Dionne Warwick

The continuing “Evening With” series at our new Grammy Museum (which will soon be a year old) is absolutely unbelievable in the traditional sense of the word.  There you sit in what’s known as The Grammy Museum Sound Stage — a jewel of a theatre holding just 200 people, with state-of-the-art acoustics.  In this intimate and relaxed setting, the crème de la crème of music sit onstage with Bob Santelli, the Museum’s director, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of music, and the two of them engage in a Q&A that’s really just a casual chat that evolves into a brief  “questions from the audience” session.  The evening culminates with a very generous personal performance from the guest with a couple of tunes. You never know where the evening is going to lead, what surprising new facts you’re going to walk away thinking about, and what music you’re going to be humming.

That’s exactly how it was with the recent evening spent with Dionne Warwick.  We all know her music from her recordings of the extensive Burt Bacharach/Hal David songbook, but this evening we learned about her early music and then her other passions in life that extend far beyond her music.  We learned all of this while sitting so close to her that it would have been possible to read by the light of her smile.

As I keep learning, so many of our great musicians have their roots in the church; not necessary for its theology but rather the joyfulness of its music.  Ms. Warwick humbly states that she was truly blessed by growing up surrounded by the legends of Gospel and true Gospel royalty while living “in a neighborhood in East Orange that was literally the United Nations of neighborhoods. We had every nationality, every creed, every religion right there on our street.”

Ms. Warwick performed at the age of six, singing “Jesus Loves Me” — her first gospel solo and her first standing ovation. Although she performed with her family members — aunt Emily (Cissy) Drinkard Houston and sister, the late Delia (Dee Dee) Warrick — it didn’t stop her from fantasizing about what she would really be when she “grew up”: a ballerina, court stenographer, or maybe an airline pilot.  Her mother didn’t care what she chose, as long as she got her education.  That was non-negotiable.  Even though she 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), it didn’t stop her from singing every chance she could get, and the chances were endless.  It seemed everybody loved her “oohs, aahs and ya, ya, yas” for backup work, and the Gospel Background Singers were on their way — but not during school time.

She fondly remembers: “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. Warwick remembers that, after school, they would catch a bus from East Orange to the Port Authority Terminal, and then a subway to recording studios in Manhattan, perform their background gigs and be back at home in East Orange in time to do their homework.

While performing background on this one song, Ms. Warwick’s voice and star presence were noticed by the song’s composer, Burt Bacharach, who’s quoted as saying, “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 this 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.

“Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s run of songs is exquisite.”  With that, she gave us her very personal and humorous take on the two of them. “For me, Burt Bacharach has this weirdness/lopsidedness; changing time signatures in the middle of a piece — something so brilliantly lopsided — and then also, he’s so handsome.”  It seems that at first she thought he looked like Peter Rabbit (albeit a very handsome Peter Rabbit), and all her girlfriends thought he was just adorable and sweet!  “Then there’s Hal David, who came to me and asked me to sing ‘Do You Know the Way to San Jose – whoa, whoa, whoa.’  There was no way I was going to whoa, whoa! But I did.  It seems he’s been stationed in San Jose and, besides that, he’s a poet, and without him we’d all be humming.”  She went on to earn her first Platinum Album with Barry Manilow as the producer.

In recent years, Ms.Warwick has worked tirelessly in using her name to bring attention to various humanitarian organizations.  Her Grammy-winning, chart-topping single, “That’s What Friends Are For,” lead the way by raising, literally, millions of dollars for AIDS research.  In 2002, she was named a global Ambassador for the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.  Locally, she makes public service announcements on behalf of adopting pets from rescue agencies with “A House is Not a Home Without a Pet.”

And now, this unprepossessing woman who’d created a life made up of “firsts” was going to treat us to a first — a couple of songs for us with just a piano accompaniment while nonchalantly sitting in a tall but deluxe director’s chair.  Sitting there in this most casual manner, we heard notes that effortlessly came from a fine instrument.  And just as the evening began with a standing ovation, that is how it rightfully ended.  Oh, except I forgot to mention the lady who brought her record album from the late ’60s to be autographed, which graciously was as Miss Warwick left the room.  No request is too small for this self-declared true global citizen.