Judith Tick Matthews Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Music j.tick@neu.edu 617.373.8537 Expertise American music, music history, twentieth century music, women's history 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.” […] Judith Tick for Northeastern Global News Profiling the “First Lady of Song” Profiling the “First Lady of Song” Music professor Judith Tick receives NEH fellowship to write a new Ella Fitzgerald biography with a “richer context”
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.” […]