On the occasion of her second marriage, while standing before a justice of the peace, 21-year-old Dinah Washington (born Ruth Lee Jones) was six months pregnant. The year was 1946, a time when having a child out of wedlock was, for a woman, a public form of self-immolation, especially for someone like Dinah, who had been raised within the conservative, constricting yoke of the Southern Baptist Church. To assuage her devout mother, and to avoid complicating her burgeoning career as a professional singer, Dinah arranged the nuptials — she would not be the first woman, nor the last, to use marriage to head off the disdainful judgments of an uptight society.
That explains one of her many marriages.
Dinah’s husbands were a motley crew of strivers and reprobates. Some were musicians she knew or worked with on the road throughout her remarkable career. Others came into her life as outsiders to the world of music — a preacher’s son, an aspiring actor, a football player. Along with the husbands, there were the boyfriends. As a childhood friend once said of Dinah, “She was wild … boy crazy.”
Dinah packed a lot into her 39 years on earth. When she was found dead in her apartment, on December 14, 1963, the tragic victim of an accidental overdose of diet and sleeping pills, her fans were shocked. She had married her last husband just five months earlier, and her career was going strong.
As we come up on the centennial, August 29, of Dinah Washington’s birth, in 1924, the most important thing to remember about her life is not that she was married so many times. The more salient legacy is her incandescent talent, a singing voice that embodied the jazz aesthetic but never strayed far from its true spiritual essence in the gospel church and the blues. Her way with a song was alternately earthy and classy, her diction and tone things of beauty. She filled the inner sanctums of nightclubs and recording studios with the pristine power of her voice, and in so doing altered the course of American music. She has been inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Three of her recordings have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame (“What a Difference a Day Makes,” “Unforgettable,” and “Teach Me Tonight”), for having “qualitative or historical significance.” In 1993, the U.S. Post Office issued a Dinah Washington commemorative stamp.
As Lionel Hampton put it, even when Dinah was young, “She walked out on that stage like she owned it.”
Though the marriages may have been a sideshow, they do tell a story. Dinah sang songs primarily about matters of the heart. The blues and jazz tunes she made popular were mostly about broken hearts, lost love, and the ways in which the desire for love can turn a rational human being into a fool. Her pop songs put forth a romanticized version of male-female longing. These pop songs comprised her biggest commercial hits, but it was the blues that provided Dinah the opportunity to absorb and process the ravages of her love life. Where did it all come from, this deep and abiding identification with the pain and regret so ever-present in the lyrics of her songs? No artist can fully separate their public triumphs from their private struggles. To understand how Dinah was able to personify the blues and turn the ups and downs of her personal life into the emotional marrow of her artistry, an excursion is required. Even the messiest parts of a person’s life can be key to understanding their brilliance. Dinah’s life was complicated. Her greatness and her disappointing romances were inextricably bound, which is why there are hard truths, cautionary tales, and the occasional epiphany to be found in rummaging through the many marriages of Dinah Washington.
1. John Young
Born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to a father who worked in a lumberyard and a mother who played piano and sang in the church choir, Dinah knew what she wanted to do from a young age. Her family moved from the Deep South to Chicago’s South Side when she was four. At 15, she headlined her first recital, at St. Luke’s Baptist Church, where she sang “Precious Lord Take My Hand” and other gospel standards. Writes Nadine Cohodas, author of Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington (2006), the definitive biography of the singer, she “stood out right away. Perhaps it was an intuitive feel for the words that allowed her to phrase passages with a maturity beyond her years and her experience. Maybe it was the pure quality of the sound she produced. Whatever it was she was making a name for herself around the city though still a teenager.”
Bandleader Lionel Hampton saw and heard Dinah for the first time at the Garrick, a club on Randolph Street, in Chicago. It was Joe Glaser, the famous talent agent, manager for Louis Armstrong and other jazz greats, who’d brought Hampton to the club. Hampton was impressed. “I knew she was the girl I was looking for,” he recalled in Hamp: An Autobiography (1989). Hampton liked her “gutty style,” and that she sang with conviction and feeling. Though she did not shout out the lyrics of a song in the style of Bessie Smith, one of her blues heroes, the clarity of Dinah’s delivery guaranteed that she could hold her own while being backed by Hampton’s 16-piece orchestra.
