Esther Phillips Biography
Through her long career, Esther Phillips (1935-1984) established herself as an incredibly versatile performer, equally credible whether singing gritty R&B and soul, down-home blues, uptown pop and even country ballads. But her vocals always retained a fundamental jazz sensibility, and her expressive, idiosyncratic voice often invited comparisons with Dinah Washington and Nina Simone.
Phillips, who reportedly borrowed her stage surname from the sign on a Phillips 66 gas station, was born Esther Mae Jones in Galveston, Texas, and began singing in church as a child. After her parents divorced, she divided her time between her father in Houston and her mother in the Watts section of Los Angeles. At the age of 13, Esther was coaxed into entering a talent contest at the Barrelhouse, an L.A. nightclub owned by bandleader Johnny Otis, who was so impressed by her talents that he added her to his live revue and brought her into the recording studio. Billed as Little Esther, she scored a major R&B hit in 1950 with “Double Crossin’ Blues,” which was followed by a series of successful singles.
The singer left Otis’ revue two years later, and recorded for a variety of labels through the ’50s and ’60s. She rechristened herself Esther Phillips in the early ’60s and scored a major crossover success with her 1962 reading of the country standard “Release Me,” which became a hit on the R&B, pop and country charts. She then moved towards a sophisticated jazz/pop style and had another notable pop hit in 1965 with “And I Love Him,” a gender-altered reading of the Beatles ballad. The Beatles were so flattered by her version that they brought Phillips to Britain for her first overseas performances.
In 1971, Phillips signed with producer Creed Taylor’s Kudu label. Her first Kudu album, From A Whisper to A Scream, was released the following year and was a critical and commercial success, thanks to such timely material as Gil Scott-Heron’s topical “Home Is Where the Hatred Is.” Phillips recorded two more well-received albums for Kudu, making the ’70s one of the most stable and commercially successful periods of her career. In 1975, she had a surprise smash with a disco-flavored update of the Dinah Washington classic “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes,” and her album of the same name became the biggest-selling LP of Phillips’ career. She continued to record prolifically for the remainder of her life.
Recent Comments