On February 7, 1956, Ella Fitzgerald walked into Capitol Studios in Hollywood and began recording the album that would redefine what her voice could mean to an audience. She had been free of her Decca contract for barely five weeks. Norman Granz, her manager and the driving force behind Verve Records, had spent years engineering her exit, ultimately leveraging Decca's need for musicians under his control, including Gene Krupa, Teddy Wilson, and Stan Getz, to secure her release in exchange for the soundtrack rights to The Benny Goodman Story. The deal closed in the first week of January 1956. By February 7, Ella was in the room. What emerged across four sessions, the last on March 27, was “Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book,” and it arrived as a deliberate repositioning of one of the greatest voices in American music.
Granz’s thinking was explicit. He wanted to move Ella beyond what he called a cult following among jazz fans, and he believed the way to do it was through the architecture of the Great American Songbook itself. The composers of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway, he reasoned, gave her material that could carry her voice into living rooms, hotel lounges, and mainstream record stores that her Decca work had never fully reached. His stated plan was to record her across multiple composers, each album a dedicated survey, and to keep just enough jazz in the backing to preserve her identity without narrowing her audience. Cole Porter was the first name on the list, and the choice was precise: Porter’s songs are melodically sophisticated but emotionally direct, built for a singer who can honor the wit of a lyric while making the feeling underneath it feel inevitable.
The arranger Granz chose was Buddy Bregman, then twenty-four years old, whose charts for the project drew on the cream of West Coast session musicians. The orchestra included trumpeters Pete Candoli, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Maynard Ferguson, and Conrad Gozzo; trombonists Milt Bernhart, Joe Howard, and Lloyd Ulyate; alto saxophonists Herb Geller and Bud Shank; tenor saxophonists Bob Cooper and Ted Nash; and baritone saxophonist Chuck Gentry, with Cooper and Nash doubling on oboe and flute respectively on the ballad sessions. Pianist Paul Smith and guitarist Barney Kessel anchored the rhythm section throughout. The detail that sharpens the picture considerably: Sinatra had recorded Nelson Riddle’s arrangement of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” on January 12, 1956, at KHJ Studios in Hollywood, with Milt Bernhart’s celebrated trombone solo at its center. Several of those same players then appeared on Ella’s version of the same song at Capitol Studios a few weeks later. The two recordings sit in permanent, productive contrast: Sinatra’s version a slow-building drama, Ella’s a demonstration of phrasing so assured it makes the song feel like she wrote it. The same city, many of the same players, two entirely different conceptions of what a standard could do.
The album came out on May 15, 1956, as a double LP priced at $9.96, its thirty-two tracks ranging from “Too Darn Hot” and “I Get a Kick Out of You” to “Don’t Fence Me In.” The double-album format and the extensive liner notes were common in classical music at the time but essentially unheard-of for a jazz release. That was the point. Granz was packaging a cultural event, and the advertising campaign that followed, with full-page spreads in Esquire, The New Yorker, and High Fidelity, plus a dozen Sunday newspapers, confirmed the ambition. By July, the album had reached No. 15 on the Billboard Best Sellers list, and by year’s end it sat at No. 18 among the bestselling records of 1956, in a year dominated by film soundtracks. A Hollywood Reporter review of Ella’s October 1956 Mocambo appearance noted that the audience “wouldn’t let the gal go after 13 songs and 50 minutes,” and credited the reception directly to what it called her “smash LP album of Cole Porter songs.”
What the Cole Porter Songbook accomplished, in formal terms, was to establish the template for the entire series that followed: the Rodgers and Hart Songbook later in 1956, the Duke Ellington Songbook in 1957, the Irving Berlin Songbook in 1958, the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook in 1959, and three more through 1964. Each album assigned a different arranger to a different composer’s catalogue, treating the songwriter as the organizing principle and Ella’s voice as the constant. The series ran eight albums in total, and the 1994 Verve box set collecting all of them won the Grammy Award for Best Historical Album in 1995. New York Times columnist Frank Rich, writing after Ella’s death in 1996, described the Songbook series as having “performed a cultural transaction as extraordinary as Elvis’s contemporaneous integration of white and African-American soul.” That is a large claim, but it points toward something real: the series did not just document the Great American Songbook, it canonized it, giving those composers a definitive recorded monument at the precise moment when rock and roll was beginning to rewrite the cultural conversation around popular music.
Granz’s gamble, which was also Ella’s gamble, was that depth of repertoire and seriousness of presentation could expand an audience rather than reduce it. The Cole Porter Songbook proved the bet sound. In retrospect, it is easy to hear the album as inevitable, the right singer meeting the right songs under the right conditions. But the conditions were manufactured, deliberately and carefully, by a manager who understood that Ella’s gifts had been underserved and a singer willing to trust a new frame for her voice. The album endures because the music inside it is extraordinary, and it exists because someone decided, in January 1956, that extraordinary was not enough on its own.
