From Harlem's streets to First Lady of Song

Ella Fitzgerald was a teenager in New York when her life came apart. Her mother died when she was 15, and she hit hard times. According to a PBS American Masters conversation with the journalist Nina Bernstein and June Norton, she was left with a stepfather who treated her badly and was then sent to live with an aunt in Harlem. She stopped going to school.

With the safety net gone, she spent much of her time on Harlem's streets. She danced for tips on 125th Street and took odd jobs, sleeping wherever she could. Bernstein describes this time as basically what we would now call homelessness. Norton notes that she was truant because she did not have any place to go. She was picked up for truancy and committed to a state reform school for girls in Hudson, New York, a harsh place where, NPR reports, she was regularly beaten. The accounts differ slightly on the order of events; NPR says she ran away from the school with no money and lived on the streets. Neither gives exact dates or an exact length for this period, though Bernstein places the reformatory stay in the earlier mid-1930s.

On Wednesday, November 21, 1934, at the age of 17, she entered amateur night at Harlem's Apollo Theater. She had meant to dance, but froze with stage fright and sang instead, modelling her style on Connee Boswell. She won first prize. The bandleader Chick Webb doubted at first whether she suited the stage, but he hired her for his band.

Four years later, in 1938, she had her first hit with A-Tisket, A-Tasket, whose lyrics she helped write, and it sold a million records. She kept singing for the rest of her life and became known as the First Lady of Song, one of the defining voices of jazz.