“It isn't where you came from, it's where you're going that counts.”
— Ella Fitzgerald
Ella lost her mother at 15, spent time in a reform school, and was homeless before winning an amateur contest at the Apollo Theater in 1934. She never let her origin define her ceiling.
I grew up in Yonkers after my mother died, moving between relatives and a reform school in Hudson. Nobody looked at me and saw a future. I was just another poor Black girl with nowhere to go. But one night at the Apollo, I walked out to sing and everything changed. I stopped thinking about the orphanage, the hunger, the cold rooms. I thought about the next note. Where I was going. That is the only thing that ever saved me.
“Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong.”
— Ella Fitzgerald
Ella faced racial segregation throughout her career, was denied hotel rooms and club bookings. Marilyn Monroe famously called the Mocambo club owner in 1954 to secure Ella a booking. Despite it all, she never quit.
There were years when I couldn't get a hotel room in the cities where I performed. I'd sing to a full house and then sleep on someone's couch because the hotel wouldn't take me. My manager Dizzy pulled strings, Marilyn Monroe once called a club owner to get me a booking. I had every reason to stop. But I never stopped wanting to sing. That want, that love, it kept pulling me forward when nothing else did.
