THE VOICE OF AMERICA

By JAY COCKS

I sing like I feel," Ella Fitzgerald would say. By that casual standard, it was a wonderful life. She sang some of the best music ever written in America, and, feeling it, she sang it wonderfully. For many, indeed, she sang it definitively. "I never knew how good our songs were," Ira Gershwin once remarked, "until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them." By the time she died at home in Beverly Hills last week at 78, she had spread the treasure of her voice over thousands of songs and half a dozen generations, cutting everyone in on the wonder. There was something about her voice that glistened, that refracted off an up-tempo number like a sudden shot of sun or shone off a ballad like a sideling beam of moonlight.

She started singing with Chick Webb's Big Band in the mid-'30s, when she was still a teenager, and later did a lot of swinging and scatting with Dizzy Gillespie. But it was her collaboration in the '50s with producer/manager Norman Granz on a benchmark series of "songbook" albums that gave Fitzgerald the musical regentship that never passed from her. "Norman felt that I should do other things," she remembered, "so he produced the Cole Porter Songbook with me. It was a turning point in my life."

Together--and often working with the brilliant arranging skills of Nelson Riddle--Fitzgerald and Granz then went on to songbooks for the likes of Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Irving Berlin and Johnny Mercer, the great composers of the great era of American popular music. Those songbooks became the foundation of a legacy, the single source for a musical standard that Fitzgerald, as much as anyone, helped make timeless. "Some kids in Italy call me 'Mama Jazz,'" she recalled. "I thought that was so cute. As long as they don't call me 'Grandma Jazz.'"

Senior-citizen status may have been her chronological due, but it never seemed to fit the refined beat of her music, which--young fans in Italy to the contrary--was less straight jazz than pop on an elegant upswing. There is no doubt that Billie Holiday had a darker genius. Lady Day's jazz was steeped in the magic and mystery and doom of the blues. Ella's art had a sunnier side, a more adaptive quality that let her be, if not an absolute original, a peerless interpreter, a superb vocal actress who could snuggle into Porter's playfulness or Arlen's melodrama or Ellington's chromatic gymnastics with equal agility. Billie Holiday's music was a lifeline. She lived out all the suffering of her songs. For Ella Fitzgerald, music seemed more like a safe harbor, a home from which she rarely ventured.

Born in Newport News, Virginia, Ella Fitzgerald never knew her biological father. According to a biographer, she was raised in Yonkers, New York, and fled her abusive stepfather after her mother died, making money by singing and dancing on the sidewalks of Harlem and warning prostitutes of the arrival of the police. At 16, dressed in cast-off clothes and wearing men's boots, she won an amateur-night contest at the Apollo Theater. When she was brought to Chick Webb's attention, he complained, "I don't want that old ugly thing!" But he took her. As admirers would later marvel, "Poor Ella, she can't play piano. All she can do is sing everything right on the first take."

She married and divorced twice. Her first husband was Benny Kornegay, a shipyard worker; her second, the jazz bassist Ray Brown. In the past decade, her many illnesses seemed incompatible with the bell-like clarity of her voice, one recognized by octogenarians and Generation Xers alike. She was performing as late as 1992, but the physical debilitation was crushing, aggravated mostly by diabetes that eventually led to the amputation of her legs below the knees in 1993. But Fitzgerald made no mythology of her personal life. Shy onstage, ill at ease in interviews, she let her songs do all the talking. She gave them a life of their own that superseded hers.

Still, Fitzgerald had a lurking melancholy in her best ballad performances that pushed past the pristine technical perfection of her pitch and phrasing into the night country. As a personality, she was remote, needing music to give her substance. As a performer, even to someone hearing her for the first time, she was an old friend. Talk about Ella or Billie, and no further I.D. is required. "It used to bother me when people I didn't know came up and called me Ella," she admitted once. "It seemed to me they should say Miss Fitzgerald, but somehow they never do."

She had, simply, become a part of the life of everyone who listens to music, a part that runs from a musical past into a shared tradition, and will not ever pass.