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Born
April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia. (Though many
biographical sources give her birth date as 1918, her birth
certificate and school records show her to have been born
a year earlier.) Often referred to as the “first lady
of song,” Fitzgerald enjoyed a career that stretched
over six decades. With her lucid intonation and a range
of three octaves, she became the preeminent jazz singer
of her generation, recording over 2,000 songs, selling over
40 million albums, and winning 13 Grammy Awards, including
one in 1967 for Lifetime Achievement.
As
a young girl growing up in Yonkers, just outside New York
City, Fitzgerald loved music and dreamed of being a dancer.
She and a friend, Charles Gulliver, performed a dance routine
at the local clubs. Fitzgerald also had an early interest
in singing, and was greatly influenced by Connee Boswell,
the lead singer of a jazz-influenced combo called the Boswell
Sisters.
In
1932, Fitzgerald’s mother died suddenly, and she went
to live with an aunt in Harlem. Fitzgerald was “discovered”
two years later, in an amateur contest at the Apollo Theater
in Harlem, where she won first prize for her rendition of
a Boswell song, “The Object of My Affection.”
She performed at the Harlem Opera House in 1935 before landing
a job as the featured vocalist in one of the era’s
top “big bands.” She made her first recording,
“Love and Kisses,” later that year with the band’s
leader, Chick Webb, on his record label, Decca. A swing
version of the classic nursery rhyme, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,”
that Fitzgerald co-wrote with Webb and released in 1938,
became her first hit recording and made her a national star.
When
Webb, who had been her legal guardian, mentor, and close
friend, died in 1939, Fitzgerald served as the leader of
his band until it broke up in 1942. She spent the war years
touring with various road shows and performing as a soloist
at jazz and night clubs around the country, and made a number
of recordings with Decca, including such popular albums
as Lullabies of Birdland and Sweet and Hot. She began to
work with an improvisational style of singing called “scat,”
or “bop,” singing, based on the complex, spontaneous
instrumental style of Dizzy Gillespie. In 1945, Fitzgerald
recorded a scat version of “Flying Home,” which
became one of the most influential vocal jazz records of
the decade
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