Both Hampton and Glaser later claimed that each was the one who’d convinced the singer she needed to change her name from Ruth Lee Jones to the more dynamic Dinah Washington. By then, Dinah had already married John Young, who was six years older. She’d falsified her age on the marriage certificate, stating that she was 18, the legal age required, though she was only 17 at the time. Her husband “talked my language,” Dinah explained, “and said he’d help me get into show business. I figured this was my opportunity.” But Young, it turned out, was a traditionalist; he did not want his teenage wife going on the road with mostly male musicians. The marriage officially ended in October 1942, just four months after it began. “He didn’t think I should be an entertainer, but this is what I wanted,” said Dinah. It would become the central tension of her life: On the one hand, she yearned to have a conventional family life, with a husband and kids. But she was also determined to have a career as a performer. And she was driven in pursuit of her destiny. As Hampton put it, even when she was young, “She walked out on that stage like she owned it.”
2. George Jenkins
Like Billie Holiday, her favorite singer, Dinah sang behind the beat. Unlike Holiday, whose phrasing could be laconic, Dinah was forceful and piercing. Other than her background in the gospel church, she had no formal training; her voice was a God-given gift. She could do a remarkable Lady Day imitation when she wanted to, varying her tempo and becoming overtly emotional in her lyrical interpretations, but it was not normally her way to be melancholy or vulnerable. She could sing a song like “Am I the Fool” (“If tears were dollar bills, I’d be a millionaire”), but her vocals were often in contrast to the lyrics — she was melodically upbeat and fierce even when the composition was sad or dark. In her life and in her interpretive embodiment of a song, Dinah refused to play the victim.
Dinah claimed that during a phone conversation with Buchanan, she heard a female voice in the background say to her husband, “You better stay with that woman and get all the money you can.”
By the time Dinah found out she was pregnant, she had been in an off-and-on relationship with musician George Jenkins for a few months. A drummer in Hampton’s orchestra, Jenkins was thought to be devastatingly handsome, but, according to Cohodas’s bio, when he learned that Dinah was pregnant he became distant, bordering on cold. It was only after Hampton and others in Dinah’s life implored him to “do the right thing” that the drummer proposed marriage. Four days after they were married, on June 11, 1946, the newlyweds got into a domestic dispute. A verbal argument escalated, until Jenkins shouted at Dinah, “Who the hell wants a big black bitch like you.” Then he slapped her. Dinah grabbed her things and moved to her family’s apartment, on the south side of Chicago. Just three weeks after her marriage, Dinah told Jenkins she was not coming back. Later, she was told by a friend that the drummer had been married to another woman when they wed — an accusation that was never confirmed. But it was confirmed that Jenkins had continued seeing other women even after he and Dinah agreed to marry. The singer did not want her child to be born out of wedlock, so she did not divorce Jenkins until after she gave birth.
While she was more than eight months pregnant, Dinah performed at gigs in and around Chicago. No matter her domestic issues, she was determined to fulfill her professional obligations and maintain the upward trajectory of her career.
3. Bobby Grayson
The blues are not for the weak or sentimental. Ma Rainey, who popularized the music in the early 20th century and became known as the Mother of the Blues, is quoted as saying, “You don’t sing [the blues] to feel better. You sing ’cause that’s a way to understand life.” In Ken Burns’s 2001 PBS documentary series, Jazz, composer and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis says, “Everything comes out of blues music — joy, pain, struggle … It’s about a man and a woman. So the pain and struggle in the blues is that universal pain that comes from having your heart broken.” Marsalis could have been talking about Dinah’s artistry when he added, “Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance.”
As a singer, Dinah knew she was preternaturally talented. Her awareness of her gift made her a perfectionist on stage and in the studio. She could be a stern taskmaster, stopping the music and pointing out when a fellow musician was lagging or off-key. She did not suffer fools, which made her a total professional on the job and consequently, perhaps, a challenging spouse.
But everyone thought the marriage to Bobby Grayson, in 1947 — not long after she’d divorced Jenkins — had a good chance of working out. Grayson was the son of the minister who had presided over Dinah’s first marriage, and they knew each other from high school. He was handsome and he looked good on Dinah’s arm. There was one problem, though: Grayson was known to be a player.
At the age of 23, Dinah gave birth to her second child, who she named Robert Grayson Jr. But the presence of a child did not cure Grayson of his philandering ways, nor did it impede Dinah’s career trajectory. The children were being raised by their grandmother, in a house that Dinah bought.
