Ella Fitzgerald at 100

Ella Fitzgerald was born 100 years ago today and she died on June 15, 1996. By any measure, she was the most important jazz-pop singer of the 20th century. By the time she was 21 in 1938, she had completely transformed pop singing, dragging the vocal into the Swing Era by giving it a more relaxed, jazz-influenced, finger-popping feel. In the 1940s, foll…