May 6th, 2024

On May 6th, 2024, we celebrated the publication of Judith Tick’s “Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Singer Who Transformed American Song.” A listening party with playlist curated by Tick that was followed by a presentation and Q&A with the author.

Judith Tick is professor emerita of music history at Northeastern University. She has published award-winning books and articles about American music and women’s history in music, including Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Reviews:
“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.”
― Wall Street Journal

“[I]ncisive, doggedly researched . . . [Tick] proves an ideal guide to Fitzgerald’s perpetual progress. She translates what she hears with lyrical clarity.”
― Los Angeles Times

“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.”
― Economist

“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.”
― Margo Jefferson, author of Constructing a Nervous System