Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

CREATIVE RESILIENCE & AGING: LADY BE GOOD — ELLA FITZGERALD'S LIFE IN SONG

2019; Elsevier BV; Volume: 27; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.jagp.2019.01.173

1545-7214

Jeffrey M. Lyness,

Nursing Education, Practice, and Leadership

This presentation will use biography and other techniques from the humanities to elucidate themes of creativity, resilience, and aging based on the life and career of singer Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996). 'Ella,' as she was affectionately known by the public, was among the twentieth century's best-loved performers. She pleased audiences around the world with live concerts and epochal recordings, helping establish the canon of the 'Great American Songbook.' Her gifts included an unerring sense of pitch, superb diction, a uniquely personal sense of rhythm, and the vocal dexterity and musical imagination to match any instrumentalist with her flights of improvised scatting. She remained at the top of her profession across six decades. Yet she had to overcome many forms of adversity in her life and career, including: deprivation and poverty as an adolescent; frequent lack of critical respect (as she was often unfavorably compared to her contemporary, Billie Holiday); and declining physical health in her later years. She also had to navigate the turbulent male- and white-dominated music and entertainment industries. That Ms. Fitzgerald did so with such grace and success is testimony to the human spirit's potential for resilience. In her last decade of performing she adapted her singing approach to fit her fraying vocal instrument, managing to convey an even deeper emotional connection to her material. This presentation will illustrate her story with curated audio and video clips as well as critical analysis, in order to identify generalizable themes and consider their implications for our clinical work with aging patients and their families and for ourselves.