Esther Phillips

Esther Phillips possessed such broad musical adaptability that it may have limited her mainstream commercial prospects, for although she handled blues, early rhythm and blues, raw soul, jazz, conventional pop, disco, and country with equal skill, her various labels repeatedly failed to devise a focused promotional approach that would have allowed her to connect with larger audiences. To many ears her voice carried an unusual nasal character often likened to Nina Simone, yet she regarded Dinah Washington as her foremost influence. Phillips entered the profession while still a child, and accounts suggest her difficulties with narcotics had already begun during her teenage years; whenever those struggles originated, their cumulative toll on her well-being ended her life before she reached fifty.

Born Esther Mae Jones in Galveston, Texas, on December 23, 1935, she sang in church from an early age. After her parents separated she divided her time between her father in Houston and her mother in the Watts section of Los Angeles. While living in Los Angeles in 1949 her sister entered her in a talent contest at a nightclub owned by bluesman Johnny Otis. Impressed by the thirteen-year-old, Otis arranged a recording session with Modern Records and incorporated her into his traveling revue. Performing as Little Esther, she achieved her initial breakthrough alongside the vocal quartet the Robins—later known as the Coasters—on the Savoy single “Double Crossin’ Blues.” The track topped the R&B charts early in 1950 and opened the door to further successful Savoy releases under her own name: “Mistrustin’ Blues,” “Misery,” “Cupid Boogie,” and “Deceivin’ Blues.” In 1951 she left Savoy for Federal following a royalties dispute, yet despite remaining the most prominent female performer in Otis’s revue she could not repeat her earlier run of hits. A subsequent disagreement with Otis, reportedly financial, ended her association with his show; she stayed with Federal briefly before moving to Decca in 1953, again without notable success.

Returning to Houston in 1954 to reside with her father, she had already developed an affinity for the excesses of touring life; by the late 1950s her experimentation with hard drugs had become a full heroin addiction. She rejoined Savoy in 1956 without significant results, then recorded for Federal and, in 1960, Warwick, both ventures largely overlooked. Short of funds, Little Esther performed in modest Southern clubs while undergoing periodic hospital stays in Lexington, Kentucky, for her dependency. In 1962 future country artist Kenny Rogers encountered her at a Houston venue and secured her a contract with his brother’s Lenox label. No longer suited to the “Little Esther” billing, she adopted the surname Phillips from a nearby gas station. Her country-soul interpretation of the emerging standard “Release Me” appeared late that year; following Ray Charles’s landmark country-soul success “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” the single topped the R&B charts and reached the Top Ten on both the pop and country charts. Capitalizing on renewed visibility, Phillips recorded a matching country-soul album, but Lenox declared bankruptcy in 1963.

Her recent achievements attracted the attention of Atlantic Records, which initially placed her in varied musical settings to determine her strongest commercial niche. The label eventually chose to emphasize her more polished qualities, resulting in a blues-inflected collection of jazz and pop standards. Her string-laden version of the Beatles’ “And I Love Him,” with the gender adjusted, nearly reached the R&B Top Ten in 1965, prompting the Beatles to invite her to the United Kingdom for her first overseas appearances. Encouraged, Atlantic steered her toward still more jazz-oriented material on the subsequent album Esther Phillips Sings, though the release drew limited notice; it was somewhat overshadowed by her soulful take on Percy Sledge’s “When a Woman Loves a Man,” again with adjusted gender, which charted on the R&B list. Atlantic resumed recording her across multiple styles, yet none of the singles achieved lasting traction and the company ended the relationship late in 1967.

As her addiction intensified, Phillips entered rehabilitation; during treatment she recorded several tracks for Roulette in 1969. Upon release she relocated to Los Angeles and returned to Atlantic. A late-1969 performance at Freddie Jett’s Pied Piper club yielded the album Burnin’, widely praised as one of the most cohesive and accomplished efforts of her career. Despite this reception Atlantic continued to favor smoother pop material, and when those efforts failed to resonate she was dropped once more. In 1971 she joined producer Creed Taylor’s Kudu imprint, a subsidiary of his CTI jazz-fusion label. Her Kudu debut, From a Whisper to a Scream, appeared in 1972 to solid sales and favorable reviews, especially for her rendition of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Home Is Where the Hatred Is.” Over the following years Phillips issued several additional Kudu albums and enjoyed sustained visibility, appearing at major venues and international jazz festivals. In 1975 she achieved her strongest single success since “Release Me” with a disco-infused revival of Dinah Washington’s “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes,” which reached the R&B Top Ten and the pop Top Twenty; the accompanying album became her most commercially successful release to date.

Phillips departed Kudu for Mercury in 1977 under an arrangement granting her unprecedented artistic autonomy. She completed four albums for the label, none matching the commercial performance of her Kudu work. After 1981’s A Good Black Is Hard to Crack she found herself without a contract. Her final R&B chart entry arrived in 1983 with the Winning-label single “Turn Me Out.” Health problems soon intensified, the result of long-term addiction compounded by recent alcohol use. Phillips died in Los Angeles on August 7, 1984, from liver and kidney failure.