BIOGRAPHY

Becoming Ella Fitzgerald

(Norton £30, 656pp) 

She wasn’t a beauty, like Lena Horne. She wasn’t sensuous, like Eartha Kitt, or homely, like Peggy Lee. ‘When a girl comes up and looks like me,’ she once said, ‘she just can’t get a chance.’

But Ella Fitzgerald was damned for more than her lack of sex appeal. Critics dismissed her as an untrained singer who did not have the emotional sensitivity to put over a song.

In 1956, when Fitzgerald made a double album of Cole Porter numbers, one critic pronounced himself astonished. 

Porter’s songs, he said, are ‘distinguished by a definite measure of intelligence’ whereas ‘intelligence is the one quality to which [Fitzgerald’s] voice could never lay claim’.

 As for Porter, he doubted Fitzgerald would understand his worldly wit, let alone his double entendres. 

Little wonder that after recording every number on The Cole Porter Songbook, Fitzgerald would turn to the producer and ask: ‘Did I say all the words right?’

Ella Fitzgerald (pictured) was born in 1917 in Virginia. She grew up in Yonkers, New York and got her first break at an amateur night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem at the age of 17

She did. And so well that the eight collections devoted to the back catalogues of individual songwriters and writing teams she released between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s are not only the heart of her recorded work, they are the best introduction ever to the Great American Songbook.

Indeed, without Fitzgerald — and, to be fair, Frank Sinatra — that songbook might not exist. As the subtitle to Tick’s worthy new biography puts it, she is ‘The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song’.

Fitzgerald was born in 1917 in Virginia. Not long afterwards the family upped sticks for the big city, and she spent most of her childhood in Yonkers (‘where true love conquers’, as she would sing on the Rodgers & Hart Songbook), a down-at-heel suburb of New York.

The Fitzgeralds were rackety. Though Ella’s mother worked in a laundry and as a domestic, her father, a dockworker, abandoned wife and child before she was three.

Later in life she would tell a cousin that someone in the family had molested her.

Small wonder Ella never finished school. At 15 she was in court for truancy, having been bunking off to earn pin money as the lookout at the local brothel. (Anyone who doubts the authenticity of feeling in Fitzgerald’s work should listen to her heartbreaking rendition of Porter’s song about prostitution, Love for Sale.)

Not long after she was sentenced to five years at the New York State Training School for Girls where, Tick quotes the superintendent, she was ‘all but tortured’. Thankfully, Ella didn’t have to serve her full five years.

By 17 she was back home, and all set for her first break, at an amateur night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.

Crippled with stage fright she nonetheless managed to sing Hoagy Carmichael’s Judy. She was soon hired by hot and happening band leader Chick Webb. From then on, as Tick’s tedious litany of concert dates attests, she rarely stopped working.

If only the rest of this book was as fast-moving as its opening chapters. Alas, once Ella found fame her life settled into a dull routine of studio session followed by tour followed by studio session ...but there’s no denying the results aren’t very interesting.

Ella’s lack of interest in politics helps account for the fact that she has never been given her cultural due

Tick’s task isn’t made any easier by the fact that Ella was a notoriously difficult interviewee who clung to her privacy. Nor, despite flings with fellow musicians, was she a bed-hopper. 

She married twice, but did not find lasting happiness. All she did was work, and even when the work is as inspiring as, say, her Duke Ellington Songbook, it’s hard to build a biographical study around that.

But Tick, who is a Professor Emerita of music history at Northeastern University, doesn’t help things by lapsing into academic prose.

Her efforts to enrol Fitzgerald in the women’s movement are unconvincing, if only because Ella herself belonged to that pre-feminist tribe that believed women are men’s equal and then some. As she told an interviewer when asked if women should have more power: ‘Who knows? Most women are telling the men what to do anyhow.’

The awful thing is that Ella’s lack of interest in politics helps account for the fact that she has never been given her cultural due.

Because she refused to be anything more than a singer, because she resisted commenting on the issues of the day, she has never been taken seriously by critics who believe the duty of an artist is to intervene in real world events.

While, say, Billie Holiday is (rightly enough) lauded as a moral exemplar for black people in America, Ella, who refused to either condemn or condone the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, is dismissed as a kind of Auntie Tom.

I’m not sure that Becoming Ella Fitzgerald really rights that wrong. Tick never focuses enough on what really counts about Ella: her recorded work. Though she discusses the detailed way Ella approached the recording of the songbooks, she never addresses the essential facts about them.

Ella carved Cole Porter’s and Harold Arlen’s and Johnny Mercer’s songs into history. She will be remembered for that for as long as people have ears

Ella was determined not to use Porter’s or Johnny Mercer’s or Harold Arlen’s songs as a means of self-expression. Instead, she wanted to record them as if they were inviolable — holy tablets handed down from on high. 

She wanted later generations to know not that she had sung, say, Begin the Beguine, but simply that the song existed and deserved to be listened to as Porter had written it.

So Judith Tick is talking nonsense when she says Ella made Porter swing.

Frank Sinatra had been swinging his way through Cole’s numbers for half a decade and more by the time Fitzgerald started recording her songbooks.

What she did do is to carve Porter’s and Arlen’s and Mercer’s songs into history. She will be remembered for that for as long as people have ears.

As Ira Gershwin said when Fitzgerald released a five LP box-set of songs by him and his brother George: ‘I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.’