Ella Fitzgerald

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie R. Hill
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Expressive Culture ◽  
First Lady ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Music And Literature ◽  
Newport News ◽  
Singing Style

Sam Waymon, the brother of Nina Simone, once stated, “Music can save you by giving [you] a sense of vision, tolerance, [and] harmony; it can give you . . . a fullness.” Waymon’s words reflect heavily in the life of Ella Fitzgerald. With her life beginning in poverty, music saved Ella. Writers and musicians alike commemorate Ella Fitzgerald in 2019 with books and albums dedicated in her honor. In her recent album devoted wholly to the swinging sounds of the Queen of Jazz, renowned jazz violinist Regina Carter pays musical homage and describes Ella Fitzgerald’s voice as a “voice that was able to bring people together.” Carter continues, “Hearing [Fitzgerald’s] voice was love.” With the pluck of the string, harmonic arpeggios, and instrumental technique that mimic the voice of Ella Fitzgerald, Regina Carter released her timely album Ella: Accentuate the Positive (cited under Accentuating Sound). The year 2017 marks the 100th birthday of famed jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, also noted as Mama Jazz, the Memorex Lady, and the First Lady of Song. While remembering the vocal ingenuity of Fitzgerald, variance, timbre, tone, texture, cadence, improvisation, and symphonic melody are all words that crown the First Lady of Song. Born in 1917 in Newport News, Virginia, Fitzgerald began singing in church when she and her mother moved from Virginia to New York. As an adolescent in 1934, she entered the Apollo Theater’s weekly amateur night competition. Inundated with trepidation at the audience’s reaction to known dancers, the Edwards Sisters, who competed before her, Fitzgerald decided to sing instead of dance. Much to her surprise after singing, Fitzgerald won the competition that night. In 1936, Fitzgerald produced her first recording with Decca Records. Known for her scat singing style and tuning her voice to sound like an instrument, Fitzgerald famously collaborated with jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, and other musicians. During the civil rights movement and years after, Ella’s appearances on The Nat King Cole Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Frank Sinatra Show, and other televised productions conveyed her ability to traverse racial barriers and disseminate her gift of song to all audiences, nationally and internationally. Fitzgerald has won thirteen Grammy Awards and sold forty million albums. This article first examines the theoretical frameworks of history and memory through which scholars examine African American expressive culture. It is through the accentuation of sound in text and in the intersections of music and literature that the gems of black culture and consciousness are found. The citations cover a breadth of material from jazz and literary theory, focusing on what Fitzgerald brings to the community, nation, and the world.

Margaret Walker

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Byerman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black People ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Northwestern University

Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on July 7, 1915. Her father, Sigismund, was a Methodist minister born in Jamaica and educated at Northwestern University; her mother, Marion Dozier, a music teacher. Both later taught at New Orleans University. In 1925, they moved to New Orleans and lived with Walker’s maternal grandmother, Elvira “Vyry” Dozier, who provided many of the stories used in her only novel, Jubilee (1966). After two years at New Orleans University (now Dillard University) Walker received her bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in 1935. She then worked in Chicago for the Federal Writers’ Project and became part of what came to be known as the black Chicago renaissance, often associated with the novelist Richard Wright. Her friendship with him ended acrimoniously after he moved to New York. She continued to help him with the research for his celebrated novel Native Son (1940) after he left Chicago. She earned her master’s degree at the University of Iowa, with the poetry collection that was published as For My People, which won the Yale Younger Poets Award (1942). She married Firnist James Alexander in 1943, and they had four children. She taught at Livingstone College and West Virginia State College before moving to a permanent position at Jackson State University, where she taught from 1949 to 1979. In 1962, she took leave from her teaching position to work on a doctorate at Iowa. Her dissertation was based on the stories told by her grandmother and on the research she had conducted in the South for thirty years. She earned her degree in 1965 and the novel was published a year later as Jubilee. During this time, she continued writing poetry, including Ballad of the Free (1966)—a chapbook—and Prophets for a New Day (1970), both of which concern the civil rights movement, and October Journey (1973), primarily a collection of celebrations of black historical and literary figures, including a long memorial to her father. At Jackson State in 1968, she established the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People. In 1973, she organized the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival through the Institute; it brought together twenty African American women poets of different generations. For Folkways Records in 1975, she recorded three albums of poetry by African American artists, including her own version of “Yalluh Hammuh,” which she had collected as part of the Federal Writers Project. In 1989, she published This is My Century: New and Collected Poems. Her most controversial work is Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1987), which many reviewers have seen as an attack on her former friend, even though she adds significant detail to his early career in Chicago. She died of cancer on November 30, 1998.

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