Dionne Warwick on singing, psychics and the hell of segregation: 'We all bleed red blood'
Dionne Warwick is 79 and on fire. In 2019 she released two albums, kicked off a Vegas residency and won a lifetime achievement Grammy award. This year she has already done a turn on the US version of The Masked Singer – the reality TV show where artists perform songs incognito – and a UK tour is planned for autumn.
As the sweet, mellow voice behind the hits Walk on By and Do You Know the Way to San Jose, she was one of the first artists in the series to be correctly identified by the show’s judging panel. “The fortunate, or unfortunate thing about my voice is it’s so distinctive,” she says. Obscuring it would have been impossible, she adds. “I don’t know how to do that.”
It’s 11am in Las Vegas when Warwick calls me in the UK. At the time she was several months into a run performing four intimate shows a week on Cleopatra’s Barge at Caesars Palace. The shows are currently suspended. After more than five decades of touring, performing like this must feel like a doddle? “Easy for you to say,” she giggles. “It’s taken the running-throughairports out my life for a minute, but aside from that, it is basically the same.”
Warwick has dazzled audiences since the 60s, when she was the bright young thing introduced to the Paris Olympia as “the black pearl” by Marlene Dietrich. But she had been singing for her supper long before that. Born in 1940 in East Orange, New Jersey, she had a “wonderful” upbringing. “Every family knew every family, of course,” she says. “My aunt lived about a block and a half away from us.” Her aunt is Cissy Houston, one of the many singers in the family, and mother of Warwick’s late cousin Whitney Houston.
Warwick was singing in the New Hope Baptist Choir in Newark by the
age of six. “I come from a gospel-singing family,” she says. Her mother and maternal aunts and uncles toured the country as the Drinkard Singers; she and her sister Dee Dee formed the group the Gospelaires in their teens. Despite this, she insists she didn’t have a showbusiness upbringing. “We grew up like normal people grow up. Went to school like everybody else did. Did my homework, and did the dishes as I had to. I had a normal life.”
She went to college, studying music at Hartt College of Music in Connecticut and was planning to go into teaching. But her music career with the Gospelaires was beginning to take off. “I was doing demonstration records, and backing singing in studios in New York while I was in college,” she says. “For Dinah Washington, the entire Scepter roster, Chuck Jackson, Maxine Brown, the Shirelles ... we did some things with Ben E King.”
Which ones stand out in her memory? “They all did. Are you kidding me? They were stars. It was really wonderful to be, first of all, in demand, and that’s what our group was. And subsequently, over the years, I made friends with all these people.” She didn’t get to work with Elvis, although, she says: “I had sweet aspirations to. But I had the pleasure of meeting him and getting to know him. That’s as far as that went.”
Warwick isn’t inclined to regale me with anecdotes about working in this golden era, preferring to be matter-offact about her job. “We did what we knew how to do,” she says. “It was a very lucrative situation that helped keep me in college with my tuition and books and things of that nature.”
The music industry had other plans for her. The songwriting duo and kings of easy listening Hal David and Burt Bacharach had heard her work as a session musician and asked her to record a demo of a song that they had written for the Shirelles. They sent
Cinemas chain, which operates 14 venues, told the Guardian that they had been told by the company that they had a week’s notice of the termination of their employment because they had less than two years’ service. The employee said that they were told of this over the phone and have not received anything in writing. Empire has been contacted by the Guardian for a response.