Ella Fitzgerald Video Showcase

Ella Fitzgerald's music is more important than her personal details, except that, from the time of her discovery during the Great Depression through the last days of her life sixty years later, the names of those with whom she performed reads like a Who's Who of Big Band, Swing and Jazz.

Though she was born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1917, Ella Fitzgerald grew up in Yonkers, New York. At the age of fifteen, she lost her mother after a car accident. She rebelled against everything for a time and ended up running away from reform school and homeless during the Great Depression. She had only her talent on which to rely. In 1934, she won a raffle at the Apollo Theater to perform on Amateur Night. That happy accident led to her discovery. In 1935 she began singing and touring with Chick Webb and his big band and made her first recording, Love and Kisses, in 1936.

(Ella Fitzgerald's official web site and the Wikipedia article differ on the exact events and cause of Tempie Fitzgerald's death. Regardless, she took over the band in 1939 after Mr. Webb passed away, an unheard-of proposition in those days of entrenched segregation and limited rights for people of color.)

Over the next several years, Ella Fitzgerald's fame spread and she was in high demand from the stars of the day in the ensuing four decades. She appeared with Duke Ellington's orchestra, Louis Armstrong, Herb Ellis, Pearl Bailey, Frank Sinatra, Joe Pass, Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Tommy Flanagan, Count Basie, Dean Martin, Dinah Shore, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Antonio Carlos Jobim.

In her later life, Ella Fitzgerald suffered from diabetes and ended up losing her eyesight and her legs to the disease in the early 1990s. Her death in 1996 was the end of a beautiful and world-changing era.