First African-American woman to win a GRAMMY

On February 4, 1958, the very first GRAMMY Awards ceremony was held, and Ella Fitzgerald made history by winning two awards on the same night: Best Vocal Performance, Female for the Duke Ellington Songbook, and Best Individual Jazz Performance for the Irving Berlin Songbook.

With these wins, Fitzgerald became the first African-American woman to win a GRAMMY Award, and also the first woman of any race to win multiple GRAMMYs in a single year. This was a landmark moment for representation in the American recording industry, coming just a few years before the height of the civil rights movement, at a time when Black artists faced significant barriers to institutional recognition despite their outsized cultural contributions.

Her celebrated 'Songbook' series—in which she recorded the works of major American composers such as Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, and Irving Berlin—was widely credited with elevating jazz vocal interpretation to the level of serious art, and cementing the Great American Songbook as a canonical body of work. The Grammy wins validated this ambitious artistic project and opened doors for future generations of Black musicians and women in the recording industry. Fitzgerald would go on to win a total of 13 GRAMMY Awards across her career, but this first night remains historically singular as a barrier-breaking milestone.