Dinah Washington

Dinah Washington

Dinah Washington was born Ruth Jones in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1924. Her family moved to Chicago while she was still a child. She played piano and directed her church choir. Later, she studied in Walter Dyett's renowned music program at DuSable High School. For a while, she split her time between performing in clubs as “Dinah Washington” while using the name “Ruth Jones” with the Salle Martin's gospel choir. She made extraordinary recordings in jazz, blues, R&B and light pop but refused to record gospel music, believing it wrong to mix the secular and spiritual professionally. She was a member of Liionel Hampton’s band in 1942 and cut her first hit with Keystone Records in 1943. She charted numerous R&B hits in the ‘40s and ‘50s. With "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes" 1959, Washington won a Grammy for Best R&B Performance. What set Dinah Washington apart from her contemporaries, was her extraordinary diction and phrasing. She was married seven times, and divorced six times while having several lovers, including Quincy Jones, her young arranger. She was known to be imperious and demanding in real life, but audiences loved her. In London she once declared, "...there is only one heaven, one earth and one queen...Queen Elizabeth is an impostor", but the crowd loved it. During her marriage to football player Dick "Night Train" Lane, she died from an accidental overdose of diet pills and alcohol at the age of 39 in 1963.