Dinah Washington: Queen of the Blues, Born in Tuscaloosa

Ruth Lee Jones was born in Tuscaloosa on August twenty-ninth, nineteen twenty-four, and moved to Chicago as a child. By the time she was a teenager she was playing piano and directing a church choir on the South Side, a deeply musical kid in one of the most musically dense cities in the country. She joined the Sallie Martin Gospel Singers as a young woman and traveled the gospel circuit before a pivot that would define her career.

She renamed herself Dinah Washington, performed at Chicago's Regal Theater, got discovered, and signed with Mercury Records in the nineteen forties. What Washington built over the next two decades was a career that refused to stay in a single lane. She recorded jazz, rhythm and blues, gospel, and traditional pop, in each category turning out recordings that have held up.

She gave herself the title Queen of the Blues. Record store owners called her the Queen of the Jukeboxes. Between nineteen forty-eight and her death in nineteen sixty-three, she placed more than forty singles on the rhythm and blues charts.

She died in Detroit in December nineteen sixty-three at thirty-nine years old, a death attributed to an accidental combination of diet pills and alcohol. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted her in nineteen ninety-three. The Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame had inducted her in nineteen eighty-six.

She is one of the most influential female vocalists of the mid-twentieth century and one of the most underrecognized outside music circles, perhaps because her fluency across multiple genres made her difficult to categorize and easy to overlook in any single history. She was born in Tuscaloosa, a city she left as a child and never came back to live in. The city does not particularly publicize the connection.

The music is its own monument.