Publishers Weekly
★ 10/02/2023
Tick (Ruth Crawford Seeger), a professor emerita of music history at Northeastern University, delivers a magisterial biography of singer Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996), who “fearlessly explored... different styles of American song through the lens of African American jazz.” Fitzgerald grew up in Yonkers, N.Y., performing for classmates in the schoolyard and listening to the Mills Brothers and Boswell Sisters, groups that proved “prophetic” for the singer’s development “because they treated the voice as a human instrument.” At 15, Fitzgerald gave her earliest public performance at the Yonkers Federation of Negro Clubs; three years later, she officially began her recording career. “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” her “swinging rendition” of the children’s nursery rhyme, kicked off her ascent to stardom in 1938, and her career blossomed thanks to her ambition and willingness to mix different musical styles, from swing to bebop to pop. Though Fitzgerald was sometimes faulted by jazz critics for blending jazz and pop standards, her music (and characteristic vocal elements such as scat singing) remained popular with audiences and helped shape the evolution of jazz in America. Drawing on archival research and animated by genuine passion for her subject, Tick paints a detailed portrait of an artist whose willingness to reinvent herself galvanized her career. It’s rendered in luxuriant prose that brings Fitzgerald’s “glass-shattering high notes” and “lustrous beguiling voice” to life. The result is an excellent addition to the shelf on America’s jazz legends. (Dec.)
Ingrid Monson
"Becoming Ella Fitzgerald is a treasure—a comprehensive, deeply researched, and documented biography that finally gives Ella the complexity and depth that she deserves. Placing Fitzgerald in the intersection of race and gender at mid-twentieth century and overturning often repeated half-truths about her life and career, Tick highlights the beauty and artistry of Fitzgerald’s voice and the full range of her genre-crossing career. Becoming Ella Fitzgerald is essential reading for anyone interested in the Ella, jazz, or American popular culture."
Paula J. Giddings
"In this radiant, rich, no-stone-unturned biography, Judith Tick shows us how Ella Fitzgerald ‘became’ not only one of America’s greatest vocalists but a brilliant innovator who forever changed the status of ‘the female singer’ in her time and beyond."
Margo Jefferson
"Ella Fitzgerald made becoming a great artist seem effortless. She hid her will, her drive, and her originality behind the mask of a modest, soft-spoken woman. Now, at last, Judith Tick shows exactly how Fitzgerald explored and shaped every form of American popular music. In the process she thwarted all the boundaries of class, race, and gender that threatened to confine her. Tick’s musical knowledge is impeccable; so are her reporting and her scholarship. 'I won’t be left behind,' Fitzgerald used to vow. This stirringly complete biography ensures that she never will be."
Economist
"Becoming Ella Fitzgerald offers a detailed account of the singer’s life, even if she remains a somewhat enigmatic figure. It succeeds in arguing that Fitzgerald’s legacy lies, in part, in how she forced an entire industry to become more accepting of talent—however it appears or sounds."
Dan Morgenstern
"At last, we know where Ella came from and how she became our beloved First Lady of Song. Becoming Ella Fitzgerald is a first-rate job of research and a great read."
Booklist (starred review) - Donna Seaman
"Tick illuminates the artist and her experiences with precision, insight, and fluency…. A defining, revelatory, and invaluable biography."
Wall Street Journal
"Thoughtful and thorough . . . trace[s] the singer through the vast variety of songs she sang, songs that not only defined Fitzgerald’s career but which came to define what it is to be a jazz singer."
|Los Angeles Times
"[I]ncisive, doggedly researched . . . [Tick] proves an ideal guide to Fitzgerald’s perpetual progress. She translates what she hears with lyrical clarity."
Ricky Riccardi
"More than a decade in the making, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald is a biography truly worthy of the ‘First Lady of Song’."
Alyn Shipton
"Remarkable.… [O]pens up whole areas of her story that have seldom been explored in print, and in the process reveals a woman whose exceptional artistry infused a bewildering variety of material with a touch of genius."
John Szwed
"Judith Tick’s much-needed updated biography uses new research and keen musicology, and brings forth a revealing and fully convincing portrait of Lady Ella as visionary, social activist, and still-modern singer."
John McDonough
"[Tick] exposes speculation, fills fissures with fact, and finds a fresh feminist heroine of transformative authority."
Library Journal
12/01/2023
Tick (emerita, music history, Northeastern Univ.; coauthor, Music in the USA: A Documentary Companion) has meticulously researched the music career of Ella Fitzgerald (1917–96) for this stunning and comprehensive biography. The book relies heavily on documented concert footage, recordings, and archival print and audio interviews to construct a portrait of Fitzgerald that makes up with its thoroughness what it lacks in intimacy. Throughout the book, Tick inspires readers to rediscover Fitzgerald's musical genius, as she describes the singer continually reinventing herself to stay vital and relevant, a process that Fitzgerald never abandoned, even in her later years. This exploration of Fitzgerald's life and career describes those personal relationships closest to her, but the book's formal tone doesn't convey a strong sense of the woman herself. VERDICT Best for jazz scholars or readers who are superfans of Fitzgerald.—Amy Shaw
JANUARY 2024 - AudioFile
A great opportunity to explore the development of the iconic entertainer Ella Fitzgerald is thwarted here. While there's little new information, author Judith Tick succeeds in compiling an exhaustive compendium of facts. Sadly, Carmen Jewel Jones is not up to the task of delivering it. Her performance is peppered with mispronunciations, and nearly every foreign name or phrase is mangled. Pauses are often inappropriately placed, forcing the listener to restructure thoughts. While Jones is understandable in other respects, a narrator more familiar with jazz history would have been wise. Listeners who are not jazz aficionados may want to sample some of Fitzgerald's actual recordings. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-08-29
Comprehensive and fascinating biography of an American music titan.
Music historian Tick, author of Ruth Crawford Seeger, presents the first extensive biography of Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) since her death. The author makes excellent use of newly available resources, in particular the digital records of Black newspapers such as the Baltimore Afro-American, “the most widely circulated Black newspaper on the East Coast,” and the Chicago Defender, unavailable to previous Fitzgerald biographers. Tick expertly synthesizes those sources to provide tremendous insight into Fitzgerald's early and personal life, the jazz and pop worlds in which she thrived and expanded her audience, and her groundbreaking work as a Black American woman singer and bandleader. The author’s music-history chops are on full display in her consistently intriguing analyses of how and why particular songs and lyrics ("The Object of My Affection," "Goodnight My Love," and "Mack the Knife" for example) worked for Fitzgerald musically and culturally; her significance in the world of bebop; early performances in such venues as the Apollo Theater and the Savoy Ballroom; and her radio, stage, and recording career with bandleaders like Chick Webb. Tick excels at describing the stark contrast between Fitzgerald's onstage presence and her offstage shyness; passages on Fitzgerald's relationship with the Decca and Verve labels and her collaborations with arrangers such as Nelson Riddle are equally valuable. The author also covers prominent music journalists' reviews of and debates about Fitzgerald's work and status, her lasting imprint on the Great American Songbook, and her evolution to adapt to a changing American music scene. “Through her own transformative quests as an artist,” writes Tick, “she changed the trajectory of American vocal jazz in this century.” Essential for casual fans of jazz and music history and Fitzgerald aficionados alike, this thoroughly impressive work will be hard to equal.
As masterful and wonderful as its subject.
