At the age of 15, she won an amateur talent contest at Chicago's Regal Theatre and began performing in nightclubs as a jazz pianist and vocalist. Ruth married the first of her eight husbands in , wedding the year-old John Young when she was 17 and divorcing him three months later. She continued to sing in local nightclubs and studied with renowned gospel singer Sallie Martin, becoming her piano accompanist.
In , Ruth stopped singing gospel, choosing to perform at such Chicago nightclubs as the Rhumboogie Club and the Downbeat Room. She also joined the house band at the Garrick, a more prestigious downtown lounge, where she also worked as a washroom attendant. Impressed, Hampton asked her to sing with his orchestra at Chicago's Regal Theater. Following that guest performance, Hampton hired the young vocalist and may have given her the stage name Dinah Washington, although other sources claim that either Glaser or the Garrick's owner, Joe Sherman, was responsible for her name change.
During her three years with Hampton's band, Washington earned acclaim for her live performances, and in his memoir Hampton wrote that he always had her perform last, because her performances eclipsed anyone who followed her. Dinah met her second husband, musician George Jenkins, in They were married shortly before the birth of their son George Jenkins Jr.
She began to be billed as "The Queen of the Blues," although she protested to the press that this title belonged to Bessie Smith. Like Smith, she was known for her bawdy and suggestive songs, also known as "dirty blues. In August , she married her third husband, Robert Grayson, whose father was the minister who officiated her first marriage to John Young.
The couple stayed together for just over two years, producing one son, Bobby Jr. The marriage lasted for three months. In , she scored a number four hit with the blues classic "Trouble in Mind. She would later pay tribute to Wrice in her song "My Man's an Undertaker.
Dinah Washington and Dick Lane During the mid- to lates, Washington recorded with many of the most acclaimed jazz musicians of the period, including drummer Jimmy Cobb and saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderly. In , she married her frequent accompanist, singer and saxophonist Eddie Chamblee. They divorced in , after she fired him onstage during a performance in Miami. In January , she married the Dominican-born actor Rafael Campos and divorced him several months later.
Hers was a gritty, salty, high-pitched voice, marked by absolute clarity of diction and clipped, bluesy phrasing. Washington's personal life was turbulent, with seven marriages behind her, and her interpretations showed it, for she displayed a tough, totally unsentimental, yet still gripping hold on the universal subject of lost love.
Born Ruth Lee Jones, she moved to Chicago at age three and was raised in a world of gospel, playing the piano and directing her church choir. At 15, after winning an amateur contest at the Regal Theatre, she began performing in nightclubs as a pianist and singer, opening at the Garrick Bar in Talent manager Joe Glaser heard her there and recommended her to Lionel Hampton , who asked her to join his band.
Hampton says that it was he who gave Ruth Jones the name Dinah Washington, although other sources claim it was Glaser or the manager of the Garrick Bar. In any case, she stayed with Hampton from to and made her recording debut for Keynote at the end of in a blues session organized by Leonard Feather with a sextet drawn from the Hampton band.
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