Volume 52, Number 11 · June 23, 2005
The Royal Blues
By David Hajdu
Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington
by Nadine Cohodas
Pantheon, 559 pp., $28.50
Heartbreak has always been central to country music. In 1953, the Grand Ole Opry star Hank Snow had a hit record called 'It Don't Hurt Anymore,' a folksy paean to a broken heart that began with a lyric that abstracted the theme idiomatically: 'It don't hurt anymore/All my teardrops are dried....' Snow moaned the words to the accompaniment of a mewling fiddle, fixing our attention on the singer's past suffering. The following year, Dinah Washington, a jazz vocalist who had come up through gospel music and the blues, remade the song. Her first variation was grammatical, a switch of the opening pronoun to the first-person singular. Washington's recording begins with her voice, a cappella, blaring like a civil defense alarm: 'IIIIIIIIIII!' After a beat, she continued the opening phrase ('don't hurt anymore...'), and a full jazz orchestra kicked in with a hard-driving rhythmic pattern. The singing continued in this crushing mode: Washington hurled out the words as she stormed through the song. Despite the lyrics, she sounded impervious to pain of any sort, and supremely capable of inflicting it.
Review, 2972 words
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