Did Ella Fitzgerald's parents get divorced?

Ella Jane Fitzgerald (4. Ma0 – 4. Ma0), was an American jazz singer. People also called her "Lady Ella", the "Queen of Jazz" and the "First Lady of Song". Her voice had a large vocal range (spanning three octaves), which meant that she could sing very high notes and very low notes.

She was famous for her scat singing. She is one of the most famous singers of the Great American Songbook. Fitzgerald's career lasted 59 years.

She won 14 Grammy Awards. 3 She was awarded the National Medal of Art by Ronald Reagan and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George H. Ella Fitzgerald was born in 1917 in Newport News, Virginia, United States.

Her parents were called William and Temperance "Tempie" Fitzgerald. 4 Soon after Fitzgerald was born, her parents separated and she went to live in Yonkers, New York with her mother and her mother's boyfriend, Joseph Da Silva. In 1923, Fitzgerald's half-sister, Frances Da Silva, was born.

When she was a child, Fitzgerald was made to live in the Colored Orphan Asylum in Riverdale, the Bronx. When she was young, Fitzgerald wanted to be a dancer and she loved listening to jazz music by Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and The Boswell Sisters. In 1932, Fitzgerald's mother died from a heart attack,4 and she began to do badly at school.

At one time, she had a job as a lookout at a bordello (a brothel) and also with some people to do with the Mafia. 7 She got into trouble with the police and was sent to a reform school. She escaped from the reformatory, and for a time was homeless.

Fitzgerald had her first job as a singer when she was 17, on 4. Ma0 at the Harlem Opera House in Harlem, New York. She became popular with the audience at the Apollo and she was able to compete in one of its famous "Amateur Nights". At first she was going to go on stage and dance but, intimidated by some local dancers, she decided to sing instead.

She sang Connee Boswell's songs "Judy" and "The Object of My Affection". She won the first prize of US$24. Ma0. In 4. Ma0, Fitzgerald won the chance to perform for a week with the Tiny Bradshaw band at the Harlem Opera House.

She met a drummer and bandleader called Chick Webb here. Webb had already hired a singer called Charlie Linton to work with the band. According to The New York Times, Webb was "reluctant to sign her....because she was gawky and unkempt, a diamond in the rough."6 Webb let her try singing with his band when they played a dance at Yale University.

Fitzgerald began singing often with Webb's Orchestra during 1935, at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. She recorded several hit songs with them, including "Love and Kisses" and "(If You Can't Sing It) You'll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini)". In 1938 she co-wrote and sang a version of the nursery rhyme, "A-Tisket, A-Tasket".

After this, she started getting famous. Chick Webb died on 4. Ma0, and his band was renamed "Ella Fitzgerald and her Famous Orchestra". Fitzgerald became the bandleader.

She recorded nearly 150 sides during her time with the orchestra. In 1942, Fitzgerald left the band and began to work as a solo singer. She was signed to the Decca label, and she had several popular hit songs.

She recording with other musicians like the Ink Spots, Louis Jordan, and the Delta Rhythm Boys. Decca's Milt Gabler became her manager and she began working often for the jazz producer Norman Granz. She often sang in his Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts.

Then, Granz became her manager, but he did not record her on any of his record labels for nearly a decade. In the mid-1940s, after the Swing era, and the end of the great touring big bands, jazz music became quite different. A new kind of jazz called bebop became popular and Fitzgerald changed her style of singing.

She worked with Dizzy Gillespie's big band and started including scat singing as a big part of her performances. Her 1945 scat recording of "Flying Home" was later described by The New York Times as "one of the most influential vocal jazz records of the decade....Where other singers, most notably Louis Armstrong, had tried similar improvisation, no one before Miss Fitzgerald employed the technique with such dazzling inventiveness."6 Her be-bop recording of "Oh, Lady be Good!" (1947) was also very popular, and made people think of her as one of the most important jazz singers. Granz did not like some of the music Fitzgerald was given at this time, so during her last years on the Decca label she recorded some duets with pianist Ellis Larkins, released in 1950 as Ella Sings Gershwin.

In 1955, Fitzgerald left Decca, and joined Granz's new record label, Verve Records. She said later, "I had gotten to the point where I was only singing be-bop. I thought be-bop was 'it', and that all I had to do was go some place and sing bop.

