Content area
Full Text
William R Bauer
JIM FARRINGTON(EDITOR)
Ella Fitzgerald: The Complete Biography. By Stuart Nicholson. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. 334pp. Discography. ISBN 0-415-97119-5 (softcover). $19.95
Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington. By Nadine Cohodas. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004. 559pp. Discography, Bibliography. ISBN 0-375-42148-3 (hard cover). $19.95
The day when Americans of African descent can entirely ignore the role skin color plays in their fortunes and in the fortunes of their fellow citizens has not yet arrived. Consequently, anyone who writes the biography of a black American needs to find an effective way to deal with the matter of race. These two relatively recent biographies of black musicians take distinctly different approaches to the problem. Stuart Nicholson's book is a revised edition, first published in 1994.
Nicholson leaves no doubt in the reader's mind that Ella Fitzgerald's AfricanAmerican lineage affected her career prospects and her personal development. Trusting his reader to get the point from a few telling anecdotes, however, he lets the facts do their job, and then keeps out of the way. His approach gives the reader room to feel gratitude
p.235
for the huge contribution Fitzgerald made to American cultural life in the face of a hostile ethnic environment. Having mined a remarkable quarry of primary sources and then built a solid foundation of data for his biographical edifice, Nicholson wins readers' trust from the ground floor and never loses it as he leads them upwards, story by story.
Nicholson succeeds in winning the reader over because he presents a well-balanced view of his subject's life, bringing into perspective a complex array of artistic and personal factors, including race. Thus, as he ventures from the terra firma of historical reporting into the subjective waters of criticism, the reader stays on board, even when Nicholson defies generally accepted views. He gives a remarkable assessment of the renowned songbook series Norman Granz produced, for example, arguing that aesthetic lapses weakened the impact of these classic recordings.
Showing how Fitzgerald was not entirely to blame for these lapses, Nicholson documents the ways Granz...