help you.”
When Tempie died suddenly, in 1934, seventeen-year-old Ella went to live with an aunt in Harlem. Not long afterward, she stepped onto the stage of the Apollo Theater as a contestant in Amateur Night at the Apollo. Intending to dance but awed by the polished performers who preceded her, she stood frozen in her hand-me-down garments, then choked out a few notes. The boos were already starting when the emcee came out and said, “Folks, hold on now. This young lady’s got a gift she’d like to share with us tonight. She’s just having a little trouble getting it out of its wrapper.” With this, Ella found her voice, and in the pungent words of another witness, “She shut us up so fast, you could hear a rat piss on cotton.”
It’s nice to think that a gift like that will always find its way. But luck matters too, as evidenced by Tick’s account of how Fitzgerald met Chick Webb, leader of the hottest swing band in Harlem. A brilliant drummer afflicted with spinal tuberculosis, Webb was “a hunchback with a stunted height of maybe four-and-a-half feet.” This disability, “which he ignored,” would kill him at the age of thirty. So it’s possible he was in too much of a hurry to bother with “girl singers,” a species valued mainly for their sex appeal. But that was before a critical mass of admirers brought this “painfully plain girl” with the “extraordinary vocal charisma” to his reluctant attention. Webb sat still for one song and hired her on the spot.
Music is a mysterious and elusive thing, and its beauty is easily lost in the shuffle of profit, power, and politics shaping every mode of cultural expression, but especially what Fitzgerald’s generation called “show business.” In that realm, the easiest way to survive is by pandering to the prejudices of the audience. It’s therefore not surprising that she was met with insults and slights. Yet rather than blame these setbacks on abstractions like racism, sexism, lookism, classism, and ageism, Tick traces the ingenious ways in which the singer and Norman Granz, her lifelong manager, thrived by challenging those prejudices.
Tick dismisses the myth that Granz was a Svengali hypnotizing a shy, awkward Fitzgerald into performing. Instead, she stresses Ella’s initiative every step of the way. For example, it was his idea to make a series of albums containing the best, most enduring songs written for Broadway and musical theater during the twentieth century. But it was her decision not to embroider them with melodic variations in the manner of older jazz masters like Louis Armstrong, or to supplant them with intense rhythmic scatting in the manner of young bebop virtuosos like Dizzy Gillespie. She was already mistress of both, but as Tick approvingly explains, she opted for a “curatorial” approach that “by muting her own personality…would clear space for a collective presentation of the songwriter’s oeuvre.”
Fitzgerald also muted herself when it came to joining the struggle for racial equality that loomed so large during her lifetime. She could have marched and sung protest songs, and was often asked to do so. But she preferred to devote her time, wealth, and talent to ground-level causes within the black communities of New York and, later, Los Angeles (where she moved in 1970). Tick quotes a 1977 article in the New York Amsterdam News praising her “profound humility” and noting that while “the world considers her ‘great’ and a ‘star,’ she never gloats on that fact. Instead, she expends her energy doing whatever she can to help others.”
This is one of many quotes from the black press of the time, including national newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, that have recently been digitized. Tick stresses that this “rich fount of new information” enabled her to upgrade the literature on Fitzgerald’s life from SD (standard definition) to HD (high definition). Even the most ardent fans will appreciate Tick’s meticulous re-creation of half-forgotten people and places, her inclusion of probing interviews in which Ella and other African Americans speak more candidly than elsewhere, and (not least) her reliance on black critics to render musical judgments more discerning than those issued by most of their white counterparts.
But this raises a vexed question: On a topic as resistant to cold analysis as music, how can anyone say what is “good” and what is “bad”? Are such judgments reducible to political statements? Are they wholly subjective? Is there a Platonic ideal against which we can compare Ella’s 1956 version of the Rodgers and Hart song “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” with Lady Gaga’s 2014 rendition? The question is vexed in part because artists like Ella make perfection look easy, and we are conditioned by 150 years of artistic modernism to value difficulty over ease. But whose difficulty are we talking about? That of the singer who spends her life learning how to delight audiences? Or that of the audience whose delight is the opposite of effort?
To her credit, Tick does not presume to explain ineffable phenomena such as the current of emotion that passed through the audience in Hannover, Germany, when Ella performed an extraordinary second take of “Nature Boy” during her 1975 concert with the superb guitarist Joe Pass. Rather than reduce the powerful sense of connection that invariably arose between Ella and her live audiences to biology, physics, psychology, or politics, Tick simply accepts it as central to her subject’s artistry.
For example, Tick relates how the lightning of Ella’s live performances posed a “daunting problem” to producers trying to capture it in the bottle of a studio recording. Here, too, it was Ella who devised the solution. Leading up to the first studio session for her 1956 LP Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook, she tried out the song list in a Hollywood jazz club, so that, in her words, “I could watch the faces.” Tick elaborates: “As she sang, she observed her listeners’ smiles and body language, their attentiveness and applause, to feel the vibe in the room and answer her perennial questions Am I making them happy? Do they like me? Am I reaching everyone?”
The coin of such questions is now greatly devalued, as billions of social media users play at projecting their putative charisma to a vast unseen audience. As we have now learned, the business model of these platforms drives online—and offline—self-expression toward ever-escalating anger and sexual exhibitionism. The same dynamic existed in show business during Ella’s lifetime. But no doubt owing to the attributes of aspiration, self-restraint, and humility conferred by her upbringing, she never succumbed to it. In a tribute written in 1996, on the occasion of her death, Stephen Holden of the New York Times hinted that those same attributes were the key to her magic onstage:
Miss Fitzgerald stood above the emotional fray…. Even when handed a sad song, Miss Fitzgerald communicated a wistful, sweet-natured compassion for the heartache she described. Where [Billie] Holiday and Frank Sinatra lived out the dramas they sang about, Miss Fitzgerald, viewing them from afar, seemed to understand and forgive all. Her apparent equanimity and her clear pronunciation, which transcended race, ethnicity, class, and age, made her a voice of profound reassurance and hope.
And a voice, I should add, whose human distinctiveness no technology will be able to replicate. Yes, we have arrived at a moment when otherwise intelligent people believe that generative AI will soon produce centillions of “songs in the style of Cole Porter sung in the style of Ella Fitzgerald.” When that day comes, the world will no doubt be impressed. But I, for one, will still be listening to the source.