But it finally got to the point where I had no place to sing. I realized then that there was more to music than bop. Norman....felt that I should do other things, so he produced The Cole Porter Songbook with me.

A new album, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook, was released in 1956. It was the first of eight multi-album "Songbook" sets that she would record for Verve between 1956 and 1964. Many of the songs were standards and Fitzgerald tried to cross over into a non-jazz audience. Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook was the only Songbook on which the composer of the songs also played with her.

Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, who had worked together for a long time, both played on half the set's 38 tracks, and wrote two new pieces of music for the album: "The E and D Blues", and a musical piece about Fitzgerald (the only "Songbook" track that Fitzgerald does not sing on). The Songbook series became the Fitzgerald's most critically acclaimed and popular work. Ella Fitzgerald also recorded albums of the songs of Cole Porter and George Gershwin in 1972 and 1983.

The albums were called Ella Loves Cole and Nice Work If You Can Get It. A later album of songs by a single composer was released when she was with Pablo Records, Ella Abraça Jobim, with songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim. While she was recording the Songbooks and the occasional studio album, Fitzgerald toured 40 to 45 weeks per year in the United States and internationally, with Norman Granz.

Granz helped her to become one of the most important live jazz performers. In the mid-1950s, Fitzgerald became the first African-American to perform at the Mocambo (a Hollywood nightclub), after Marilyn Monroe had persuaded the owner to make the booking. This was very important in Fitzgerald's career.

The event was turned into a play by Bonnie Greer which is to receive a production in London's West End from 4. Ma0. Some live albums on Verve that she recorded are well thought of by critics: Ella at the Opera House, Ella in Rome and Ella in Berlin. Verve Records was sold to MGM in 1963 for $3 million, and in 1967 MGM did not give Fitzgerald another contract.

Over the next five years, she recorded with different labels like Atlantic, Capitol and Reprise. Her music at this time is different from her earlier jazz music; for Capitol she recorded Brighten the Corner, an album of hymns, Ella Fitzgerald's Christmas, an album of traditional Christmas carols, Misty Blue, a country and western album, and 30 by Ella, a series of six medleys. During this time, she had her last US chart single with a cover of Smokey Robinson's "Get Ready", which had already been a hit for The Temptations.

After she recorded it, it was also a hit for Rare Earth. In 1972 she recorded an album called Jazz at Santa Monica Civic '72, which was successful. Granz started a new record label called Pablo Records.

Fitzgerald recorded 20 albums for the label. While she was working with Pablo Records, her voice stopped sounding as good as it used to. She had health problems, and she made her last recording in 1991 and her last public performances in 1993.

Fitzgerald married at least twice, and people think that she may have married three times. In 1941 she married Benny Kornegay, a convicted drug dealer. The marriage was annulled after two years.

In 4. Ma0, she married the famous bass player Ray Brown. She had met him while on tour with Dizzy Gillespie's band a year before. Together they adopted a child of Fitzgerald's half-sister, Frances.

They named him Ray Brown, Jr.. Fitzgerald and Brown were both often busy touring and recording, Ray was mostly looked after by Fitzgerald's aunt, Virginia. Fitzgerald and Brown divorced in 1953 but they continued to perform together. In 4. Ma0, Reuters reported that Fitzgerald had secretly married Thor Einar Larsen, a young Norwegian, in Oslo.

She had even furnished an apartment in Oslo, but the affair was quickly forgotten when Larsen was sentenced to five months hard labor in Sweden for stealing money from a young woman. Fitzgerald was also known for being shy. Trumpet player Mario Bauza, who played behind Fitzgerald when she sang with Chick Webb, remembered that "She didn’t hang out much.

When she got into the band, she was dedicated to her music…. She was a lonely girl around New York, just kept herself to herself, for the gig."4 Later in her career, Fitzgerald said, "I don't want to say the wrong thing, which I always do. Fitzgerald had diabetes, which caused her to go blind and she had to have both her legs amputated in 1993.

4 In 1996 she died of diabetes in Beverly Hills, California, at the age of 79. She was buried in the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California. Several of Fitzgerald's awards, significant personal possessions and documents were given to the Smithsonian Institution, the library of Boston University, the Library of Congress, and the Schoenberg Library at UCLA.