Ella Fitzgerald & “I Can't Stop Loving You,” Berlin 1968

“If you don't learn new songs, you're lost,” Ella Fitzgerald told The New York Times in 1967. This essay is a close reading of one performance of “I Can't Stop Loving You” she gave at a concert in Berlin on February 11, 1968. The song, which had already become a global hit through a version by Ray Charles in 1962, turned into a vehicle through which Fitzgerald signified on “Soulsville,” or soul, a black popular style then sweeping the American music scene. References to Aretha Franklin's “Respect” and Vernon Duke's “I Can't Get Started With You” are examples of the interpolations included here. The essay challenges the idea that the late 1960s were a fallow period in Fitzgerald's career by highlighting the jazz techniques she used to transform one song into a self-revelatory theatrical tour de force

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