Dionne Warwick (born December 12, 1940) is an American singer, actress, activist, United Nations Global Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization, former United States Ambassador of Health, and humanitarian. She is best known for her partnership with songwriters and producers Burt Bacharach and Hal David.
According to Billboard magazine and Joel Whitburn's Top Pop Singles 1955-2009 book, Dionne Warwick ranks as the 30th most popular hit maker of the entire the rock era based upon the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles Charts. She also ranks as one of the 10 all-time biggest Easy Listening/Adult Contemporary hit makers of all time.
Biography
Early life and career
Warwick was born Marie Dionne Warrick to parents Mancel Warrick, who began his career as a pullman porter, chef, a gospel record promoter for Chess Records and later a certified public accountant; and Lee Drinkard Warrick (1921-2005), manager of a renowned family gospel group and RCA recording artists The Drinkard Singers in East Orange, New Jersey. Dionne began singing gospel as a child at the New Hope Methodist Church in East Orange. She performed her first gospel solo at the age of six and frequently joined The Drinkard Singers. Warwick's aunt Emily (Cissy) Drinkard Houston (Whitney Houston's mother) and sister, the late Delia (Dee Dee) Warrick also performed with the family group. Other family members include Dionne's brother, Mancel Warrick, Jr., who was killed in an accident in 1968 at the age of eighteen.
Her first televised performances were in the mid-and late 1950s with the Drinkard Singers and were carried on local television stations in New Jersey and New York City. Warwick grew up in a racially mixed middle-class neighborhood. She stated in an interview on The Biography Channel in 2002 that the neighborhood in East Orange "was literally the United Nations of neighborhoods. We had every nationality, every creed, every religion right there on our street." Warwick was untouched by the harsher aspects of racial intolerance and discrimination until her early professional career when she began touring nationally. Warwick graduated from East Orange High School in 1959 and was awarded a Scholarship in Music Education to the Hartt College of Music in Hartford, Connecticut (a school from which she earned her Doctorate of Music Education in 1973).
In 1958, Warwick, Myrna Utley, and Carol Slade, along with Warwick's sister Delia (known professionally as Dee Dee Warwick) formed their own group called the "The Gospelaires". Their first performance together was at the world famous Apollo Theater, where they won the weekly amateur contest. Various other singers joined The Gospelaires from time to time, including Judy Clay (adopted by Lee and Mancel Warrick), Cissy Houston, and Doris Troy (who had a hit with 1963's "Just One Look" featuring backing vocals from the Gospelaires). Warwick recalls, in her 2002 A&E Biography that "a man came running frantically backstage at The Apollo and said he needed background singers for a session for Sam "The Man" Taylor and old big-mouth here spoke up and said 'We'll do it!' and we left and did the session. I wish I remembered the gentleman's name because he was responsible for the beginning of my professional career." The backstage encounter led to the group being asked to sing background sessions at recording studios in New York. Soon, the group was in demand in New York music circles for their background work for such artists as The Drifters, Ben E. King, Chuck Jackson, Dinah Washington, Ronnie Hawkins and The Hawks, and Solomon Burke among many others. Warwick remembers, in her A&E Biography that after school, they would catch a bus from East Orange to the Port Authority Terminal, and then subway to recording studios in Manhattan, perform their background gigs and be back at home in East Orange in time to do their school homework. The background vocal work would continue while Warwick pursued her studies at Hartt.
