With a voice described as “earthy” and “youthful”, still familiar to many today, jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald has been described as “worth hearing in every phase of her career.” In 2023, “Rolling Stone” named her 45th in their list of the 200 “greatest singers of all time,” We remember the accomplishments of this stellar female entertainer during March Women’s History Month.
Born in Newport News, Virginia in April 1917, she was to become internationally known. She would give performance tours around the world, in places such as Australia, Norway and Panama after her rise to fame in the U.S.
Moving with her family as a toddler to Yonkers, she would eventually move to Hollywood, but it was in New York where she broke into music. Her mother died when Ella was 15, and she began busking on the streets of Harlem at the age of 16, in 1933. Though previously a good student, her grades began to slip and she got into trouble by skipping school and aligning with numbers runners. She was sent to a girls reformatory school for a time.
At the age of 17, in November 1934, she won one of the earliest amateur nights at the famed Apollo Theater. She sang with bands playing in Harlem for the next several years. Then her 1938 version of the nursery rhyme song she co-wrote, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” brought her public acclaim, becoming a major hit on the radio and also one of the biggest-selling records of the decade.
Known as the “First Lady of Song” and the “Queen of Jazz,” in 1959 while performing in a D.C. nightclub she was first invited to sing at the summer jazz festival held at Lorton Prison; an event held exclusively for prisoners and prison staff. As early as 1955, the prison was described as “500 [incarcerated residents] above safe operations.” Chaplains serving at the reformatory believed in the “redemptive and connective power of music.” They organized summer concerts held on the prison’s ball field, visiting D.C. nightclubs to invite musicians to participate. Fitzgerald was to sing there four more times between 1961 and 1968, the date of the last festival held there. Over the years, the annual Lorton Jazz Festival drew other big names, including Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Frank Sinatra during the same time period, but Fitzgerald was the first and most frequent famous performer.
Fitzgerald adapted her style several times over the 60 years of her career, from the swing era with big bands, to be-bop, to a series of song books featuring known composers, to blues, and rock and roll. She was known for singing “scat,” a vocal improvisation using wordless nonsense syllables, creating an instrumental sound with voice. She sang a glass shattering note in a Memorex cassette tape commercial, which when played back on tape also broke another glass, as viewers were asked "Is it live, or is it Memorex?” Although she popularized scat in the mid-40s, in recent years rap artists use her scat techniques to set the rhythms for songs, before coming up with their words.
Fitzgerald died in 1993 at the age of 79, a musical titan; the winner of 14 Grammy Awards, the National Medal of Arts, the NAACP's inaugural President's Award, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Visitors to the Lucy Burns Museum, located on the grounds of the former Lorton Reformatory where Fitzgerald delivered her concerts to appreciative prisoners, can see historic photos of the times and life at the prison. The Museum memorializes the work of many other dedicated women. Women who were instrumental in gaining the right to vote for women in the United States. For more information on the museum, see https://www.workhousearts.org/lucy-burns-museum.