When Ella Fitzgerald was young, no one would have guessed she’d grow up to be one of the most-famous singers in the world. That people would call her “The First Lady of Song.” That she would win 14 Grammy Awards and sell more than 40 million record albums.Ella Jane Fitzgerald was born in Newport News, Virginia on April 25, 1917. Her parents, William and Temperance (called Tempie) separated shortly after Ella was born. She and her mom moved to Yonkers, New York.Things were good for a number of years, but then her mother died in a traffic accident. Ella and her half-sister, Frances, went to live with an aunt.The loss of her mother and the change in circumstances hurt Ella. She went from being a good student and a girl who was happy and loved fun, to being someone who got bad grades, often skipped school, and got into trouble. The police sent her to a reform school – a kind of prison for troubled kids. She was 15 years old.The people at the reform school were very cruel. They often beat her and treated her with unkindness. She managed to escape, but there she was, only 15, with no place to live and no way to earn a living. Plus, this was 1932 and the United States was in the middle of what is called The Great Depression. There were not many jobs and most people, it seemed, were poor and struggling.Two years later, in 1934, Ella’s name was drawn to compete in an amateur talent contest at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York. She went to the theater planning to dance. She had fallen in love with dancing back in the third grade and thought she could do a good job in the contest. But when she saw how much better some of the other contestants were at dancing, she didn’t think she had a chance.When Ella got on stage, she froze. She was scared and looked ragged. The audience started booing her because she just stood there. Ella’s legs were shaking from being frightened, so she decided not to dance, but to sing, instead. She asked the band to play a popular song called “Judy.” The audience quieted down and liked her singing so much, they demanded that she sing another song, which she did. She won the contest.Singing on that stage made Ella want to sing for people the rest of her life.However, wanting to be a singer and actually getting paid for singing are two different things. But in the band that night at the Apollo was a saxophone player named Benny Carter, who introduced Ella to people and helped her find work as a singer.Ella was black and overweight, not a thin white woman like many famous movie stars and successful singers were in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. But her singing was so great that people, black and white, rich and poor, wanted to hear her and see her.One of the things Ella could do better than most people is called scat singing. Jazz was very popular, and jazz musicians accompanied Ella as she sang. Jazz musicians were very good at improvising, which means making up solos as they played. A trumpet player or a saxophone player, for example, might make up a solo in the middle of a song.Scat singing is when a singer does what jazz musicians do, make up a solo, but without words. Ella could make up solos as good as any jazz musician, singing with crazy made-up sounds. Musicians admired her ability to scat sing, as did many of her fans.In her later years, after a long and successful career, Ella began to have serious health problems.In 1986, she had major heart surgery. Doctors told her she had diabetes, which caused her eyesight to begin to fail. People thought this was the end of her career, that she would never sing on stage again. They were wrong. Soon Ella was back on stage performing, just like before.In 1991, she gave her final concert. Her health problems continued to get worse, and on June 15, 1996, Ella died in her Beverly Hills home.The internet has many videos of Ella Fitzgerald singing and also scat singing.Fun Facts• In 1938, at the age of 21, Ella recorded a song that was unlikely to become a hit. It was a version of the nursery rhyme, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” The record sold one million copies and stayed at number one on the pop charts for 17 weeks. Suddenly, Ella Fitzgerald was famous.• On stage, Ella didn’t seem shy. But off stage in her everyday life, she was extremely shy.• Ella had perfect pitch. She could sing any note so precisely in tune that her band tuned their instruments to her voice.• In addition to “The First Lady of Song,” Ella Fitzgerald was also called “The Queen of Jazz,” and “Lady Ella.”
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