Jazz Connection Magazine

First Lady Of Song Ella Fitzgerald Honored On U. S. Postage Stamp

The new Ella stamp released Jan. 10, 2007

Stephen Fratallone/Jazz Connection Magazine along with AP News sources

The lady is now a stamp! The U.S. Postal Service has honored the First Lady of Song - Ella Fitzgerald - with her own postage stamp. The 39-cent stamp was released on Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2007, at ceremonies at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, and has been on sale across the country.

People who don't know about her will see the stamp and think: "What makes this person special? And perhaps find out about the person and about the music," said her son, Ray Brown Jr.

Fitzgerald wasn't self-important, perhaps reflecting the values she sang about in the Rodgers and Hart song The Lady Is A Tramp:

"I don't like crap games, with barons and earls. Won't go to Harlem, in ermine and pearls. Won't dish the dirt, with the rest of the girls. That's why the lady is a tramp."

Van Alexander was extremely delighted when he heard the news about the new Ella stamp. Alexander, the former big band era bandleader who went on to become a much sought-after arranger/conductor in the studios in Hollywood, worked as an arranger in the Chick Webb band when Fitzgerald was the band's girl singer.

"I was thrilled!" said Alexander, 91, via telephone from his home in Los Angeles. "I thought that it was about time. I have the stamps already. Being a little facetious, when I bought the stamps, I told the clerk at the post office that Ella and I were partners on a big song once and I think my picture should be on the stamp with her. He said, 'You wouldn't want your picture on there. You have to be dead in order to have your picture on a U.S. postage stamp!' (laughs) I think it's a wonderful honor and Ella is certainly deserving of it. I'm just thrilled that somebody promoted that."

In 1938, Alexander and Fitzgerald collaborated to turn an old nursery-rhyme into one of the block-buster hits of the era: A-Tisket, A-Tasket. The song was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1986, as part of a pantheon of music to honor recordings of "lasting qualitative or historical significance that are at least 25 years old."

A-Tisket, A-Tasket went on the charts at No.10 on June 18, 1938, and hit No.1 two weeks later. It stayed on the hit parade at the No.1 position for a total of 19 incredible weeks. It eventually became a million seller in 1950, its sales helped after it was revived in the 1944 movie, Two Girls And A Sailor, starring June Allyson, Gloria DeHaven and Van Johnson.

Fitzgerald has often been described as being a very humble person who was rather shy, very private. Alexander agrees.

"She was that way when I first met her," he said. "At 17 years old she was very shy and humble. As the years went on, she hadn't changed one iota. In later years she was the same way. I don't think she ever realized how great she was. Her demeanor was that way always."

Even the late great composer, arranger, alto saxophonist, and multi-instrumentalist Benny Carter echoed that same sentiment when he once said, "Ella has no great ego, no sense of having accomplished all she has."

"She'd probably smile and say, 'Well, isn't that nice," speculated Alexander. "She'd be happy about it, but I don't think she would have made a big deal out it. She just wasn't that way."

Born in Newport News, VA, in 1917, Ella Jane Fitzgerald moved with her mother to Yonkers, NY, as a youngster and began to sing and dance from an early age. She began winning talent competitions in the early 1930s and was hired to sing with Chick Webb's band in 1935. Still a minor at the time, she was legally adopted by Webb and she took over the band after Webb's untimely death in 1939. Renaming the band "Ella Fitzgerald and her Famous Orchestra," the aggregation reaped modest success before disbanding two years later.

On May 2,1938, Fitzgerald recorded A-Tisket, A-Tasket with the Webb band, thrusting her into the national limelight.

Fitzgerald went on to forge a career as a stellar solo recording artist, earning the respect and admiration of all who worked with her. She became famous as a scat singer, vocalizing nonsense syllables, and performed with most of the great musicians of the time. She recorded the song books of such composers as Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and Johnny Mercer.

Over the years, Fitzgerald won 13 Grammy Awards and many other honors, including the National Medal of Arts, presented to her in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan. She died in 1996.

"Ella will be remembered for her voice, her diction, her intonation," Alexander said. "Everything was just perfect. She was like a wonderful instrumentalist with her voice. Her records will live on forever."