Dinah Washington: two early ballads
-
Artist:
-
Track:
Dinah Washington with Dave Young's Orchestra (1947): "Am I Asking Too Much?"
photo from 1943
Most of Dinah Washington's first recordings were blues, which she sang beautifully, but I find that the melodies of her subsequent Mercury label ballad recordings have less of a sameness to them, and thus they grab me more forcefully. In the song above, "Am I Asking Too Much?," what a sweet alto sax phrase, played by an Andrew "Goon" Gardner, opens and closes the song.
The other highlight here from back then is "It's Too Soon to Know" (1948), arranged by the recording's bandleader and oboist Mitch Miller. It's a cover of the Orioles original version earlier that year, their first hit, written by their 18-year-old white Jewish manager Deborah Chessler.
Locating MOG account...
Comments (4)
Oh Dinah! What a honey! Beautiful songs by a beautiful lady. Thanks so much...!
Madeline, I agree with you 100%.
These are both really lovely. I couldn't agree more about how much more interesting her records are when she's given a more melodic song. And because these are earlier departures from the blues-based material, her phrasing is more disciplined and less mannered - but somehow more heartfelt - than many of the recordings from her later years, when to my mind she can fall prey to scenery-chewing and schtickiness.....
ivylander, they say that successful public personalities, such as speakers, actors and singers, slowly resemble themselves more and more with each decade, nurturing their notable idiosyncrasies, or at least I once read somebody mentioning Reagan as an example of this. Were it not for Mrs. Spike, I would be hopelessly idiosyncratic by now.