Ella Fitzgerald Birthplace — Newport News, Virginia

Ella Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia, and grew up in Yonkers, New York, after her mother relocated the family north. Her discovery is one of music's great origin stories: she entered an amateur talent contest at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1934 intending to dance, lost her nerve, and sang instead — winning first prize and beginning a career that would make her the most celebrated jazz vocalist in history. Chick Webb hired her as his band's singer shortly after, and she fronted the orchestra until Webb's death in 1939.

Fitzgerald's voice — a pure, four-octave instrument of perfect intonation and apparently effortless flexibility — could move between swing, bebop, and ballad singing with equal authority. Her Songbook series for Verve Records in the late 1950s — dedicated albums to the music of Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer — established the American Songbook as a canon and her as its definitive interpreter. Benny Carter, Norman Granz, and Duke Ellington all considered her the finest singer they had ever worked with.

Newport News has a historical marker acknowledging Fitzgerald's birth. Yonkers, New York — where she grew up — has been more active in commemorating her connection to the city. The Apollo Theater in Harlem, where her career began, is the primary pilgrimage site for Fitzgerald devotees. She died in Beverly Hills in 1996.