On August 29, 1924, Dinah Washington was born. Washington was a versatile R&B singer of the late 1940s and 1950s who crossed over to pop audiences near the end of her short life.
Washington grew up in Chicago and showed her talent early. She was playing the piano for her church choir while she was still in elementary school and leading the choir by her early teens. After winning a local talent contest, she dropped out of high school at 15 to join the Sallie Martin Gospel Singers and began performing in Chicago clubs.
So Washington was already an experienced performer when, at the age of 19, she went to hear Billie Holiday perform. She sang for the club owner, who hired her to perform in the club’s second room. She stayed there for a year, and that was when she adopted her stage name; she had been born Ruth Jones.
That’s where Lionel Hampton heard her sing, and he was impressed enough to hire her as the singer for his band. Washington made her first recording in December 1943, backed by Hampton’s band; by spring 1944, “Evil Gal Blues” had made it to the top ten of the R&B chart.
Washington left Hampton’s band in 1946 and signed as a solo act with Mercury Records. Mercury began releasing singles in 1948, and Washington went on a remarkable run of success. Between 1948 and 1955, she landed 27 top ten hits on the R&B chart, even crossing over to the pop charts a couple of times—with “I Wanna Be Loved” in 1950 and “Teach Me Tonight” in 1954—a relatively rare occurrence in an era when radio stations were very strictly segregated.
And those hits covered a wide musical range. Washington was at home with Tin Pan Alley standards, covers of recent pop hits, jazz, and blues, even fairly risque blues songs like “Long John Blues,” in which she sang about a dentist who “filled [her] whole inside” with his “trusty drill.” For some fans who had followed her from her early Chicago club days, though, that versatility was a problem; they thought of Washington as a promising jazz singer who was wasting her talent on popular fluff.
By the late 1950s, the rise of rock’n’roll was beginning to break down the racial barriers in American radio, and it was becoming easier for black singers to cross over to white/pop radio. Washington had her first top ten pop hit in 1959 with one of her signature songs, “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes.” She followed that up with a successful album of duets with Brook Benton, another singer popular with both R&B and pop audiences; they had two big hits, “Baby (You’ve Got What It Takes)” and “A Rockin’ Good Way.”
By now, Washington was popular enough to draw large audiences in Las Vegas, even when her appearances weren’t well-publicized in advance. And that was fairly often the case, according to her friend Tony Bennett: “She used to just come in with two suitcases in Vegas without being booked. And she'd just come in and put the suitcases down. And she'd say ‘I'm here, boss’. And she'd stay as long as she wanted.”
On December 14, 1963, Washington’s husband awoke to find her in bed, unconscious and unresponsive. A doctor was called and declared her dead. An autopsy determined that she had taken an overdose of prescription insomnia and diet pills. She was 39 years old.
In 1964, a promising young singer named Aretha Franklin recorded Unforgettable, a tribute album of songs associated with Washington, who was one of Franklin’s favorite singers. Washington was inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame in 1984, and into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (in the Early Influence category) in 1993. Three of her records—“What a Diff’rence a Day Makes,” “Teach Me Tonight,” and “Unforgettable”—have been added to the Grammy Hall of Fame.
The greatest hits collection Gold is a good one-disc overview of Washington’s career, and includes all of the individual songs mentioned above. Almost all of the albums Washington recorded during her decade-long career are available for streaming at Hoopla.