Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘Cocktail Hour’ Encourages a Swig

Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, apart from being the most important and best-known female jazz singers of the last century, represent two sides of an interesting coin. Their early years were more similar than their public images suggest, and both bore the scars of hard and abusive childhoods. Both became well-known singers at a very young age.

They diverge in that Holiday’s pain seems central to her art and appears at times to be its sole subject matter, whereas Fitzgerald buried her demons beneath the perfectly phrased song. There is no hint of a troubled soul in Ella Fitzgerald’s style; Billie Holiday is a troubled soul personified. Fitzgerald had the more successful career; Holiday is the more dramatic and sentimentalized figure.