The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books

The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books

The Ella Fitzgerald Songbooks were a series of eight studio albums released in irregular intervals between 1956 and 1964, recorded by the American jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, supported by a variety of orchestras, big bands, and jazz quartets.

The eight albums are as follows, with arrangers in parentheses:

• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook (1956) (Buddy Bregman)
• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers & Hart Songbook (1956) (Bregman)
• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook (1957) (Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn)
• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook (1958) (Paul Weston)
• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook (1959) (Nelson Riddle)
• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Harold Arlen Songbook (1961) (Billy May)
• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Jerome Kern Songbook (1963) (Riddle)
• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Johnny Mercer Songbook (1964) (Riddle)

They are considered a cornerstone of 20th century recorded popular music, and as a whole, represent some of the finest interpretations of the greater part of the musical canon known as the Great American Songbook.

The New York Times columnist Frank Rich was moved to write a few days after Fitzgerald's death that in the songbook series, she "performed a cultural transaction as extraordinary as Elvis's contemporaneous integration of white and African-American soul."

Here was a black woman popularizing urban songs often written by immigrant Jews to a national audience of predominantly white Christians. As Ira Gershwin said, in the line quoted in every obituary: "I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them." Most of the rest of us didn't know, either. By the time she had gone through the entire canon, songs that had been pigeonholed as show tunes or jazz novelties or faded relics of Tin Pan Alley had become American classical music, the property and pride of everyone."

Frank Sinatra was moved out of respect for Fitzgerald to block Capitol from re-releasing his own albums in a similar, single composer vein.

Verve reissued the eight albums in 1994 in this expansive boxset, which won the 1995 Grammy for Best Historical Recording.