Ella Fitzgerald and the Acoustics of My Autism

A long-in-the-making tribute.

Raised the daughter of a classical harpist and opera singer in Prague before her family fled the Nazis, my grandmother adored music, but pretty much the only genre that she and I agreed on is jazz. 

And no one reached us quite like singer Ella Fitzgerald. 

I dropped the needle on an LP of Fitzgerald’s Duke Ellington Song Book album. The standard “Sophisticated Lady” started with the First Lady of Song’s slow, heavy vibrato on just two words–“they say.” 

I observed my grandmother’s rapt expression, head in her hands, staring at the speakers, stunned by Fitzgerald’s purity of tone. When I put music on, I usually paced as part of my autistic “stimming”–repetitive, self-soothing behavior. But with this record I sat on my bed, watching my grandmother and the speakers. I got chills. 

As a music historian and autistic person, I focus on the sound of a recording, its production, the vocal and instrumental arrangements. But while no two autistic persons are alike, I care nearly exclusively about the music on first listen with the lyrics trailing in my hierarchy of concerns. 

In fact, my mother has said that music was my first language. She told me, “Music has been your bridge to relationships, to the world.” In that context, melodies and harmonies carry more meaning to me than words do. 

From a very early age, in fact, I was obsessed with gorgeous voices across many genres, so picking a favorite singer for someone who loves to make lists is near impossible. Even acknowledging the inherent subjectivity of the process, it is exceptionally difficult to compare singers with divergent styles, attitudes, and tonal qualities. 

But when it comes to voices, Fitzgerald possessed my favorite voice in the history of recorded music. With her sound, flawless in its mellifluousness, its rhythmic ferocity, and the sheer clarity of her vocal expression, she astonishes even veteran listeners. No Auto-Tune, the pitch-correcting software prevalent in popular music since the late nineties, is needed to correct anything she sang from the fifties and sixties. She was immaculate in her delivery. 

Having immersed myself in music history and criticism for decades, I have often wondered why I respond so enthusiastically to Fitzgerald’s music when some argue that her singing is noticeably detached, surface-level. Her interpretations of sad songs are especially subject to criticism from her detractors when compared to the interpretive genius of fellow jazz legend Billie Holiday. In one disparaging example, clarinetist Tony Scott said, “[A] singer like Ella says, ‘My man’s left me’, and you think the guy went down the street for a loaf of bread or something” (quoted in Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music). 

But Fitzgerald's music especially reveals the acoustics of my autism in how my brain organizes and interprets sound, privileging melody and rhythm over words. Frankly, I never would have noticed Fitzgerald’s supposed “lack of emotional intelligence” that critics argued she encapsulated with lyrics, as recent biographer Judith Tick makes clear was a widespread sentiment in Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song, if not for searching out these polemics in earnest. 

As an autistic person, I understand language and communication literally enough so that the surface is the meaning. Try to imagine the question marks that would arise in your mind trying to figure out what it means to “drop it like it’s hot.” On a literal level, I, at least, didn’t think it was anything close to a butt dance. 

Because I have always been less attuned to the meaning of words than to their sound, growing up I dismissed many modern albums known for masterful lyrics, especially in hip hop. Some have argued that Fitzgerald was inattentive to the meaning of lyrics as a singer. But critic Will Friedwald argues that “Fitzgerald was an essentially musical interpreter, and the melody was, in fact, more important to her than the words,” adding, “Fitzgerald was emotionally true to whatever she was singing,” making listeners feel the emotions in a song (A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers). 

When I listen to certain ballads of Fitzgerald’s like her 1950 recording of “Someone to Watch over Me'' with pianist Ellis Larkins, I tend to find common cause with Friedwald’s interpretation. To me, Fitzgerald could be very much in sync with the emotions of sad songs and those that sounded far more jaunty.

I recently visited Bowling Green State University in Ohio for research and heard that version of “Someone” on its original vinyl in the university's Music Library and Sound Archives—and practically had an out-of-body experience. The precise attention that Fitzgerald paid to the melodic details of the song evoke a haunting trace that belies widespread criticism that Fitzgerald couldn't sing sad songs. 