One of the other problems with Bobby Grayson was that he had no intention of working for a living. This would be a common issue for the singer; many of her spouses and boyfriends turned out to be freeloaders looking to take advantage of her burgeoning income. By now Dinah had left Hampton’s band and gone out on her own, and almost immediately she became known as “Queen of the Jukeboxes,” with a Billboard Top 10 hit song (“I Wanna Be Loved”). She was constantly in demand as a performer in nightclubs, with gigs from coast to coast. At the same time, her third marriage fizzled. She had begun to see Grayson as a ne’er-do-well. She once came out of the Ritz Lounge, in Chicago, and found Grayson and his friends drinking liquor and smoking cigarettes in the car she had just bought. “Get those motherfuckers out of my car,” she yelled at Grayson (according to those who knew Dinah, “motherfucker” was her favorite epithet). Grayson’s friends skedaddled — they knew better than to mess with the Queen. After Dinah caught her husband having an affair with the neighborhood fortune teller, she filed for divorce. At slightly less than two and a half years, it had been the longest of her three marriages so far. She was 25 years old.
4. Walter Buchanan
The threat of physical violence was sometimes part of the equation. It was noted by some of Dinah’s colleagues that she was drawn to rough men who drank and caroused. Surrounded mostly by men in the music business, Dinah could curse, shoot craps, and play cards with the best of them. She had a tart tongue, which some of the men tolerated and were even amused by, until they had a few drinks and turned surly.
At one point, Dinah was traveling to Junction City, Kansas, by car to perform during “Negro Business Week.” She had hired a driver and was traveling with her latest boyfriend, Teddy Stewart, a drummer with her band. During an argument, Stewart became so angry that he punched Dinah in the face, then kicked her and the driver out of the car. The drummer then left them standing on the side of the road. A passerby picked them up and drove them into Junction City, and Dinah arrived for her gig at Municipal Auditorium wearing dark glasses to hide the bruises on her face.
In October 1950, Dinah married Walter Buchanan, a bass player. Buchanan was nine years older than Dinah. After less than one month of marriage, their union was already characterized by ferocious arguments, witnessed by the rest of the band. On one occasion, Dinah, who was determined that she would no longer be physically abused, pulled a gun on Buchanan. He took their car and disappeared for a few days.
Buchanan drank so much that he was no longer employable as a musician. Said Dinah, “In no time at all I knew the marriage was doomed. I considered it a joke when he told me one day that he wanted a new car.… He said I have enough money to take care of him.” Dinah claimed that during a phone conversation with Buchanan, she heard a female voice in the background say to her husband, “You better stay with that woman and get all the money you can.” Dinah was on the road so often that sometimes her marriages lingered on long after they had run out of gas. By the time the singer divorced Buchanan, she was already into her next relationship.
5. Eddie Chamblee
“Nobody Knows the Way I Feel This Morning” is one of Dinah’s most sublime renditions on record. At a time when the average length of a commercial song was roughly three minutes in duration, Dinah’s version of this song (written in 1924 by Tom and Pearl Delaney) clocks in at eight and a half minutes. In verse after verse, in her inimitable style, with interjections of “Lord Lord Lord” and her hums — “hmmm” — in descending scales, she gives voice to the inner lamentations of a jilted lover:
I pawned everything that I had this morning
I pawned everything I could get my hands on this morning
I pawned my ring, gold watch and chain
I would have pawned myself but don’t you know I felt kind of shamedNobody knows the way I feel this morning
Lord, Lord, I feel like I could scream
Scream and cry this mornin’
The song borders on the masochistic, except when Dinah, who was no pushover, adds her own verse, which was not in the original:
Girls let me tell you, if your man stays out all night till morning
I said if your man stays out and don’t come home till morning
Don’t waste your breath by fussin’ at him,
Just maul him on the head with your rolling pin
Dinah might have been thinking of husband number five, Eddie Chamblee, when she sang that verse. Chamblee was a saxophone player who had also come up with the Hampton orchestra. While playing together, they fell in love (or perhaps, lust), and Chamblee became part of Dinah’s band.
