Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Jane Fitzgerald was an American jazz singer often referred to as the First Lady of Song, Queen of Jazz and Lady Ella. She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing and intonation, and a hornlike improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.
Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia, the daughter of William Fitzgerald and Temperance Tempie Fitzgerald. Her parents were unmarried but lived together for at least two and a half years after she was born. In the early 1920s Fitzgeralds mother and her new partner, a Portuguese immigrant named Joseph Da Silva, moved to the city of Yonkers, in Westchester County, New York, as part of the first Great Migration of African Americans. Initially living in a single room, her mother and Da Silva soon found jobs. Her halfsister, Frances Da Silva, was born in 1923. By 1925, Fitzgerald and her family had moved to nearby School Street, then a predominantly poor Italian area. She began her formal education at the age of six and proved to be an outstanding student, moving through a variety of schools before attending Benjamin Franklin Junior High School from 1929.
Source: Wikipedia