Dinah Washington - The Queen Sings 1948-1951

Here are  parts 3 & 4 of this marvelous Proper set covering the first 7 years of recordings featuring The Queen.  (Thanks Cliff) For me these R&B years are some of my favorites (of course the 1954 Jam sessions are way up there too) of her too short career.

Like most singers of the age, Ms Dinah is covering tunes from all sorts of genre's but I think you can make a strong case that the music that she, Helen Humes and Billie Holiday are singing between 1944 and 1950 is as much R&B as it is Jazz. A scan through the titles here shows at least as many Blues/R&B songs as there are standards and Pop songs. Her version of Percy Mayfield's Please Send Me Someone To Love comes not even a year after the original, making it one of the earliest covers of that classic.

"Dinah Washington recorded a stunning amount of material in her too-short career (when she died in Detroit in 1963 she was only 39 years old -- somehow she still managed to find time for seven marriages), most of it during her lengthy association with Mercury Records between 1948 and 1955. Washington seemingly tackled everything under the sun in the recording studio, cutting jazz, R&B, blues, and pop sides with an assortment of small groups, trios, sextets, and increasingly, toward the end of her life, with large orchestras, and if she seemed to be gradually fading into blander and sleeker arrangements as time went on, her voice always remained focused and coiled, and her bluesy phrasing has influenced far more singers than most folks realize. This four-disc, 109-track set includes every side commercially released under Washington's name between 1944 and 1951 (each of the four discs has been previously released by Proper as a stand-alone album), opening with tracks recorded with Lionel Hampton and closing out with a couple of delightful selections recorded with the Ravens. Much of what is here falls to the R&B side, revealing a somewhat rougher style that will be revelatory to listeners only familiar with her later more smoothed-out pop material. This lady could sing anything in any style and make it her own (just listen to how she claims Hank Williams' "Cold, Cold Heart" here). This box is an absolute treasure trove from one of the best singers of the 20th century." AMG