Like many musicians, Chamblee was a drinker (sometimes a fifth of gin a day, according to a bandmate), and he often disappeared for days. By the time they were a year into the marriage, the two were bickering onstage. This came to a head one night in Miami, in 1958, when Dinah and her band were performing at the Palms nightclub. All that week, she had been annoyed with Chamblee, who sometimes walked off the bandstand or refused to play a tune. Dinah’s anger grew throughout the sets. One night, in front of a full house, someone in the audience requested a song. Dinah responded that she would like to accommodate the request but that she was not getting cooperation from her saxophone player. Chamblee was sitting offstage and had left his instrument onstage in its stand. “This same thing happens from coast to coast,” Dinah said to the audience. “I’m getting sick and tired of that man always embarrassing me and trying to hurt my feelings. I won’t stand for it.” Perhaps spurred on by the audience’s applause, Dinah then walked over and picked up Chamblee’s horn — which she had purchased as a wedding present for her husband — and smashed it to the floor. Chamblee stood and approached the stage. A band member stepped in between Dinah and Eddie, who were now shouting at each other, then another band member became angry with the one playing peacemaker, on the grounds that he had no business interfering with a man and his wife. The entire club erupted in chaos. The cops were called and moved in with billy clubs and handcuffs. One of the officers told a musician to get Dinah out of the club and take her back to her hotel.
Back at the hotel, Dinah called LaRue Manns, her longtime personal assistant, and said, “I just wrapped Eddie’s saxophone around his head.” Shortly afterward, she and Chamblee were divorced. The marriage had lasted 14 months.
5a. Rusty Maillard
Throughout the 1950s, in between marriages, Dinah had many flings. She had short-lived relationships with esteemed jazz musicians, including Jimmy Cobb and Max Roach (clearly, she had a thing for drummers). She also had a torrid affair with one of her arranger/producers, a brilliant 22-year-old musical dynamo named Quincy Jones. The singer, now in her mid-30s, and the arranger spent much quality time in the studio creating one of Dinah’s best albums, Back to the Blues. They also spent time in bed.
“I seemed to amuse Dinah because of my age,” Jones told Dinah’s biographer. “She used to call me ‘grasshopper kid’ because I was young and green, and we used to drink grasshoppers at the time.” Jones was a married man. One night, after he and Dinah caroused all night long, he stumbled home and fell asleep. Hours later, the phone rang. Still half asleep, Quincy answered and mumbled, “Hello.” His wife picked up the other line in the house, just in time to hear Dinah say, “You know what, Mister Green-ass Grasshopper? In case you forgot, I got your li’l ass drunk last night and we did the doogie three times.”
The affair ended but Dinah and Quincy remained close, and often collaborated throughout her career.
In the summer of 1959, Dinah met a Bronx-born cab driver at ex–heavyweight champ Joe Louis’s Brown Bomber nightclub, in Manhattan. Rusty Maillard was seven years younger than Dinah, and he professed surprise that she would even talk to a regular guy like him. They started a romance. A few weeks later, when Dinah was performing a series of club dates in Sweden, she arranged for Maillard to be flown over. He proposed marriage. There was a waiting period in Sweden to secure a legal license; rather than wait, Dinah and Maillard chartered a boat, sailed out beyond the country’s three-mile boundary, and had a minister conduct a ceremony.
“You’ve got to stay up late and get up early to get the jump on the Queen.”
When they returned to the states, Dinah showed him off as if he were her husband, but to family and friends she expressed doubts that the marriage was legally binding in the U.S. When they separated, in 1960, she told people there was no need for a divorce, and from then on she didn’t count Maillard among her legally designated husbands.
The relationship with Maillard was similar to an earlier “marriage” Dinah had with drummer Larry Wrice. They had conducted a torrid romance that was ongoing for a few weeks when, during a gig in Miami, they decided to get married. On a Friday, they went to the courthouse to tie the knot before a justice of the peace, but they arrived too late — the court was closed for the weekend. Dinah and Wrice decided to publicly announce that they were married nonetheless. The next day they headed back to New York as word of the so-called marriage spread; Jet magazine announced that Dinah had taken a new husband, with a picture of the happy couple.
As with Maillard, Dinah’s relationship with Wrice ended within a few months of its inception. Unlike with Maillard, it was a “marriage” that had never legally existed, in any country.
No matter what was happening in her career, Dinah always seemed to feel the need to either have, or give the impression that she had, a significant other. She knowingly stoked the fires of rumor about her romances and apparently didn’t mind creating confusion about the number of husbands she’d had over the years. Some who knew her claimed she was driven by lust, others said loneliness. Her compulsion for male companionship became part of her legend.
