Ella by Starlight

But Fitzgerald did that to other vocalists. Indeed, she may have dazzled musicians even more than the general public and the ranks of her rapt admirers include a veritable hall of fame of American popular song. “I often told her she was the best singer I’d ever heard in my life,” Tony Bennett recalls in his autobiography. “Man, woman or child, Ella is the greatest of them all,” Bing Crosby once admitted. “She was the greatest singer on the planet,” acknowledged Mel Tormé.

But my favorite reviews of her music came from the songwriters. Cole Porter, a man not easily impressed, and typically blasé about what jazz performers did to his work, exclaimed in response to Fitzgerald’s recording of his music: “My, what marvelous diction that girl has.” Ira Gershwin, upon hearing her interpretations, pronounced: “I didn’t realize our songs were so good until Ella sang them.”

This year marks the centenary of Ella Fitzgerald’s birth (April 25, 1917), and I’m curious to see whether the occasion will bring her music to the attention of new millennial listeners. After all, Fitzgerald’s commercial value, although considerable, never quite matched her artistic reputation: The last time she had a single on the Billboard chart was 1969—when “Get Ready” peaked at spot 126 the same week the Beatles’ Abbey Road was the bestselling album—and Ella’s last number-one single was during World War II. For millennials, that’s almost as ancient as the Battle of Marathon. Even for my generation of aging baby boomers, Fitzgerald may be better known for a television commercial touting Memorex cassette tapes than for her jazz recordings.

That said, a dose of Ella Fitzgerald might be just what the music industry needs in the year 2017. In fact, she represents the antithesis of all the worst excesses and vices of the current scene. No popular singer of the 20th century ever had less need of Auto-Tune and the other digital trickery of today’s recordings. She set the gold standard for intonation, and her pitches were as true as a Bob Feller fastball. Nor did she need to borrow samples and snippets from other recordings. When you sing at that level, who would you possibly want to borrow from? And she never used the F-word or N-word in a song, even when seemingly scatting out every other possible combination of vowels and consonants in her uninhibited vocal improvisations.

But Fitzgerald differs most from today’s pop divas in the sweet innocence that she brought to her delivery of a love song. She never tried to sell herself on sex appeal. Even within the context of the primmer attitudes of her era, Ella downplayed eroticism—you were advised to check out Billie Holiday or Bessie Smith if you were looking for saucy fare of that sort. But you never missed it when you heard Fitzgerald sing. What she lacked in sexual innuendo she more than made up for in the potent emotional longing of her music. If Bessie Smith got you thinking about a steamy affair, Ella Fitzgerald reminded you of what it’s like to fall in love. I’ll leave it up to you to judge which is the more powerful and lasting experience, whether in real life or just its radio soundtrack.

You might conclude that Ella Fitzgerald is hopelessly out-of-date in an age of twerking teen divas and sampling DJs. But I wouldn’t count out the First Lady of Song (as her admirers nicknamed her). Fitzgerald built her whole career on defying the odds and coming out on top.

She launched her career entertaining for tips on the streets of Harlem, but got her big break when she wowed the audience at a 1934 talent contest at the Apollo Theater. A few weeks later she took over the coveted spot as featured vocalist with the Chick Webb Orchestra, one of the hottest jazz bands of the era.

In this new role, opportunity and tragedy struck in quick succession. First came a huge success when, in June 1938, Fitzgerald enjoyed the biggest hit of her career. The Webb band’s recording of “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” was a number-one hit and remained the bestselling record in America for almost three months. Back then, music writers didn’t anoint tunes as “the song of the summer” the way they do nowadays, but if they had, this unlikely swing band number—based on a children’s nursery rhyme from the 19th century—would have been the consensus choice.

But Fitzgerald’s boss Chick Webb was already struggling with the effects of the tuberculosis that would lead to his death on June 16, 1939, almost exactly one year after the release of “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” If he had lived, Webb would have made his mark as one of the leading stars of the World War II era. And deservedly so—in my opinion, he was the finest jazz drummer of his generation. But after his death at Johns Hopkins, from complications of surgery, the survival of his band was in question. Could it continue without its star attraction?

At this juncture, Ella Fitzgerald, who had just turned 22, stepped in as the new leader of the band. Under her stewardship, the hits kept coming—”Imagination,” “I Want the Waiter,” “Five O’Clock Whistle”—although none matched the success of “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” But Fitzgerald was ambitious and wanted more. In 1942, she left bandleading behind to pursue a career as a solo artist and started to gain renown more for her virtuosic wordless vocals—known in the jazz world as scat singing—instead of novelty tunes and romantic ballads. Her recordings of “Flying Home” (1945) and “Oh, Lady Be Good!” (1947) captivated listeners with their free-flowing invention and laid the foundation for Ella’s shift from swing-band singer to modern jazz diva.

Even so, Ella Fitzgerald faced numerous challenges in the 1950s. Her marriage to bassist Ray Brown broke up in 1953. In 1954, she was hospitalized with a node on her vocal cords that threatened to end her career. She was pursued by the Internal Revenue Service for unpaid tax bills. But her biggest challenge was simply maintaining superstar status in a musical culture that was abandoning jazz for rock ‘n’ roll. In this new environment, even the hottest vocalists of the 1930s and ’40s struggled to hold on to their audience.

At this perilous juncture, Ella embarked on the most ambitious project of her career. Under the direction of Norman Granz, a jazz impresario who was now both her manager and record producer, Fitzgerald once again aimed to redefine her image, downplaying her bebop pyrotechnics and setting herself up, instead, as the champion of the classic American popular songs.

“I had gotten to the point where I was only singing be-bop,” she later explained.

The Cole Porter project, from 1956, set the pattern for most of the next decade. Fitzgerald released a series of now-classic albums devoted to the finest songwriters of the 20th century: George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer. By the time she was finished, she had recorded 15 hours of music and set a standard of excellence no interpreter of the American popular song has surpassed in the intervening half-century.

There are many reasons why Ella Fitzgerald still warrants our love and respect 100 years after her birth, but these works belong at the top of the list. I admire many of her other recordings: Her collaborations with Louis Armstrong, her live albums in Berlin and Rome, and her late career projects with Joe Pass are some of my most cherished jazz albums. But the Songbooks transcend jazz. In elevating herself, she also celebrated the worthiest of song composers and created a timeless document of the greatest popular music of her lifetime. I can’t imagine this music ever losing its allure—not now, not tomorrow, nor even in another 100 years.

Ted Gioia writes on music, literature, and popular culture and is the author, most recently, of How to Listen to Jazz.