While performing background on The Drifters' recording of "Mexican Divorce", Warwick's voice and star presence were noticed by the song's composer Burt Bacharach, a Brill Building songwriter who was writing songs with many other songwriters including Hal David. According to a July 14 , 1967 , article on Warwick from Time magazine, Bacharach stated, "She has a tremendous strong side and a delicacy when singing softly—like miniature ships in bottles." Musically, she was "no play-safe girl. What emotion I could get away with!" And what complexity, compared with the usual run of pop songs. During the session, Bacharach asked Warwick if she would be interested in recording demonstration recordings of his compositions to be used to pitch the tunes to record labels. One such demo, "It's Love That Really Counts"—destined to be recorded by Scepter-signed act The Shirelles—caught the attention of Scepter Records President Florence Greenberg. Greenberg, according to "Current Biography" 1969 Yearbook, told Bacharach "forget the song, get the girl!" Warwick was signed to Bacharach and David's production company, according to Warwick, which in turn was signed to Scepter Records in 1962 by Greenberg. The partnership would provide Bacharach with the freedom to produce Warwick without the control of recording company executives and company A&R men. Warwick's musical ability and education would also allow Bacharach to compose more challenging tunes. The demo version of "It's Love That Really Counts", along with her original demo of "Make It Easy on Yourself", would surface on Dionne's debut Scepter album entitled Presenting Dionne Warwick , released early in 1963.
Early stardom
Her first solo single for Scepter Records was released in November, 1962. The song was entitled "Don't Make Me Over", the title (according to the A&E Biography of Dionne Warwick) supplied by Warwick herself when she snapped the phrase at producers Burt Bacharach and Hal David in anger. Warwick found "Make It Easy on Yourself"—a song on which she had recorded the original demo and had wanted to be her first single release—had been given to another artist, Jerry Butler. From the phrase, Bacharach and David created their first top 40 pop hit (#21) and a top 5 US R&B hit. Warrick's name was misspelled on the single's label, and she began using the new spelling (i.e., " War w ick ") both professionally and personally. According to the July 14 , 1967 Time magazine article, after "Don't Make Me Over" hit in 1962, she answered the call of her manager ("C'mon, baby, you gotta go"), left school and went on a tour of France, where critics crowned her "Paris' Black Pearl", having been introduced on stage at Paris Olympia that year by Marlene Dietrich. Rhapsodized Jean Monteaux in Arts: "The play of this voice makes you think sometimes of an eel, of a storm, of a cradle, a knot of seaweed, a dagger. It is not a voice so much as an organ. You could write fugues for Warwick's voice."
The two immediate follow-ups to "Don't Make Me Over"—"This Empty Place" (with "B" Side "Wishin' and Hopin'" later covered by Dusty Springfield) and "Make The Music Play"—charted briefly in the top 100. Her fourth single, "Anyone Who Had a Heart" in December 1963 was Warwick's first top 10 pop hit (#8) in the USA and also an international hit. This was followed by "Walk on By" in April 1964, a major international hit and million seller that solidified her career. For the rest of the 1960s, Warwick was a fixture on the US and Canadian charts, and virtually all of Warwick's output from 1962-1971 was written and produced by the Bacharach/David team.
Warwick weathered the British Invasion better than most American artists. Her UK hits were most notably "Walk On By" and "Do You Know the Way to San Jose". In the UK a number of Bacharach-David-Warwick songs were covered by UK singers Cilla Black, Sandie Shaw and Dusty Springfield, most notably Black's "Anyone Who Had a Heart" which went to #1 in the UK. This upset Warwick and she has described feeling insulted when told that in the UK, record company executives wanted her songs recorded by someone else. Warwick even met Cilla Black while on tour in the UK. She recalled what she said to her - " I told her that "You're My World" would be my next single in the States. I honestly believe that if I'd sneezed on my next record, then Cilla would have sneezed on hers too. There was no imagination in her recording." "You're My World"—recorded in no time by Black—was not released as a single by Warwick, but it did appear on a later album, Dionne Warwick in Valley of the Dolls , released in 1968.
Warwick was named the Bestselling Female Vocalist in the Cash Box Magazine Poll in 1964, with six chart hits in that year. Cash Box also named her the Top Female Vocalist in 1969, 1970 and 1971. In the 1967 Cash Box Poll, she was second to Petula Clark, and in 1968's poll second to Aretha Franklin. Playboy Magazine's influential Music Poll of 1970 named her the Top Female Vocalist. In 1969, Harvard's Hasty Pudding Society named her Woman of the Year.
In a May 21 , 1965 Time Magazine cover article entitled "The Sound of the Sixties," Dionne Warwick's sound was described as follows: "Swinging World. Scholarly articles probe the relationship between the Beatles and the nouvelle vagu
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