I enjoyed listening to Becoming Ella Fitzgerald. Surprisingly, this book was a long for me and took my to an imaginative place. I cannot wait to share this with my book club,

Judith Tick has provided readers with a thoroughly enjoyable experience with Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: the Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song. Here is the tale of a rebel, a heroine and humble human who stood her ground, making sure she was heard the way SHE wanted to be heard.

This well-researched book covers aspects of her life and career that haven't been shared in the past, and a bright light is focused on the aspect of race relations in her living, working and musical spaces - despite all she overcame with grace and beauty. This read is time-worthy for both those who are familiar with her history, or those who know very little (me).

Ella provides an inspiring, forthright and a worthy example for anyone then or now, and this book is a great way to discover her!

*A sincere thank you to Judith Tick, Tantor Audio, and NetGalley for an ARC to read and independently review.* #BecomingEllaFitzgerald #NetGalley

Long biography, but had lots of details about Ella’s life a career. Would appreciate it more if it was trimmed down a bit.

Unable to finish the book because the app was unusable. I am willing to review the audio arc if/when I am provided with a suitable copy to review.

Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song is less a biography than a discography. Perfect for release during the age of streaming media, I was able to read along with my Pandora premium account, pulling up recordings as they were described. I didn't know much of anything about Ella Fitzgerald prior to reading this excellent work, and I don't feel like I can tell you much about her now that I've finished. A dishy celebrity biography this isn't!

Here's what I can now tell you: I understand why Ella Fitzgerald is considered The First Lady of Song. You would be hard-pressed to find a harder worker in any industry, much less in entertainment. She had a great amount of character in the old-fashioned sense. Don't confuse that with being stale or stodgy. Ella Fitzgerald was a tireless innovator. Given a few more years I would've fully expected to see her release a hip-hop single (it never occurred to me before reading Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song that scatting and rapping have similar roots). It seemed like everything was always an uphill struggle for Ella Fitzgerald, too. For example, why the insistence of pitting her against Billie Holiday? The two weren't rivals in real life, why did the press insist on forming teams? No matter what challenges were sent her way, Ella Fitzgerald just kept moving. She is a great inspiration.

Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song can be read by the casual reader or used in a classroom setting. For those unconcerned about having access to the acknowledgements, appendix, notes, bibliography, or index, I highly recommend the audiobook due to Carmen Jewel Jones's narration. She captures the essence of Ella Fitzgerald's voice, and I felt like I was directly listening to recorded interviews on a number of occasions. It makes it a little bit harder to flip back and forth into the songs, but you can always pause the recording, open up the Pandora app, pull up the work, and even save it to directly a playlist if you so choose. I would like to thank Tantor Audio for allowing me to experience this NetGalley audiobook.

I was lucky enough to receive a copy of the audio book from NetGalley in return for my honest review. Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song, was a great listen! I didn’t know much about Ella Fitzgerald before listening to this book, so all of this was new information for me. I enjoyed all of the details about her career. I particularly found interesting the parts where it talked about race relations during her lifetime. I thought that the person narrating the audiobook did a fantastic job and the story had a good pace that kept me interested. Thanks for sharing this with me, I am so glad I read it. Now, I need to go and re-listen to her music for the next few weeks!

<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77264982-becoming-ella-fitzgerald" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1676788287l/77264982._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77264982-becoming-ella-fitzgerald">Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/169597.Judith_Tick">Judith Tick</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6099928077">4 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
I was lucky enough to receive a copy of the audio book from NetGalley in return for my honest review. Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song, was a great listen! I didn’t know much about Ella Fitzgerald before listening to this book, so all of this was new information for me. I enjoyed all of the details about her career. I particularly found interesting the parts where it talked about race relations during her lifetime. I thought that the person narrating the audiobook did a fantastic job and the story had a good pace that kept me interested. Thanks for sharing this with me, I am so glad I read it. Now, I need to go and re-listen to her music for the next few weeks!<br />
<br/><br/>
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/154970912-becky-giese">View all my reviews</a>

Prior to this audiobook, I knew nothing about Fitzgerald’s life, I’d never even thought about looking it up. I just knew that she was definitely one of the best singers and musicians I had ever heard, and I was looking forward to learning more about her, and how her circumstances growing up in early 1900s America impacted her career and musical style.

