The Apollo Theater on 125th Street, photographed in June 2020.Credit...Rob Stephenson
Ella Fitzgerald’s first love was actually dancing. When she made her debut at New York's Apollo Theatre in 1934, after hearing the crowd erupt with applause over a couple of dancers who had just performed, she decided to sing. And that was the beginning of one of the most celebrated of all singing careers. During her lifetime, Fitzgerald received countless honors that celebrated her talents and accomplishments both in the jazz world and in the civil rights movement.
Kamilah Forbes and the Apollo Theater continue the fight for racial justice, serving as a resource to their Harlem community, and to the world, as with the recent stage adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me.
Singers and composers called Fitzgerald’s renditions of their songs definitive. Even legendary lyricist Ira Gershwin said "I never realized just how good our songs really were until I heard them sung by Ella Fitzgerald."
We feel the same way about our Child of America honoree this year. Kamilah Forbes is Carver’s definitive honoree.
We are reminded of Fitzgerald’s start at the Apollo Theater by today’s article in the New York Times Magazine, excerpted below.
Ella Fitzgerald in 1940, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, who documented much of the Harlem Renaissance.Credit...Carl Van Vechten © Van Vechten Trust, courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University
On Nov. 21, 1934, Ella Jane Fitzgerald appeared at the Apollo. It was the Harlem theater’s first amateur night, and Fitzgerald was just 17. Her friends had dared her. “They said, ‘Well, if you don’t go, you’re chicken,’” she would later recall in a 1978 television interview with the pianist and composer André Previn. She had originally entered the show to dance, but after watching the Edwards Sisters’ dazzling tap-dancing act from the wings, she told him, “I said there’s no way I’m going out there and try to dance.” As she stood awaiting her cue, the M.C. told her, “Just do something.”
In a raggedy dress and workman’s boots, Fitzgerald, who was then homeless and living on the streets of Harlem, looked out at the 1,500-seat theater with its glittering chandeliers and glamorous crowd. Designed by the American architect George Keister, the neo-Classical music hall was built for burlesque performances in 1914, when Harlem was largely white and African-Americans were not allowed in, but in 1933, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia cracked down on burlesque, and the following year the theater was transformed into a venue for variety revues. Harlem was 70 percent black by then, and the Apollo, on 125th Street, now open to black performers and audiences, became “monumental,” as the legendary Motown singer, writer and producer Smokey Robinson described it to me. “In the lobby,” he said, “there’s a mural with people I had grown up hearing about: Sammy Davis Jr., Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Duke Ellington — and Ella Fitzgerald, of course. When I made it on that wall, I felt I had really made it, because the Apollo is the Apollo….”