‘Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song’
By Judith Tick
W.W. Norton, 592 pages

‘Feel My Big Guitar: Prince and the Sound He Helped Create’
Edited by Judson L. Jeffries, Shannon M. Cochran, Molly Reinhoudt
University Press of Mississippi, 202 pages

What do Ella Fitzgerald, Prince, and Marilyn Monroe have in common? Fitzgerald was doing well playing small jazz clubs like the Tiffany in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles, but she told her agent she wanted to sing in one of those “fancy places” along Sunset Strip. Monroe had become a Fitzgerald fan after the star was advised to study only Fitzgerald for her singing debut in “Gentleman Prefer Blondes.”

When Monroe showed up at the Tiffany, photographs were taken that appeared in newspapers across the country. In March 1955, she promised to be in the front row at Fitzgerald’s booking at the Mocambo, a club favored by the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, and Charlie Chaplin. Fitzgerald said that after that booking, she never played in small jazz clubs again. 

In the mid-1980s, Andy Warhol wrote in his diary about spotting Prince and Billy Idol at a party: “seeing these two glamour boys, it’s like boys are the new Hollywood glamour girls, Like Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe.” Warhol then made 12 silk-screen portraits of Prince for his personal collection — a fitting complement for his many Marilyn Monroe portraits.

Fitzgerald and Prince saw themselves as more than just entertaining singers. In his songs, as the editors say in the introduction to “Feel My Big Guitar,” the politics of sex, gender, and sexuality, international relations, as well as poverty, drug addiction, the space race, and the Cold War all were subsumed in Prince’s lyrics as he displayed his mastery of the electric guitar, rock’s signature instrument.

Fitzgerald, as Ms. Tick documents, kept expanding a repertoire that went way beyond jazz and swing in the 33 albums stacked in the biographer’s family home. Tick memorized the double LP “Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book.” The family expanded its range, listening to Fitzgerald singing George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, and Irving Berlin.

Fitzgerald said: “In the Fifties I started singing with a different kind of style, picking out songwriters and singing their songs. … It was like beginning all over again. … People who never heard me suddenly heard songs which surprised them because they didn’t think I could sing them. People always figure you could only do one thing. It was like another education.”

“Feel My Big Guitar” does not treat Prince as just a contemporary American phenomenon. The editors include an essay, “Zoot Suits and New Jack Swing: Morris Day’s Dandyism,” which deals with the very idea of the dandy derived from the work of Baudelaire.

The editors explain that they have “identified, recruited, and cultivated a small group of scholars that we believe are capable of producing some of the freshest, most intriguing, thought-provoking, and mind-bending work about Prince,” as well as calling on “lay persons” with personal reflections on the musician’s visceral impact.  

In both books, race as it intersects with stardom is also a theme. See, for example, H. Zara Caldwell’s “Fire it Up! Prince, Rick James, Rivalry, Race, Punk Funk, and the Minneapolis Sound.” Fitzgerald began, Ms. Tick shows, as “a race woman,” to quote Coretta Scott King, who heralded Fitzgerald as one of “heroines of our history.”

At the time of those photographs with Monroe, Fitzgerald may well have been viewed as a prop by the movie star’s fans, Ms. Tick observes. Black people were seen as background on the screen. But to Monroe then, and to the rest of her audience now, those photographs made Fitzgerald part of the mainstream Monroe wanted to foster.

Fitzgerald understood how the culture was changing because she was changing. When she sang, early in her career: “The object of my affection can change my complexion / From white to rosy red,” the Black theater audience roared. By 1966, she substituted the words “from brown to rosy red” in front of a laughing, hip audience.  

In her own sly, ingratiating way, Ella Fitzgerald was pushing the culture toward the flamboyant Prince. Both of them held their places in Black history while showing why American history would be so lacking without them.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Marilyn Monroe Day by Day.”