I suppose I feel quite reluctant to write an overly negative review about a biography, there’s part of me that feels like it could be rather disrespectful to the person it’s written about, especially if they’re someone who’s gone through certain traumas or major historical events, or somebody who’s done a lot of long lasting good in the world. So I’d like you to keep in mind I’m reviewing this audiobook and its content, not the literal life story of Ella Fitzgerald.

I admire Tick’s courage to even attempt to write this book, because, as very clearly displayed throughout, there’s so much about Fitzgerald that went unspoken, and so much that she kept private and that her (criminal) management and “friends” didn’t bother ever asking her about. It’s not that this book didn’t lack the in depth archival research, or the very detailed history of the first to last time she ever sung and danced- Tick is very clearly an impressive researcher.

But in many ways I think that the disappointment in this book was just that- it is just research into Ella Fitzgerald’s life, start to finish, all the information anyone can access piled into one book. This might make me sound like a massive techie “2000s baby”, but I can’t help but feel that in this century, and probably for the rest of time, I’m really not sure if this sort of collection is “enough”. Maybe if I wanted to write further works about Fitzgerald myself, this book would be great because it compiles her whole life story into one place. But in a world where virtually anyone has access to internet, if they ever need to know what Ella Fitzgerald did on a particular day in a particular venue, they could just Google it.

I know that scientifically time probably roughly goes from A to B, but I do not believe we as human beings experience it like that. Time moves forward and physically we age but we are constantly looking back to specific points in the past, experiencing them all over again. We do not live life in the moment, strictly experiencing time as it happens. We do not even process time in chronological order, many people take longer to process a trauma that happened decades ago, than a trauma that happened yesterday. We are in the present when we can be, and in the past at the same time, whether we want to be, or not.

I felt like this book ignored that. It was almost a completely straight chronological timeline of Fitzgerald’s life, A to B, Birth to Death.

Which, personally, I just got so bored of. Some analysis is made about the reliability of sources, and there is light research on the political climate certain times, but I feel like even if this book focused more on one of these things, it would move away from being a linear explanatory timeline of Fitzgerald’s life, and transform into something that one wouldn’t really be able to find anywhere else, and would get to read from a perspective they would not have seen or thought of before.

As for an audiobook-specific review, this is a perfectly fine audiobook. There are a few odd pauses here and there, where editing has slipped up, but nothing that throws the dialogue to a point where it can’t be easily understood. I found the narration particularly slow, too. I had this book on x2.5 speed, which is already quite high for me, yet I feel like I still could’ve sped it up even more if I wanted to. Nothing too crazy, it was just something I definitely noticed with this audiobook in particular.

Release Date: December 26, 2023
📖📖📖📖

Ella Fitzgerald is enigma. In this book the authors archival research and in-depth family interviews shed new light on the singer's difficult childhood, the tragic death of her mother, and the year she spent in a girls' reformatory school. Ella sang in its renowned choir and dreamed of being a dancer.

I really enjoyed this book! I’ve always known Ella’s music but not much about her as a person. This book went REALLY in to depth. I’ll admit there were some parts I skipped ahead because it was so many facts. Breaking ground as a female bandleader, Fitzgerald refuted expectations and the more I learned about her and her incredible life, the more I loved it!

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions and thoughts are my own.

#becomingella #becomingellafitzgerald
#judithtick #TheJazzSingerWhoTransformedAmericanSong #tantoraudio #netgalleyreads #biography #capecodreads #bookreview #bookstagram #booklover #bookstagram #bookworm #booknerd #booktok #bookrecommendations #bibliophile #booksofinstagram #readersofinstagram #bookblogger #igreads #goodreads #bookclub #bookreviews #bookblog