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Judith Tick

Biography

Judith Tick

Judith Tick is professor emerita of music history at Northeastern University. She has published award-winning books and articles about American music and women’s history in music, including RUTH CRAWFORD SEEGER: A Composer’s Search for American Music. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Judith Tick

Books by Judith Tick

Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song
by Judith Tick - Biography, Nonfiction

In this first major biography since Ella Fitzgerald’s death, historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of this ambitious risk-taker whose exceptional musical spontaneity made her a transformational artist. BECOMING ELLA FITZGERALD clears up long-enduring mysteries. Archival research and in-depth family interviews shed new light on the singer’s difficult childhood in Yonkers, New York, the tragic death of her mother, and the year she spent in a girls’ reformatory school --- where she sang in its renowned choir and dreamed of being a dancer. Rarely seen profiles from the Black press offer precious glimpses of Fitzgerald’s tense experiences of racial discrimination and her struggles with constricting models of Black and white femininity at midcentury.