Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington [Hardcover]

Nadine Cohodas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 24, 2004

Queen is the landmark biography of the brief, intensely lived life and soulful music of the great Dinah Washington.

A gospel star at fifteen, she was discovered by jazz great Lionel Hampton at eighteen, and for the rest of her life was on the road, playing clubs, or singing in the studio--making music one way or another.

Dinah's tart and heartfelt voice quickly became her trademark; she was a distinctive stylist, crossing over from the "race" music category to the pop and jazz charts. Known in her day as Queen of the Blues and Queen of the Juke Boxes, Dinah was regarded as that rare "first take" artist, her studio recordings reflecting the same passionate energy she brought to the stage. As Nadine Cohodas shows us, Dinah suffered her share of heartbreak in her personal life, but she thrived on the growing audience response that greeted her signature tunes: "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes," "Evil Gal Blues," and "Baby (You've Got What It Takes)," with Brook Benton. She made every song she sand her own.

Dinah lives large in these pages, with her seven marriages; her penchant for clothes, cars, furs, and diets; and her famously feisty personality--testy one moment and generous the next. This biography, meticulously researched and gracefully written, is the first to draw on extensive interviews with family members and newly discovered documents. It is a revelation of Dinah's work and her life. Cohodas captures the Queen in all her contradictions, and we hear in this book the voice of a natural star, born to entertain and to be loved.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A significant blues and jazz diva, Washington rivaled Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith with her soulful singing and her tempestuous ways. Once known as "Queen of the Blues and Queen of the Juke Boxes," Washington lived a tumultuous life, ascending to early fame with Lionel Hampton's band and flirting with all the temptations of a musician's life on the road. Drawing on archival materials and interviews with the singer's fellow musicians, Cohodas (Spinning Blues into Gold; Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change) provides a much-needed portrait of Washington. Born Ruth Jones in Tuscaloosa, Ala., in 1924, the young singer and her family soon moved to Chicago, where Jones left school to pursue a singing career. By the time she was 18, Washington was singing with Hampton's band at the Apollo Theater. In a few years she had made such a name for herself that she left Hampton for her own solo career, recording an album almost every year for the next 20 years until her death in 1963. Cohodas provides a detailed chronological account of Washington's turbulent life and career, including her seven marriages. Although Cohodas swamps the reader with a mass of exhausting details and her interpretations of Washington's music sometimes lack depth, she has written the definitive biography of this important singer.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

When Dinah Washington (1924-63) died, she seemed poised to become the female Nat Cole--the first black woman to be America's favorite pop singer. Her career had already spanned more than 20 years, and she had become first the queen of the blues, sophisticated big-band variety, and then a premier jazz singer before turning to the orchestrated pop treatments of "This Bitter Earth" and "What a Difference a Day Makes" that began making her a household name. This exhaustive biography-- Cohodas seems to have found every scrap of writing about her and talked to every living soul who knew her--shows that no one worked harder for her success than Washington herself. Indeed, she probably overworked herself, and what Cohodas characterizes as her premonitory sense of her image--that is, her determination, before thinness became an American obsession, to be remarkably svelte at all costs--indubitably killed her. Although it doesn't include enough appreciation of her honey-and-vinegar voice and her recorded legacy to please Dinah devotees, this is an invaluable document. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; First Edition edition (August 24, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375421483
• ISBN-13: 978-0375421488
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 0.4 x 6.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,123,867 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Nadine Cohodas is the author of several books, most recently Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington, which received an award for Excellence in Research in Recorded Jazz Music from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Still Waiting for the Definitive Bio..., January 29, 2005

By 

Bay Area Book Fiend (San Francisco, CA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington (Hardcover)

Dinah Washington, like Etta James and Esther Phillips, is one of the underrated singers of the post WWII era, and very little has been written about her. So when I saw this book and who its author was,(Nadine Cohodas, who wrote a superb history of Chess Records,Spinning Blues Into Gold), I eagerly anticipated reading it.
After finishing it, unfortunately I'm still waiting for the definitive biography of the Queen. It's very apparent that Cohodas did a lot of research, but the result was turned into a laundry list of club dates, recording sessions, clothes inventories, and rotating musicians and husbands which becomes numbing. What is missing is context and interpretation of these events aside from the repetitive assertion that Washington was narrowly promoted and marketed because of race. I wasn't looking for sensationalism or psychobiography from this book, but I was hoping to gain some insight into Dinah Washington's life, or music, and the lack of analysis left me still wondering both who she was and how she created such wonderful music.

17 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's only the music I love., November 17, 2004

By 

Richard L. Pangburn (Bardstown, KY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington (Hardcover)

I finished this book while listening to her multiple CD collections. The book gets five stars for its scholarship, its extensive notes, its all inclusive index.

But still it seems too cold for the subject at hand, or perhaps I'm just disappointed that Dinah Washington was more shallow than I imagined her to be. Probably the latter.

Also Cohodas's appraisal of the albums I enjoyed most is just the opposite of what I feel myself. What I hear as honest and tragic, the biography calls tired and too husky. And the other way around.

I had no idea that Dinah Washington did "It's Too Soon To Know" before Etta James (who owns the song in my estimation). Etta James came later, and she idolized Dinah Washington and made her sound her own, strings and all.

When Etta James spotted Dinah Washington in the audience at the nightclub where she was singing, she abandoned her original program and sang "Unforgettable" as a tribute to her idol. The song was broken up by Dinah Washington screaming at her, pointing a finger at her saying, "Girl, don't you ever try to do the Queen's songs."

According to Cohodas, Dinah Washington's lovers, to whom she dedicated songs, were usually gone by the time the records were released. She was married seven times and had many lovers in-between. Such as the "Rafael" she mentions on her cover of Irving Berlin's "I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm."

Dinah was dead at thirty-nine, but her music lives on and always will for this listener. This biography reminds me again that Art is part the author and part the reader, part the singer and part the listener. What I hear in her music has not changed.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars exhaustive and exhausting ....., October 13, 2004

By 

J. Brady (PAWLEYS ISLAND, SC United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington (Hardcover)

I couldn't agree more with the reviewer here who calls this biography "dry." "Queen" is an exhausting, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink look into the life and music of Dinah Washington. The pace is maddeningly slow - it's certainly not what I'd call a "page-turner" - and it is full of minute details but little insight. Informative, sure, but in the right hands all this detail could have been compiled into a book that is an enjoyment to read, not something that seemed ( for me, at least ) more like a homework assignment.