Dinah Washington

Singer and pianist Dinah Washington was one of the great voices of jazz in the 1950s. Born Ruth Lee Jones in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on August 29, 1924, she grew up in Chicago and learned to play the piano in church, where she also sang in the choir. After winning an amateur competition at the Regal Theater, she performed in clubs and was noticed by Joe Glaser, who recommended her to Lionel Hampton. She became Dinah Washington when he hired her from 1943 to 1946, singing "Evil Gal Blues" for the Keynote label. This success launched her career as a performer of R&B, blues and jazz, which she followed up with a string of twenty-seven chart hits for Mercury between 1948 and 1955, including the No. 1 hits "Am I Asking Too Much" and "Baby Get Lost", or "I Wanna Be Loved" on the pop side. Among the standards and hits of the day, Dinah Washington covered Hank Williams' "Cold Cold Heart", No. 3 in 1951. She went on to work with such greats as Clifford Brown and Clark Terry on Dinah Jams (1954), as well as Cannonball Adderley, Ben Webster, Wynton Kelly, Kenny Burrell and a young pianist named Joe Zawinul. In 1959, she scored one of her biggest pop hits with "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes" (No. 4), in a Latin version that won her a Grammy Award. She followed this up with "Unforgettable" and two duets with Brook Benton in 1960 on "Baby (You've Got What It Takes)" (#5 pop, #1 R&B) and "A Rockin' Good Way (To Mess Around and Fall in Love)" (#7 pop, #1 R&B). Her last hit, in 1961, was "September in the Rain" (no. 23 pop, no. 5 R&B). Her versions led to richly orchestrated albums for Mercury, including Queen and Quincy among the sessions with Quincy Jones, and later for Roulette Records. The self-styled "Queen of the Blues" died of an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol on December 14, 1963, at the age of 39.