Dinah Washington

Midway through the twentieth century, few vocalists commanded wider affection or navigated as many idioms with equal authority as Dinah Washington, who moved with ease among R&B, blues, jazz, gospel, and pop. Her singing featured a raw, penetrating timbre, distinguished by razor-sharp diction and concise, blues-rooted phrasing. Turbulence in her private affairs colored her readings, producing an unsentimental yet fiercely compelling grasp of romantic loss. Beginning in the 1940s she placed repeated Top Ten singles on the R&B charts; in 1959 she crossed into the pop mainstream with the album What a Diff'rence a Day Makes!, which earned her the Grammy for Best R&B Performance. Though she died at thirty-nine in 1963, her example left a lasting mark on later R&B and jazz singers, among them Nancy Wilson, Esther Phillips, and Diane Schuur. Her recordings have been assembled in extensive anthologies such as The Complete Dinah Washington on Mercury and The Complete Roulette Dinah Washington Sessions.

Originally Ruth Lee Jones, she arrived in Chicago at the age of three and grew up immersed in gospel music, serving as pianist and choir director at her church. At fifteen she won an amateur contest at the Regal Theater and began working Chicago nightclubs as both pianist and vocalist, securing an engagement at the Garrick Stage Bar in 1942. Talent manager Joe Glaser heard her there and suggested her to Lionel Hampton, who invited her into his orchestra. Hampton maintained that he supplied the name Dinah Washington, though other accounts credit Glaser or the Garrick’s manager. She remained with the band from 1943 until 1946 and cut her first sides for Keynote late in 1943 during a blues date produced by Leonard Feather that drew on Hampton sidemen. The initial hit, Feather’s “Evil Gal Blues,” launched a rapid climb; by the time she left to pursue a solo career Washington was already a leading R&B attraction.

After signing with the fledgling Mercury label she delivered a steady run of R&B Top Ten entries between 1948 and 1955, interpreting blues, standards, novelties, pop material, and even Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart.” Parallel to those releases she recorded numerous straight-ahead jazz sessions with both large ensembles and small groups, most notably the album Dinah Jams with Clifford Brown and additional dates alongside Cannonball Adderley, Clark Terry, Ben Webster, Wynton Kelly, and the young Joe Zawinul, who served as her regular accompanist for several years.

The year 1959 brought an abrupt commercial breakthrough when What a Diff'rence a Day Makes! reached the pop Top Ten. The project revived composer María Grever’s 1930s ballad—previously a Dorsey Brothers hit—in a Latin-American bolero arrangement and captured the Grammy for Best R&B Performance. For the remainder of her life Washington focused largely on ballad performances supported by opulent orchestral backings at Mercury and Roulette, a direction that paralleled the contemporary work of another R&B-rooted vocalist, Ray Charles. Among these later recordings stands her 1961 treatment of Billie Holiday’s “Don't Explain,” graced by an affecting, blues-tinged Ernie Wilkins arrangement under Quincy Jones’s direction. Washington’s death came in 1963 from an accidental overdose of diet and sleeping pills combined with alcohol; she was still performing regularly, having appeared in an L.A. club only two weeks earlier.