Search - Dinah Washington :: The Fabulous Miss D: The Keynote, Decca, & Mercury Singles 1943-1953

Dinah's pre-LP singles, all 107 in one place for the first time! Dinah Washington was the undisputed Queen of the Jukeboxes in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the pre-LP, pre-45s era when that title meant everything. Dinah had huge hits and sell-out shows; she was a leading lady on the new Mercury label as well as a star of the blues circuit and the new genre of rhythm & blues. Admired by the jazz community, noticed by the pop world, within a few years she conquered both. The Fabulous Miss D! chronicles the first 10 years of her extraordinary short-lived career. This 4-CD box set includes 107 tracks: 102 of them formerly issued as 78-rpm singles from the Mercury label, the rest are her previous singles for Keynote (later reissued on Mercury) and her one-off release for Decca as lead vocalist of the Lionel Hampton Orchestra, where she got her start. This is the first time all of these original, pre-LP-era singles have been available in one package; acquiring them previously would have required purchasing several volumes of an earlier "Complete Mercury Recordings" box set from Japan, which is long out of print and excluded the Keynote and Decca recordings. These singles are presented in release sequence here for the first time since their original issue. The Fabulous Miss D! is highlighted by Washington's biggest chart hits, including "Evil Gal Blues," "Ain't Misbehavin'," "West Side Baby," "Am I Asking Too Much" (her first R&B chart No. 1), the two-sided smash "Baby Get Lost"/"Long John Blues," "Trouble In Mind," and many more. She was backed by the leading lights of the studio jazz musicians in New York and Chicago, including Ray Brown, Wynton Kelly, Jimmy Cobb, Keter Betts and others. All of the songs have been significantly restored and remastered, making Dinah's voice--one moment surging with sincerity and the next snapping like a whip--sound better than ever. The music is housed in another fantastic Verve Select package. It's a slip-case set the same size as the previously released and critically acclaimed releases from Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole. The same standards of information and visual extras are in place: rare original photographs-- including a few never seen before; detailed annotations; a chronological rendering of Dinah's sessions; and an alphabetical index to help find your favorites in the set. Tying it all together is an entertaining and informative essay by Marc Myers of JazzWax, who interviewed some of Dinah's surviving contemporaries. Dinah Washington - Fabulous!