Women In Music
By Jettrainbow

Jettrainbow is on LOA and submitted her article before she left, but I did not receive it. So in her absence, I am posting this article. Since this is black history month, I want to bring to you a women whom you might be familiar with. She is a women of color and of many talents who made history as a singer. I will let you read about her.

Ella Fitzgerald
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917 – June 15, 1996), also known as Lady Ella (the First Lady of Jazz), was one of the most influential jazz singers of the 20th Century, the winner of thirteen Grammy Awards, the National Medal of Art presented by President Reagan and the Presidential Medal of Freedom presented by the elder President Bush. Gifted with a three-octave vocal range, she was noted for her purity of tone, near faultless phrasing and intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.

She was born in Newport News, Virginia, USA in April 1917, and raised in Yonkers, New York. She was orphaned at age 14, following the sudden death of her mother from a heart attack at age 38 and the disappearance of her father shortly following her birth.

Fitzgerald made her singing debut at age 16 on November 21, 1934 at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York, in one of the earliest of its famous "Amateur Nights". She had originally intended to go on stage and dance, but intimidated by the 'Edwards Sisters', a local dance duo, she opted to sing, in the style of her idol, Connee Boswell. Winning the competition that night, Fitzgerald was noticed by Bardu Ali of Chick Webb's band, who persuaded Webb to hire her. She began singing with Webb's Orchestra in 1935, at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. Fitzgerald recorded several hit songs with them, including "(If You Can't Sing It), You'll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini)", but it was her version of the nursery rhyme, "A Tisket A Tasket" that bought her wide public acclaim. The eight 'Songbooks' that Fitzgerald recorded for Verve at irregular intervals from 1956 to 1964 represent her most critically acclaimed and commercially successful work, and probably her most significant offering to American culture. The composers and lyricists for each album represent the greatest part of the cultural canon known as the Great American Songbook.

The eight albums are:
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook (1956)
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers & Hart Songbook (1956)
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook (1957)
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook (1958)
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook (1959)
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Harold Arlen Songbook (1961)
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Jerome Kern Songbook (1963)
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Johnny Mercer Songbook (1964)
The arrangers for each album are in brackets.

A few days after Fitzgerald's death, The New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote that in the songbook series, Fitzgerald "performed a cultural transaction as extraordinary as Elvis's contemporaneous integration of white and African-American soul. Here was a black woman popularizing urban songs often written by immigrant Jews to a national audience of predominantly white Christians." Frank Sinatra was moved out of respect for Fitzgerald to block Capitol from re-releasing his own albums in a similar, single composer vein.

Perhaps Fitzgerald's greatest collaboration, (in terms of popular music) would have been a studio or live album with Frank Sinatra. Unfortunately, Ella and Frank were to appear on the same stage only periodically over the years, in television specials in 1958 and 1959, and again in 1967, a show that also featured Antonio Carlos Jobim. Fitzgerald's appearance with Sinatra and Count Basie in June 1974 for a series of concerts at Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas was seen as an important impetus upon Sinatra returning from his self-imposed retirement of the early 1970's. The shows were a great success, and September of that year saw them gross $1,000,000 in two weeks on Broadway, in a triumvirate with the Count Basie Orchestra.

You can read more about this phenomenal women here Encyclopedia Wikipedia (Source & Reference)