6. Rafael Campos
In late 1960, at Ciro’s nightclub, in Los Angeles, Dinah met Rafael Campos, a Dominican-born, small-time actor who had appeared in the movie Blackboard Jungle with Sidney Poitier. He was six years younger than Dinah. They had barely even dated when Campos proposed marriage, and even Dinah’s friends were surprised. Certainly Rafael, a smooth-skinned Latino who looked even younger than his 30 years, fit the bill of “boy toy,” but was he marriage material? Secretly the two flew to Tijuana, where, backed by a mariachi band and administered to by a Spanish-speaking priest, they were married, on January 6, 1961.
Throughout her career, Dinah had issues with her weight. She had begun taking diet pills, which caused her to drop pounds quickly but in a manner that was not healthy. One evening not long after Dinah and Campos were married, she was in her suite at the Roberts Motel, in Chicago, across the street from Club DeLisa, where she was performing. With her was her stepsister, Farris Kimbrough, who was now working as her personal assistant. In the motel room Dinah had stripped down and was nearly naked when Campos entered. Over recent weeks she had lost a lot of weight, and, according to Kimbrough, had folds of skin around her midsection. Apparently Campos had not seen Dinah completely naked since her dramatic weight loss. Said Kimbrough: “Rafael went berserk. He had an epileptic fit. He fell on the floor. Dinah was trying to keep him from swallowing his tongue.”
Dinah never forgave Campos for his extreme reaction to her naked body. She decided the marriage was over. “I get the message before God,” she told a reporter from the Chicago Defender. “That’s why I had his bags packed…. He sure was surprised to find his clothes already packed, and you should have seen the expression on his face. I’ve been in this game for a long time. You’ve got to stay up late and get up early to get the jump on the Queen.”
7. Dick “Night Train” Lane
In 1960, three years before her death, Dinah released “This Bitter Earth,” a strange, haunting ballad with lyrics and music by Clyde Otis, Lily Mars, and Charles Kawasaki that rose to No. 1 on the Billboard R&B charts. It is arguably Dinah’s greatest creation, a song that has the power to freeze a listener in their tracks and bring about a kind of existential vertigo. The lyrics are deceptively simple.
This bitter earth
Well, what fruit it bears
What good is love
Mmmm, that no one shares
And if my life is like the dust
Oooh, that hides the glow of a rose
But what good am I
Heaven only knows
Backed by a choir of strings building slowly in intensity, the song’s ethereal melody lingers while the vocals remain anchored by Dinah’s mesmerizing, sharp-edged truth-telling.
Lord, this bitter earth
Yes, can be so cold
Today you’re young
Too soon, you’re oldBut while a voice within me cries
I’m sure someone may answer my callAnd this bitter earth
Ooh, may not be so bitter after all
The song was Dinah’s definitive statement as a vocalist and a human being, as much her declaration of principle as Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” was for him. Dinah liked to project the image of a tough woman, but when she sang “This Bitter Earth” in nightclubs her eyes were often wet with tears, and when the song came to an end, for a moment she remained hushed. (In 2010, German-British composer Max Richter created a remix of the song, entitled “This Bitter Earth/On the Nature of Daylight,” using Washington’s original vocals over a meditative electronic soundscape. Richter’s version has been used in numerous movies, including, most notably, at the end of Martin Scorses’s Shutter Island, bringing the song to the attention of a whole new generation.)
To most people it probably sounds exhausting for a woman to have been married seven times, as well as to have had so many boyfriends, before having turned 40 years of age.
As a Black woman making her way in show business, Dinah had her travails. Like all Black musicians of her era, she was often forced to stay on the other side of town from where she was performing, because of segregation. Once, while appearing in Philadelphia, she and her entire band were arrested for no reason other than that they were five well-dressed African Americans in Dinah’s new white Chrysler automobile. She showed the two white cops her license and registration for the car, but they still made the singer and her band stand against a wall while they searched the vehicle for drugs. The cops said they had received a report of a stolen white car. Dinah was livid. “I showed you my license and information,” she said to the cops. “You could see it was my car. You arrested me because I’m a Black woman in a white car.” She later filed a lawsuit against the Philadelphia police department for false arrest. According to biographer Cohodas, the suit “went nowhere.”
Another time, Dinah was performing at a club in Baltimore. After the gig was over, around 4 a.m., Dinah, band members, her manager, and the club owner were sitting at a table and talking. Suddenly a group of cops burst in and arrested everyone for “disorderly conduct” and “unlawful consumption of alcohol,” meaning drinking after hours. Dinah and the others were taken before a magistrate, who asked her, “Are you a singer or a dancer?” Said her lawyer, “She is a singer of renown, famous the world over.”
