Ella Fitzgerald was discovered at age sixteen while singing in a talent contest at Harlem's Apollo Theater. A fighter, she fought her way to the Apollo after enduring a terrifying childhood. Noted cultural critic Margo Jefferson sums Ella Fitzgerald's early struggle in an article shortly after her death:

That voice never did give us intimations of the stepfather who abused her when her mother was dead; of the aunt who rescued her, then had no time or money to care for her; of Ella herself as a teen-age truant who did time in a New York State reformatory for girls, where discipline was instilled through beatings and solitary confinement. When she ran away she went from wayward girl to urchin, shuffling alone through the streets of Harlem, singing and dancing for small change, sleeping wherever she could find a night's bed and board... It was this grimy little urchin who got herself onto the stages of the Apollo Theater and the Harlem Opera House, won their amateur singing contests, then almost stumbled back into oblivion because she lacked glamour or sex appeal.¹⁰¹

Yet from the brink of oblivion Ella Fitzgerald rose to become one of the preeminent singers in music history, the indisputable "First Lady of Song." After weaving her way through New York's contest scene, Chick Webb hired her for his band in 1935. She began recording for Decca with the Chick Webb Band immediately in 1935, and her performances at the Savoy Ballroom catapulted her into a Harlem icon. In 1938 Ella recorded A-Tisket, A-Tasket, which topped the music charts and made her famous. In the early years she made over two hundred and thirty recordings for Decca. After Webb's death in 1939 she became band's leader and it was renamed Ella Fitzgerald and her Famous Band. Over the next several years she earned greater exposure by performing with Norman Granz at his Jazz at the Philharmonic Concerts from 1946 to 1954.

Facing rampant discrimination in the 1950s, Ella Fitzgerald along with other musicians touring with Granz's Philharmonic were targeted by police and arrested. "They took us down," Ella recalled, "and then when we got there, they had the nerve to ask for an autograph." During the same period Ella faced hostility from white club owners. She is said to have credited Marilyn Monroe, who idolized her, for a breakthrough into larger, white-owned venues:

It was because of her that I played the Mocambo, a very popular nightclub in the '50s. She personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him—and it was true, due to Marilyn's superstar status—that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard...After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman—a little ahead of her times. And she didn't know it.

After 1955 she recorded almost exclusively with Norman Granz's label, Verve records. Her most celebrated recordings, The Verve Songbooks, were dedicated to great composers including Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, and George and Ira Gershwin. Gershwin remarked famously, "I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them."¹⁰² Renowned for her lucid, warm, mellifluous sound, her unparalleled scat solos, her three-octave range, vocal agility, and her improvisation, she was considered the quintessential singer by many of her contemporaries. Her virtuosity rivaled that of the predominantly male jazz instrumentalists of her day. Indeed, she earned such esteem from Duke Ellington that he honored her with a song, Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald in 1957.

Ella Fitzgerald made approximately two hundred albums. Estimates of her total record sales top 25,000,000. She performed at the Newport and JVC jazz festivals, and with the Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Errol Garner, Earl Hines, and Oscar Peterson bands. Throughout the course of her career, she earned every conceivable type of award: thirteen Grammy Awards, induction of A-Tisket, A-Tasket into the Grammy Hall of Fame, Kennedy Center Award, a National Medal of Arts from Ronald Reagan, the French Commander of Arts and Letters Award, the Cole Porter centennial Award, the Medal of Freedom Award, as well as honorary doctorates in music from Yale, Dartmouth, Harvard, Howard, and Princeton Universities, Talladega College, and the University of Southern California. For her dedication to children's charities she was named to the International Committee of the Foster Parents' Plan for World Children. In tribute, The University of Maryland named its theater and concert hall the "Ella Fitzgerald School of Performing Arts."

Defying the odds, she continued to perform after undergoing quintuple coronary bypass surgery in 1986. In 1990 she performed her final—her twenty-sixth—concert at Carnegie Hall. Ella also defied stereotype. As Margo Jefferson argues, "Ella Fitzgerald fit no available or desirable cultural type. She wasn't a lusty, tragic blues diva and she wasn't a sultry, melancholy torch singer...And so she turned herself into a force of music."¹⁰³