DINAH WASHINGTON, "SOULVILLE" (ROULETTE R-4490, REL. 4/1963); "I WOULDN'T KNOW" (ROULETTE R-4444, REL. 8/1962)

They called Dinah Washington "The Queen of The Blues," and her musical career, cut short by an early death, bookends with raw, soulful performances. In the middle is lush pop material touched with jazz and blues but rendered as easy listening, with strings, vocal choruses and all the trappings of pop music. Her most successful material, sales-wise, was her least interesting music-wise.

In her long tenure with Mercury Records, she was marketed as a female equivalent to Nat "King" Cole--a Black performer accepted by the white mainstream by dint of less Black-sounding material. She still sang a tradition blues here and there, but most of her repertoire was out of The Great American Songbook, and pains were taken to smooth off the rough edges and deliver mellow material, touched with the hem of jazz but acceptable to suburban couples who needed some music to relax by. This did her an enormous mis-service.

When she left Mercury in 1961, she seemed open to a return to her roots. Rhythm and blues had changed since she last partook of its sound, but she rose to the challenge on a few singles for Roulette Records. These suggested that, had she lived beyond 1963, she might have become a towering figure in the early years of soul music.

Today we'll hear two of her best sides for Roulette. "Soulville," released in April 1963, is the greatest of her late efforts. Penned by Titus Turner, Henry Glover and Ms. Washington, it eschewed all the marzipan of her recent recordings and revealed an able-bodied practitioner of hard-edged r&b. It opens with a call-and-response, then settles into a chunky, forceful up-tempo item.

With a dense bed of vocal harmonies behind her rowdy vocal and a red-hot band, this Henry Glover production is a joyous break from the chains of crowd-pleasing MOR material that shackled this performer for most of the 1950s and early '60s. The song feels like an impassioned plea of the singer to be accepted for who she was, rather than who the public imagined her to be. Washington could never escape the lush approach--some of her Roulette 45s suffer from the strings-and-schlock mood of the Mercury years--but on this and a couple other Roulette sides, she recalled her early days but with the years of experience she'd earned. This had the earmarks of a major hit, but it seems her audience couldn't accept this return to form. It strangulated at #93 on the pop charts. UK band The Zombies learned the song for their live act, and recorded it for a BBC broadcast in 1965.

Cash Box approved of this change of course; the public was indifferent.

Rose Marie McCoy penned "I Wouldn't Know (What to Do)," an after-hours blues ballad with the trappings of her hit years--strings, white vocal chorus--but a more committed performance that breaks through the pop trappings. It's an odd blend of blues and country, and Ms. W gets to the heart of the matter in her confessional, frank vocal. She was capable of this approach all along, but Mercury's insistence on whitening up their Black acts kept this musical giant sidelined for a decade. It's one of the less-acknowledged tragedies of Black music. We didn't need yet another Black vocalist going through the motions of well-known show tunes: we needed performances like these two sides. It's a pity there are so few of them in Washington's catalog. This song got to #92 in the late summer of 1962.

Before Dinah Washington could solidify her new approach, she died of a drug overdose. Barbiturates Seconal and Amytal were found, in lethal quantities, in her bloodstream after she failed to wake up on the morning of December 14, 1963. Her last stand at Roulette Records had only begun to get back to her roots. Her albums for the label are similar to the Mercury material; most of her Roulette singles chose this regrettable route. Had she hung in there a bit longer, her true musical choices might have been validated by the world. But perhaps she felt she'd said all she could, and that the fight was too hard to continue. 

Tomorrow: the least-celebrated of the three rock 'n' roll performers who were victims of "The Day the Music Died," via one of his post-mortem 45s released in the spring of 1959.