Dinah seethed with anger, especially when a policeman gave testimony before the judge that he’d heard “drums and piano playing and the voice of a man singing at 4 a.m.” To a reporter from the Baltimore Afro-American, Dinah said, “If it was a party, where were the people?” Of the cops, she added, “They’re ridiculous. I called the NAACP to look into the matter because it’s prejudice.” Eventually, the judge tossed out the charges against Dinah and the others. These slights and indignities, which few white entertainers would be forced to endure, ate away at Dinah’s psyche. Some said she could be caustic and bitter. According to bandmates, if you said “Good morning” to her, she would sometimes respond, “That’s a matter of opinion.”
No doubt the emotional residue of these racial encounters spilled over into the singer’s personal relationships. Some thought her marriage to husband number seven had a better chance than most of going the distance. Their first meeting had been dramatic. Dick Lane, a defensive halfback with the Detroit Lions, was nearing the end of his career when he met Dinah at a party one night and told her, in a joking tone, that she need not be so bossy and vulgar, saying, “Girl, you know what, if I was your old man, I’d put half my fist down your throat, talking like that.” Dinah threw her drink in Lane’s face. The halfback, who was six-foot-two and two hundred pounds, picked Dinah up and carried her toward a window, pretending he was going to throw her out. After putting her down, he again told her, “Seriously, you oughta try and clean up your mouth.”
Because few people talked to Dinah so directly, she was impressed by this athlete infamous for his brutal “clothesline” tackles, whose nickname supposedly came from saxophonist Jimmy Forrest’s 1952 hit song of the same name. After they were married, on July 2, 1963, Dinah referred to Lane as her “lucky number seven.” She also told her bandmates that Lane was “hung like a stallion — damn near killed me.” None of the men were shocked by her description; they were accustomed to Dinah’s blue sense of humor.
What made Night Trane Lane different was that he was a man with his own successful career and source of income. He did not need Dinah’s money. Dinah moved into her new husband’s spacious two-story apartment, at 4200 Buena Vista Drive, in Detroit. As was the case during all of her marriages, she did not cut back on her bookings. In fact, 1963, like most years, was a relentlessly busy time for the singer. She performed three, four, sometimes five nights a week at venues all around the country. But her health had been suffering. Along with the diet pills she’d been taking for years, Dinah took “pep pills” to maintain her energy and keep her awake. The pills made it possible for her to meet the obligations of her career, but they also gave her insomnia. So she was prescribed medication for that as well. Her regimen of pills raised her up and then brought her down, and frequently, the result was exhaustion. Four times in 1962 and 1963, Dinah was taken to the hospital to be treated for physical collapse. At the age of 39, she was running herself ragged.
Sometime after midnight, in the early-morning hours of December 14, Dinah took her usual concoction of medications — only this time, the dosage was lethal. Her heart stopped pumping. Husband number seven found her that morning, slumped over in front of the television. He called an emergency number. Paramedics arrived and pumped her stomach, but the singer was already gone.
* * * * * * *
In death, the African American press lionized Dinah Washington. She had always been most popular with Black audiences. Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and even Billie Holiday had quickly crossed over to white followers, but Dinah, with her irreproachable roots in the Black church and the blues — and her tart mouth and imperious ways — was adored by Black folk. It wasn’t until her megahit, “What a Difference a Day Makes,” that she fully crossed over and became just as popular with whites.
To most people it probably sounds exhausting for a woman to have been married seven times, as well as to have had so many boyfriends, before having turned 40 years of age. This begs the question: How many husbands would Dinah have had if she’d lived to 60 or 70? Her checkered love life was either a testament to an unflagging optimism and belief that hope springs eternal, or an indication of her ability to absorb the pain and sorrows of failed romances.
Her songs suggest it was the latter. Though she rarely wrote the lyrics of those tunes, her ability to burrow deep into the emotional authenticity of a song — especially when she sang the blues — was transcendent. Her voice triumphed over, and perhaps even took inspiration from, the cluttered junkyard of her marriages and the fallow lows of her fractured love life.
As Quincy Jones put it: “She had a voice that was like the pipes of life. She could take the melody in her hand, hold it like an egg, crack it open, fry it, let it sizzle, reconstruct it, put the egg back in the box and back in the refrigerator, and you would’ve still understood every syllable of every single word she sang. Every single melody she sang she made hers. Once she put her soulful trademark on a song, she owned it and it was never the same.” ❖
T.J. English is the author of nine books, including, most recently, Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld, from William Morrow/HarperCollins.
