“I got a Dinah Washington story,” Etta James told me. “I was a young thing with a couple of jive-ass hits under my belt. I was playing a small club in Providence while Dinah was booked into the big Loew’s State Theatre. When someone said she’d come to see my midnight show, I nearly fell out. Dinah was in the house! With that in mind, I decided to open with her big hit, ‘Unforgettable.’ I didn’t even get to the chorus when I heard this earth-shattering crash. Dinah had got up off her chair, swept all the glasses and plates off her table, and was pointing at me, screaming, ‘Bitch, don’t you ever sing the Queen’s songs when the Queen is right there in front of you!’ “I ran off the stage crying. Didn’t even do my set. No one could console me. Didn’t wanna see no one. But it was Dinah herself who came back to my dressing room and said, ‘Sorry, I lost it for a minute, but look, girl, you learned a valuable lesson. If a star’s around, you don’t ever sing the star’s songs. Ever.’ ‘Yes, ma’am’ was all I could say. She invited me to her show at the Loew’s the next day. I went and we tightened up. I loved me some Dinah, but, man, that lady was something else.”
Etta James recounting her run-in with tempestuous and ultra-salty Queen of the Blues Dinah Washington (pictured) to author David Ritz. Washington (29 August 1924 - 14 December 1963) died on this day aged just 39. One of the first Black superstars to enjoy crossover success on the white pop charts, Washington was financially able to indulge her love of jewelry, furs and sports cars. A defiant and willful tough cookie, she was known to pull out a gun in disagreements. During recording sessions, she would pound back magnums of pink champagne (no wonder her vocals sound so relaxed and effortless! And no wonder – as the liner notes to one of my CDs claims - “records were released that Dinah didn’t even remember making”).
