Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook is a 1956 studio album by American jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, accompanied by a studio orchestra conducted and arranged by Buddy Bregman, focusing on the songs of Cole Porter.
This was Fitzgerald's first album for the newly created Verve Records. Fitzgerald's time on the Verve label would see her produce her most highly acclaimed recordings, at the peak of her vocal powers. This album inaugurated Fitzgerald's Songbook series, each of the eight albums in the series focusing on a different composer of the canon known as the Great American Songbook. Fitzgerald's manager, (and the producer of many of her albums), Norman Granz, visited Cole Porter at the Waldolf-Astoria, and played him this entire album. Afterwards, Porter merely remarked, "My, what marvellous diction that girl has".
This album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000, which is a special Grammy award established in 1973 to honor recordings that are at least twenty-five years old, and that have "qualitative or historical significance." In 2003, it was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry.
Read more about Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Cole Porter Songbook: Track Listing, Personnel
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“You can stroke people with words.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Now he sings of Jacky Horner,
Sitting in the chimney corner,
Eating of a Christmas pie,
Putting in his thumb, O fie!
Putting in, O fie! his thumb,
Pulling out, O strange, a plum.”
—Henry Carey (1693?–1743)
“These young women have had four years of very special space.... This has been special space. This has been safe space. But when they graduate, they will begin to deal on a daily basis, all day long, month after month, year after year, with the realities that still haunt our nation.”
—Johnnetta Betsch Cole (b. 1936)
“I’d take the bus downtown with my mother, and the big thing was to sit at the counter and get an orange drink and a tuna sandwich on toast. I thought I was living large!... When I was at the Ritz with the publisher a few months ago, I did think, “Oh my God, I’m in the Ritz tearoom.” ... The person who was so happy to sit at the Woolworths counter is now sitting at the Ritz, listening to the harp, and wondering what tea to order.... [ellipsis in source] Am I awake?”
—Connie Porter (b. 1959)