The Fabulous Miss D.

Ruth Lee Jones was seventeen on the December day she walked into a New York City recording studio to record four songs with the All-Star sextet that included Lionel Hampton on piano and tenor saxophonist Arnett Cobb. Born in Alabama she moved to Chicago, won a talent competition and was singing with Hampton’s band; Hampton is possibly the one who suggested Ruth change her name to Dinah Washington.

She recorded four songs that day and her first single, Evil Gal Blues only made the Harlem Hit Parade after Salty Papa Blues, her second single, was released. You can hear the influence of Billie Holiday, who Dinah had been taken to see in Chicago, in her singing.

After these two singles Dinah was affected, like every other performer, by the recording band enforced by the American Musician’s Union and she spent her time fronting Hampton’s band on live dates. She went back to recording under her own name in 1946 and soon made the R&B charts; it was the beginning of the most successful recording career of any black female singer in the 1940s and 1950s. She topped the charts twice in the early 1950s and throughout the decade just about every record she released went Top.10; n 1960 she topped the charts twice, with Brook Benton.

She was just 39 when she died in 1963, following an overdose of prescription drugs. Despite being so young she had been married eight times, the first time when she was just sixteen. Today, Dinah Washington is somewhat overlooked but should not be; she sang the blues, jazz, torch songs and just about every other kind of ballad with style and panache. Seek out Teach Me Tonight to hear why she really was the Fabulous Miss D.