Toni Lynn Washington

Toni Lynn Washington, a blues singer based in Boston, put out her album Blues at Midnight on the Tone-Cool imprint of Rounder Records during 1995. Locals long ago crowned her Boston’s “queen of the blues,” a title rooted in her enduring presence on the city’s club circuit.

Her earliest musical experiences came through a series of gospel ensembles in Southern Pines, North Carolina; from there she moved into R&B work, sharing stages across the South with such established acts as Sam and Dave and Jackie Wilson. In the 1960s she also completed USO tours spanning both the United States and Asia, and she cut the Top 50 single “Dear Diary” for New Orleans’s Conti label, at that time an Atlantic Records subsidiary.

Following a twenty-year absence from touring and recording, she resumed live work in 1992 fronting a ten-piece band. On her Tone-Cool debut, Blues at Midnight, Washington shone most brightly as an interpreter, delivering B.B. King’s “Ask Me No Questions,” Jimmy Reed’s “Ain’t That Loving You Baby,” and the standard “Evening,” a number long associated with both Jimmy Rushing and the Basie Orchestra and T-Bone Walker.

The follow-up It’s My Turn Now appeared in 1997; early in 2000 she issued another collection, Good Things.