Scope and Content Note
Known as the "First Lady of Song," Ella Fitzgerald sang professionally throughout a career that spanned some fifty-seven years. More than 2,300 recordings are known to exist of over 1,000 songs; Fitzgerald is thought to be more recorded than any other singer. Her repertoire included works from various genres, including musical theater, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, religious works, and Latin-American songs. Under the guidance of manager and producer Norman Granz, Fitzgerald recorded several "songbooks" of the works of individual composers and lyricists.
The core of the Ella Fitzgerald Collection at the Library of Congress is the arrangements found in the Music series that were made for her by a group of more than fifty arrangers and orchestrators. The arrangers whose works are included in the collection include Buddy Bregman, Benny Carter, Frank DeVol, Russ Garcia, Billy May, Marty Paich, Gerald Wilson, and, with the greatest number, Nelson Riddle.
Most arrangements in the collection are represented by a combination of full scores and parts, often with the addition of some combination of a piano-conductor short score, a reduced score, and a lead sheet or lyric sheet. The collection came to the Library with materials for each arrangement kept together in an envelope marked with a song title, a number (or numbers) assigned to that arrangement and, usually, the name of the arranger. These envelopes were kept in numeric order, which appears, for the most part, to represent a chronological filing system, with each new song arrangement being placed after the last. There are a few exceptions, however, where different arrangements of the same title were filed together but had been assigned different numbers.
There are both unnumbered arrangements in the collection and missing arrangements for which numbers are given in the index cards; we assume many of these are held at the other institutions mentioned in the introduction.
Folders may contain a combination of manuscript and printed music, photocopies, or Ozalids – sometimes multiples in different versions. If there is either some version of a full score and/or what appears to be a complete set of parts, then no particular note is made about a folder’s contents.
In addition to the primary listing of arrangements by song title, researchers may find the included Alphabetical Index of Arrangers to be helpful. This index provides a quick overview of the arrangers and their respective works contained in the collection.