Marie Dionne Warrick (born December 12, 1940), known professionally as Dionne Warwick, is an acclaimed five-time Grammy Award-winning African American singer best known for her work with Burt Bacharach and Hal David as songwriters and producers.
Contents [hide] 1 Biography 1.1 Early years 1.2 The late 1960s and early 1970s 1.3 The Warner era (1972-1978) 1.4 The 80s: Move to Arista 1.5 1990s to present 1.6 Personal Life 1.7 Famous relations 2 Discography 3 Awards and Honors 4 Filmography 5 External links 6 Notes 7 References
Biography
Early years Born to parents Mansel Warrick (a gospel record promoter for Chess Records) and Lee Drinkard (manager of The Drinkard Singers) in East Orange, New Jersey.
Her first performances began when she occasionally sang with the Drinkard Singers in the late 1950s. In 1960, while studying at Hartt College of Music (a school from which she now holds a Doctorate), Dionne, Myrna Utley, and Carol Slade, along with Dionne's sister Delia (known professionally as Dee Dee Warwick) formed their own group called the "The Gospelaires". Their first official performance was at the world famous Apollo Theatre, where they won the weekly amateur contest.
This led to the group being asked to sing background sessions at recording studios in New York for such artists as Ben E. King, Chuck Jackson, Dinah Washington and Solomon Burke. While performing as background on The Drifters' recording of "Mexican Divorce", Dionne's voice and star presence were noticed by the song's composer Burt Bacharach, who was about to begin writing songs with a new partner named Hal David. This fortunate meeting marked the ascent to stardom for both singer and songwriter. Dionne was signed to Bacharach and David's production company, which in turn signed to Scepter Records in 1962.
Her first solo single for Scepter Records was released in November of that year. The song was entitled "Don't Make Me Over", the title (according to the A&E Biography of Dionne Warwick) supplied by Warrick herself when she snapped the phrase at producers Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Warwick became incensed and shouted the phrase when she found a song she wanted to record, "Make It Easy on Yourself" had been given to another artist, Jerry Butler. From the phrase, Bacharach and David created an elegant R&B recording, which became a top 40 pop hit (#21) in the US (and a top 5 US R&B hit.) Famously, Warrick's name was misspelled on the credits, and she soon began using the new spelling (i.e., "Warwick") both professionally and personally.
The two immediate follow-ups to "Don't Make Me Over" -- "Make The Music Play" and "This Empty Place" -- were largely unsuccessful, but 1963's "Anyone Who Had a Heart" was Warwick's first top 10 pop hit (#8). This was followed by "Walk on By" in April 1964, a major international hit that launched her career into the stratosphere. For the rest of the 1960s, Warwick was a fixture on the US and Canadian charts, and virtually all of Warwick's singles from 1962-1971 were written and produced by the Bacharach/David team.
In fact, Warwick weathered the British Invasion better than most American artists, although she released only a few hits in the UK during the late 1960s, 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 singer Cilla Black, most notably "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" was, in fact, 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 only to Petula Clark, and in 1968's poll second only 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.
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