Ella became a fixture with the Chick Webb band. After his death in 1939, they became known as Ella Fitzgerald and her Famous Orchestra, which lasted until 1942.

In those early years, Ella's voice was discernably young; that is, happy, lighthearted, youthful-sounding. As she matured, her voice developed that familiar timbre and richness we think of when we think of Ella Fitzgerald.

In the mid-40s, Ella started to add scat to her vocals. Scat is vocal improvisation using phonetic sounds traditionally similar to the instrumental sounds of jazz. Many people credit Louis Armstrong as its originator, but the vocal technique had been used since the turn of the century. Ella brought scat to new heights.

Anyone who attempts to sing extemporaneously - that is, scat - will tell you that the hardest aspect of that kind of singing is to stay in tune. You are wandering all over the scales, the notes coming out of your mouth a millisecond after you think of them.... A singer has to work double hard to emit those random notes in scat singing with perfect intonation. Well, I should say all singers except Ella. Her notes float out in perfect pitch, effortless, and most important of all, swinging.     - Mel Torme

By the end of the 40s, Ella was a Decca recording artist and a star. She began to tour with Norman Grantz' Jazz at the Philharmonic. The popularity of Big Bands was declining, and ballrooms all over the country were closing their doors for good. Jazz for the most part, could only be heard in clubs. With the JATP tours, the stature of jazz, and its performers, was elevated to concert status.

Although Ella was a world-class performer, she still fought battles with racism. Norman Grantz sought to combat racial injustice with his commercial clout. He had promoters seeking to book his concerts sign a contract which strictly forbid any kind of racial discrimination. He would cancel concerts if he heard of segregation in the audience. However, Ella still encountered prejudice. There was an instance of her being snubbed in a bar by two GIs who pointedly sat across the room and as far away from her as they could get. Then there was the time in 1954, while on her way to Australia for a concert, she was bumped from the flight to accomodate some white patrons. She was forced to stay in Honolulu for three days and the concerts in Sydney had to be cancelled.

In 1955, Ella left Decca records to join Norman Grantz' new Verve label. She began to record the Songbooks series of albums, something that would consume her recording career for the next few years.

There is no guile about Ella. She is a large woman who performs so unaffectedly and straightforwardly that she is transformed into a little girl. A beautiful little girl. She has the dignity of innocence and she sings innocently, her roots solidly in jazz, the kind of happy, haunting jazz that has almost been frozen to death by the cool young men.      -Herb Caen

Ella's career continued for the next several decades. She continued to perform to sellout concerts around the world. She flew to Washington D.C. from Australia to perform for five minutes at President Kennedy's Inaugural Gala. She played internationally with great success. She won a flood of awards, citations, and accolades. In 1974, the University of Maryland named a new facility on campus the Ella Fitzgerald Center for the Performing Arts, one of the first buildings in the United States to be named after a black artist. In 1976 she won her eighth Grammy Award.

Ella recorded for the last time in 1989. She was part of a group assembled by Quincy Jones for an album Back on the Block, on which she sang on three tracks. She continued to perform occasionally into the early 1990s, but her advancing age and health problems prevented her from entertaining as much as she wanted.

Ella Fitzgerald died on June 15th, 1996, at age 78.