Ella Fitzgerald In Soulsville

Ella Fitzgerald often said, "I'm not going to be left behind. If you don't learn new songs, you're lost." The year was 1967 and she was 51 years old. She said more in 1968: "I want to stay with it. And staying with it means communicating with the teenagers. I want them to understand me and like me." Youth was listening to soul, a new keyword in black popular music, whose powerful musical and political currents were converging around 25-year-old Aretha Franklin. Proclaimed "Sister Soul" in Ebony (October 1967), and the "Sound of Soul" on the cover of Time Magazine (June 1968), Franklin had rocked the music industry with a string of hit singles and albums. It was time for Ella to go to "Soulsville," as she called it, for a stopover.

In 1967 Fitzgerald began singing "I Can't Stop Loving You" as a way into the soul world. She chose wisely. In 1962, Ray Charles had transformed this country ballad — released by its composer, Don Gibson, in 1957 — into a crossover chart-busting hit. By 1967 it had been recorded by a wide range