Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Fitzgerald was born in Virginia and raised in Yonkers, New York, by her mother and stepfather. She was a good student who loved dancing and baseball. Then, in 1932, her mother died. Ella went to live with an aunt in Harlem, stopped going to school, ran errands for numbers runners and was eventually sent to a state reform school for girls, where Black inmates were beaten and held in the basement. She ran away and lived on the streets.

In November 1934, aged seventeen, she put her name down for Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater intending to dance. A pair of dancing sisters went on before her and were so good that she lost her nerve. Standing frozen on stage while the crowd heckled, she decided to sing instead. She won first prize.

The drummer and bandleader Chick Webb was reluctant to hire a scruffy girl with no stage experience, but his band members insisted. Her recording of A-Tisket, A-Tasket in 1938 was a national hit, and when Webb died the following year she took over his band at 22.

Over the next fifty years she recorded the great Songbook albums, toured the world, won 13 Grammy awards and was known simply as the First Lady of Song. Diabetes cost her both legs in her seventies. She died in 1996.