Judith
Tick
Matthews Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Music
Judith Tick in the Press
Christian Science Monitor
A jazzy new biography unfurls Ella Fitzgerald’s life and career
A professor emerita of music history at Northeastern University, Tick blends her understanding of the era with recent interviews and newly accessible digital copies of Black-owned newspapers of the time.
Daily Mail
How Ella gave any song real… soul! Cole Porter said she wasn’t intelligent enough to sing his lyrics – but it’s thanks to her they’re remembered at all
But Tick, who is a Professor Emerita of music history at Northeastern University, doesn’t help things by lapsing into academic prose.
Ella Fitzgerald, a Voice That Set the American Standard
Tick is a professor emerita of music history at Northeastern University whose books include a biography Ruth Crawford Seeger, the modernist composer who also happened to be Pete Seeger’s stepmother. She chronicles the slights and insults Fitzgerald faced as a Black woman on tour, especially in the South.
KUNC
Early hardship couldn’t muffle Ella Fitzgerald’s joy
From early on, music was Fitzgerald’s salvation. It was where she lived. She could lose herself in it and go somewhere else, no matter what was happening around her. Northeastern University music historian Judith Tick imagines the young girl “singing by herself in a corner of a recess schoolyard and looking happy, smiling and laughing.” […]