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Regarded by many as one of the finest ever jazz singers, Ella Fitzgerald would have been 90 this month. A decade on from her death, Keith Shadwick looks back at a remarkable career
"Ella Fitzgerald my dear Whopper," joked John Lennon, paraphrasing Sherlock Holmes, in one of his A Spaniard In The Works stories from 1965, and the whole world knew who he was referring to. Nothing in her subsequent professional or private life, up to her death in 1996, was to diminish the public's affection for her.
Fitzgerald started life on April 25 1917. Of mixed race, she was born out of wedlock in Newport News, Virginia, to a dirt-poor couple who stuck together only for Ella's first three years. With her father gone, Ella's mother took up with a second man who became her de-facto stepfather. By then the family had moved to Yonkers, New York; the city Ella was to grow up in. A happy child, she was also ambitious, telling her neighbourhood friends that she would one day be famous and they would see her in the headlines. Of course, nobody took the pre-adolescent girl more seriously than the next star-eyed child. But then nobody had heard her sing yet.
In fact, Fitzgerald preferred to dream of a career as a professional dancer, but in 1932 her home life imploded with the death of her mother and abusive treatment by her stepfather.
Within a short while she was taken in by her mother's sister, who lived in Harlem. This was the beginning of a downward spiral that led to her sleeping rough in New York while she turned to any kind of work she could do for survival, including dancing professionally on Harlem's streets.
In autumn 1934, egged on by friends, she appeared at Harlem's famous Apollo Theatre on their amateur spot. All her life she claimed that until the moment she hit the stage she was going to do a dance routine. Ushered into the spotlight she froze, and when asked impatiently by the compere what she was there to do, she said she was a singer. Three minutes later she was overwhelmed by waves of applause as her impromptu performance of The Object Of My Affection had the...