Jackie Washington

Born in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1919, Jackie Washington came of age in the city’s large Black enclave and began making music at five. For eight years that stretched into the close of the 1930s, he sang with his brothers Ormsby, Harold, and Doc in the Washington Brothers, a group whose close-harmony style echoed the Mills Brothers. Professional performing gave way to other work in the 1940s, yet by decade’s end he was on the radio as a disc jockey and returned to singing in nightclubs throughout the 1950s. His first blues album, Blues and Sentimental, appeared in 1976 on the Knight II imprint—the same name as the Hamilton coffeehouse where he regularly played.

Across Canada he appeared at folk and blues festivals yet never crossed into the United States, the country where his grandparents had been enslaved; at any moment he could draw on a repertoire of 1,200 songs. Over the decades his path also crossed those of jazz figures Duke Ellington, Clark Terry, and Lionel Hampton, as well as blues artists Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Lonnie Johnson. He kept recording and performing, issuing several albums on the Borealis label: Where Old Friends Meet with Mose Scarlett and Ken Whiteley in 1991, Keeping Out of Mischief in 1995, Midnight Choo Choo in 1998, We’ll Meet Again again with Scarlett and Whiteley in 1999, and Sitting on a Rainbow with the same two partners in 2003. In 1996 the biographical volume More Than a Blues Singer: Jackie Washington Tells His Story was published.

Regarded as an elder statesman of jazz, blues, and folk music in Canada, particularly in Ontario, Washington still took the stage now and then during his eighties even as diabetes and other ailments took their toll—he eventually lost a leg to the disease. The Canadian Jazz and Blues Hall of Fame inducted him in 2002. He died in Hamilton, his lifelong home, in June 2009 at the age of 89.