***

As musically adept as I was as a child, I lacked neurotypical social skills. At one point a peer had to explain the existence of sarcasm. Today I’m much more attuned to the ironic, but I still make jokes on social media about what I call #literalproblems– referring to confusion about everything from the ambiguity of the phrase “this weekend” to the many meanings of slang. 

But that is only part of what I mean about hearing surface meaning in music where the sound comes first. Any melodic and rhythmic attention threatens to drown out the nuances of lyric interpretation.

Ella Fitzgerald certainly had the capacity to express irony in her lyrics in a way that comes naturally to someone like me. When I hear her perform “Sweet Georgia Brown” on her live album Ella in London (Pablo Records) from 1974, there’s what I call a discernible wink in her style that gives the humor away in how she sings, “You know I don’t lie, not much.” 

I think music and singing have been my consistent escape. White, male, and middle class, I have privilege that a Black woman, even at the height of her international renown, could not access. But bullied and abused at school for being autistic and queer, I (metaphorically) sang my heart out at school talent shows–and even won one. Having experienced the early death of her mother, abuse, truancy, divorce, depression, diabetes, racism, sexism, and fatphobia, Fitzgerald nevertheless made clear when she sang that pain was not the only part of her story. 

Trauma was one thing; art, it seems, another. 

Musicians across genres have cited her as a crucial influence and inspiration. I’m tempted to concur with singer Johnny Mathis who said in the PBS American Masters documentary Ella Fitzgerald: Something to Live For, “She was the best, the best there ever was. Out of all of us who sing, she was the best.” 

*** 

I first learned about Ella Fitzgerald from reading a children’s biography of her at age eight. When I played her on CD four years later, I was bowled over. It was the 1993 compilation, The Best of the Song Books on Verve Records, taken from her eight-album series spotlighting one composer, one lyricist, or one team (like George and Ira Gershwin) per album, each recorded between 1956 and 1964. 

From the opening verse of the first track, the brassy and ebullient “Something’s Gotta Give,” I was hooked: musically, Fitzgerald was an “irresistible force” at least as much as the object of her affection in song. Her fluttering melisma and hushed and intimate renderings of ballads like “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” sounded wonderfully easy for her to elicit. 

But a key text in recent years that has helped me orient myself in Fitzgerald’s canon is cultural critic Margo Jefferson’s sharp and sumptuously written essay, “Diaphoresis” (in This Woman’s Work: Essays on Music, eds. Sinéad Gleeson and Kim Gordon). The piece emphasizes the multiple sets of double standards Black women face for weighing and sweating too much. In her television appearances, Fitzgerald sweated profusely, a public display of the labor and the physicality, easy to ignore over a recording she makes sound effortless. 

I know I can never understand her kind of pain, but I also feel her singing in my bones, and not just for its joy. In “The Price of the Ticket,” the writer and social commentator James Baldwin wrote in 1985 that in the company of painter Beauford Delaney, he began to understand the multilayered meaning in the music of Fitzgerald. One of the recordings I have especially grown to appreciate for this is the Harold Arlen Song Book album. The way Fitzgerald responds to multiple kinds of musical settings, her often underappreciated versatility, the way she out-swings anyone in striking distance–all of this was noticeable in both slow ballads with jazz combos and high energy big band performances.

I am admittedly less familiar with Fitzgerald’s experimentations with country music, but her scatted improvisations in the style of country, soul, and classical on Ella in London are a sheer delight. On her rendition of the rock classic “Sunshine of Your Love” in the late sixties, she still sounded as vital as ever.

***

On her deathbed, my grandmother, half-conscious and exceptionally fragile, in a near-whisper said to me: “We'll listen to music together across the skies.” 

I hear Ella Fitzgerald singing, “Heaven, I’m in heaven, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak” on her duet with Louis Armstrong on “Cheek to Cheek,” and I can see and hear my grandmother’s captivated expression listening to her once again, with me, across the skies.

​​