THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 16, 1996 TAG: 9606160045
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEVE STONE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 85 lines
When word reached Sidney C. Evans Jr. on Saturday that Newport News native Ella Fitzgerald - one of the world's most famous and versatile jazz/pop singers - had died, he did the natural thing.
He played her music for the world to hear.
``It was a great loss to the music world,'' said Evans, founder and head of the Ella Fitzgerald fan club as he paused during a four-hour tribute to the singer Saturday afternoon on WFOS-FM - the radio station of the Chesapeake Public School system. ``It's a loss not just for jazz. She did it all. She could sing it all.''
Evans called Miss Fitzgerald ``a great legend'' and said her death marks ``the closing of an era of music that I know will never be repeated again.''
Evans, a 35-year-old longshoreman who lives in Norfolk, was a sixth-grader at Robert Gatewood Elementary School when he first heard about her during Black History Month.
He first heard her sing on television one Sunday night, when he was 16. He became an instant fan, reading and collecting all the material he could find on the First Lady of Song.
``She has a voice like an instrument,'' Evans said. ``No one can get as close to an instrument as she can.''
Today Evans has one of the largest known collections of memorabilia on Miss Fitzgerald, with hundreds of compact discs, tapes and albums, and hundreds of photographs and articles.
Five years ago he formed the Ella Fitzgerald Music Fan Club and became its president, mailing out a bimonthly newsletter to hundreds of members around the world. It's her only officially sanctioned fan club.
He met her backstage once at a Detroit concert.
``When I finally met her, I was drenched in sweat and almost speechless,'' he said in a 1994 interview in the Chesapeake Clipper.
``She was very gracious and very quiet. She doesn't say a lot. In fact, I had to hold up most of the conversation. A lot of young people today don't know who Ella Fitzgerald is, and that's too bad. She's a national treasure.''
Although she left Newport News as an infant long before she could have any memories of her hometown, she was always welcomed back as one of its favorite daughters.
She last performed locally in 1992 at the 25th Hampton Jazz Festival and received a plaque from residents of her former neighborhood in southeastern Newport News.
``I'm just so proud to have passed through Virginia,'' she said that day. ``I was a little bitty baby here. My mother was the real representative here, and so I'd like to accept this for her. If she was alive, she'd be so, so proud.''
Having undergone surgery on her eyes as well as quintuple-bypass heart surgery in 1986, Miss Fitzgerald had to be helped to the Hampton Coliseum stage, and she sat in a chair for her performance.
A Virginian-Pilot music critic made it clear the next day, however, that there was nothing frail about her work:
``Fitzgerald demonstrated the continued vitality of both her singing and the 20th century American song book in which she holds a very real stake.''
After receiving the plaque from her former neighborhood, she encored with Stevie Wonder's ``You Are the Sunshine of My Life.''
She was that and more for Evans.
``I knew she was sick and her health was down,'' Evans said Saturday. ``But when I got the word that she had passed, that stunned me.''
He spoke with members of Miss Fitzgerald's staff in California.
``They are all taking it very badly. They say she died comfortably. She went out in style with her family there beside her.''
Funeral services will be private.
``If it had been a public thing, I would have gotten on the plane and flown to California this morning,'' Evans said. ``But they said it's just going to be the family.''
Instead, he spent the day talking with fellow fans around the country and went on the air from 3 to 7 p.m. at WFOS with a tribute featuring her music.
``That's a hard question,'' Evans said when asked if there was one song in particular he felt best represented her work.
``She did so much. But there's one that's been sticking with me. I just played it. `A-Tisket A-Tasket.' That's one of her best because she wrote it.'' It's in the Grammy Hall of Fame.
The fan club will not fade with her passing, Evans promised.
``I am going to change the name to the Ella Fitzgerald Legacy Society, and I'll continue to put together the newsletter six times a year.
``She did so much for music. I'm going to keep her legacy alive. I'm going to keep her name in the light.''
MEMO: For information on the Ella Fitzgerald Music Fan Club/Legacy
Society, write Sidney C. Evans Jr., P.O. Box 1461, Chesapeake, Va.,
23327. by CNB