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Esther Phillips was born Esther Mae Jones on December 23, 1935 in Galveston, Texas. He parents divorced when she was young and she shared her childhood between Houston and Los Angeles and brought up singing in church. At age fourteen she entered and won a local L.A. amateur talent contest that culminated in a recording with Johnny Otis for Modern Records and added her to his traveling revue, billed as Little Esther Phillips, a name she reportedly took from a gas station sign.

Her first hit record was “Double Crossing Blues” in 1950 for Savoy Records and after several hit records with Savoy that went to number one or hit the Billboard charts in the top ten, she was counted as one of the very few female artists that enjoyed such success in their debut year. She left Otis and Savoy for Federal Records but just a quickly as the hits came, they stopped, in part because she no longer worked with Otis and her increasing drug use that had her addicted by the middle of the decade.

By 1954, she was back home in Houston recuperating with her father, working small nightclubs around the South, punctuated by periodic hospital stays in Lexington, Kentucky, stemming from her addiction. In 1962, Kenny Rogers re-discovered her while singing at a Houston club and got her signed to his brother Lenox label, which assisted in her comeback. From Lenox she went to Atlantic Records, dropped “Little” from her name, and covered the Beatles’ “And I Love Him” and they flew her to the UK for her first overseas performance.

With the ushering in of 1972 she realized one of her biggest with her first album “From A Whisper To A Scream” for Creed Taylor’s Kudu Records with an account of drug use on the lead track in Gil Scott-Heron’s “Home Is Where The Hatred Is”. The song went on to be nominated for a Grammy Award but when Phillips lost to Aretha Franklin, the latter presented the trophy to Phillips, saying she should have won it instead.

While at Kudu she scored her biggest hit single with a disco-style update single of Dinah Washington’s “What A Difference A Day Makes” that reached the U.S. Top 20 and the UK Top 10. The subsequent album had her working with the Brecker Brothers, Joe Beck, David Sanborn, Steve Khan and Don Grolnick. She continued to record and perform throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, completing a total of seven albums on Kudu and four with Mercury Records.

At age 48, Esther Phillips died in Carson, California on August 7, 1984 from kidney and liver failure due to her on-going battle she waged with heroin dependency.

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