Ella Fitzgerald was a highly influential singer who is considered to have been one of the most important artists in jazz.
Ella Jane Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia. Her parents, William and Temperance, separated shortly after her birth and she went to live with her mother and half-sister Frances in Yonkers, New York, where her mother's boyfriend Joseph Da Silva helped to raise her. However, when she was fifteen, her mother was killed in a car accident. Da Silva died shortly afterwards from a heart attack, and the girls went to stay with their Aunt Virginia. There, Ella, who had been a popular and successful student with a love of dance, became a habitual truant and started getting in trouble with the police. After being caught working as a lookout at a bordello, she was sent to a reform school where she was kept prisoner and was beaten by the teachers. Eventually she escaped, only to find herself alone and homeless in the middle of the Great Depression.
With no other way to make a living, Fitzgerald fell back on her remarkable natural talent as a vocalist, starting with a performance in New York City's Apollo Club when she was just seventeen. Shy, self-conscious, and disheveled in appearance, she didn't look like a star, but her voice soon won over the audience and impressed saxophonist Benny Carter so much that he became determined to help her succeed. He encouraged her to enter competitions, and it was one of these which led to her working with the Tiny Williams band at the Harlem Opera House, where she was spotted by the bandleader Chick Webb. She became a regular with his band at the Savoy Ballroom and they recorded several hits together. By the time of Webb's death in 1939 Fitzgerald's name had become so famous that she became bandleader herself.
In 1942, Fitzgerald decided to pursue a solo career. She worked with Louis Jordan and Norman Granz and subsequently toured with Dizzy Gillespie, developing new techniques as a scat vocalist and helping to lay the foundations of be-bop. Working with the Philharmonic, she recorded several albums with Louis Armstrong before Granz suggested that she try something a little different and introduced her to the songs of Cole Porter. This led to the first of a series of cover albums collectively known as The Great American Songbook, which also included interpretations of the work of Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer. She would later record a separate album devoted to the work of Antonio Carlos Jobim.
Fitzgerald married at least twice. Her first husband was dockworker Benny Kornegay, but they were together for just a few weeks before she discovered he had a criminal background and had the marriage annulled. Seven years later she married bassist Ray Brown, with whom she had a son, Ray Jr., though her commitment to touring at the time meant that the child was mostly raised by her aunt. Ray was very supportive of her work and helped her to advance her career, but their busy work schedules meant the couple saw little of each other and eventually divorced, though they remained friends. In 1957 it was reported that she had married young Norwegian Thor Einar Larsen, but she denied this and ended the relationship after Larsen was convicted of theft.
Fitzgerald's later life was plagued by illness. Her diabetes led to her going blind and later necessitated the amputation of both her legs. On June 15, 1996, it finally killed her. She is buried in Inglewood Park Cemetery in California.
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