Remembering Ella Fitzgerald

by Lara on June 14th, 2008

This week back in 1996: Jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald died at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 78.

Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra in undated photo.

Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald in undated photo.

I’ve previously written a Did You Know? post about Lady Ella, but here are 5 more facts about the legendary Miss Ella Fitzgerald:

- Over a recording career that lasted 57 years, she was the winner of 13 Grammy Awards, and was awarded the National Medal of Art by Ronald Reagan and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George H. W. Bush.

- In January 1935, Fitzgerald won the chance to perform for a week with the Tiny Bradshaw Band at the Harlem Opera House. This was where she met drummer and bandleader Chick Webb for the first time. He’d already hired singer Charlie Linton to work with the band, and was, The New York Times later wrote, “reluctant to sign her….because she was gawky and unkempt, a diamond in the rough.”

- She’s been immortalized in wax at Madame Tussauds in Las Vegas:

- With the demise of the Swing era in the mid-40s, and the decline of the great touring big bands, a major change in jazz music occurred. The advent of bebop caused a major change in Fitzgerald’s vocal style, influenced by her work with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band. Fitzgerald started including scat singing as a major part of her performance repertoire. While singing with Gillespie, Fitzgerald recalled, “I just tried to do [with my voice] what I heard the horns in the band doing.”

- The Songbook series ended up becoming the singer’s most critically acclaimed and commercially successful work, and probably her most significant offering to American culture. The New York Times wrote in 1996, “These albums were among the first pop records to devote such serious attention to individual songwriters, and they were instrumental in establishing the pop album as a vehicle for serious musical exploration.”

Here’s Ella singing “Georgia On My Mind” in Sweden in 1963: