Entraînement à la Grammaire Anglaise à Distance

Back Story New York Times. 15.01.2018.

"Man, woman or child, Ella is the greatest," Bing Crosby once said.

Ella Fitzgerald, who died (1) on this day in 1996 at 79, began her journey to stardom (2) by winning a talent contest as a teenager. She had planned (3) to dance, but stage fright made her decide to sing (4) instead. The "First Lady of Song" spent [...] years in the limelight (5), working with more musical legends than we can count. She won 13 Grammy Awards and received a National Medal of Arts (6). With a range of nearly three octaves, she relished big band, jazz, bebop, scat and swing. She is perhaps best known for her Song Books of the ͛50s and ͛60s: eight albums, each dedicated to the likes of Duke Ellington, Cole Porter and Rodgers & Hart. But her young life was filled with hardship. Her mother died when Ella was 15. She ran away (7) from an abusive stepfather and had a spell in a reformatory where beatings were common. She was living hand-to-mouth (8) in 1934 when she won that crucial competition (9). As she received an honorary doctorate at Yale, she said: "Not bad for someone who only studied music (10) to get that half-credit in high school."