Ella Jane Fitzgerald was born in Newport News, Virginia, on April 25, 1917.
Ella Jane Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia, to William and Temperance (Tempie) Fitzgerald. Her early life was marked by hardship: her parents separated when she was very young, and she moved with her mother to Yonkers, New York, where she was raised in a working-class household.
Fitzgerald's mother died in 1932, an event that profoundly destabilized her adolescence, and she briefly experienced homelessness and time in a reform school before finding her way to the stage. Few could have predicted that this troubled beginning would give rise to one of the most celebrated voices in American musical history.
Her birth in the segregated American South, followed by a childhood shaped by poverty and loss, forms the backdrop against which her eventual triumphs must be understood. Fitzgerald would go on to become known as the 'First Lady of Song' and the 'Queen of Jazz,' a testament to the distance she traveled from her early circumstances to international acclaim, breaking racial and gender barriers in the American entertainment industry along the way.