FIRST there was Lady Day, Billie Holiday. Then there was the First Lady of Song, Ella Fitzgerald. Between them, they defined not only the art of jazz singing, but also the art of interpreting the nearest thing to lieder that America has produced the songs of classic popular composers such as Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin and Harold Arlen.
She was born like Billie Holiday poor, black, and female, in Newport News, Virginia, on April 25th, 1918. Unlike Lady Day, she neither knew her father nor was drawn to the self destructive sex and narcotics that finally killed Holiday.
The difference is a crucial, temperamental one, epitomised by the songs with which they first achieved fame in the 1930s.
Holiday was then and later associated with Strange Fruit, a bitter, mordant, anti lynching poem set to music.
Fitzgerald's first hit, with the Chick Webb Orchestra, was a Tin Pan Alley novelty, A-Tisket, A-Tasket, and though she grew beyond such ephemeral into a singer of substance, a political statement on racism as explicit as Strange Fruit was never for her.
There's a paradox in this. One of Ella's most arresting performances, from her great era of the 1950s and 1960s (brilliantly managed by the nonpareil impresano and record producer, Norman Granz) is Cole Porter's sexually daring Love For Sale. Her voice, girlish yet worldly, gives the lyrics a dimension that is innocent yet knowing.
That mixture of inexperience and worldliness is echoed in her early happy childhood. Her mother and stepfather moved to Yonkers ("where true love conquers", as she was later to sing in Porter's Manhattan) and she won local notice as a dancer. She took, up singing in amateur contests on a bet.
While still under age, she was offered a professional contract on a major radio show. But her mother died and, without a guardian, she could not sign.
Harlem, however, did give her a professional break. Chick Webb, beloved in the New York ghetto and celebrated as one of the Swing Era's greatest figures finally hired her after she was hidden in his dressing room and he was forced to listen.
Neither the recordings of the period nor her career then suggested the eminence she was later to reach.
A couple of failed marriages, including one to the great jazz bassist Ray Brown, which lasted from 1948 to 1952 and produced a son, were followed by a professional association with Norman Granz in the mid 1950s. It was agreed, she said, on no more than a handshake, but it survived rows, recriminations, her personal uncertainties and the passage of time.
Granz created the international tours and the special concerts, which included a couple of, visits to Dublin. In 1965 she told the critic Leonard Feather: "Dublin this year was just unbelievable. I just stood, "there onstage and cried the audience was too much." He devised the Song Book series of albums, and he facilitated her development as a jazz singer.
The effect was not so much to revive a career it had been going reasonably well as to lift its 0fl to another plane. To own a Song Book album in the 1960s was A Statement About The Owner. Ella was In.
She deserved it all. Her personal stamp is all over the classic work she did for Granz. She could make the Beatles's Can't Buy Me Love swing so hard that the spirited original sounded anaemic. Songs such as Love For Sale, Manhattan, and Everytime We Say Goodbye (all, oddly, by Porter, elegant, brittle and cool) embody her art.
She died peacefully on Saturday, surrounded by family and friends at her Beverly Hills home. She had been suffering complications of diabetes for several years, and in 1993 both of her legs were amputated below the knee. The First Lady of Song sang beautifully crafted songs, and she was technically equipped to do them justice. She wills remain one measure of the popular art of an era.