WARWICK, Dionne

(b. 12 December 1940 in East Orange, New Jersey), singer who served as the mouthpiece for the sophisticated pop songs of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, resulting in a string of hits in the 1960s.

Born Marie Dionne Warrick, Warwick acquired her stage name when her name was misspelled on an early record release. She is the daughter of Mancel Warrick, a gospel record promoter for Chess Records, and Lee Drinkard, who managed the gospel group the Drinkard Singers, consisting of Warwick's aunts and uncles. Steeped in gospel music, Warwick got her first singing experience in church. She studied the piano as a child, and, with her sister Dee Dee, Warwick formed a vocal group, the Gospelaires. The group began to get work singing background vocals on records in New York.

Warwick began attending the Hartt College of Music in Connecticut on a music scholarship in 1959, but she continued to work in New York recording studios. There, at a Drifters session in 1961, she met songwriter Burt Bacharach, who was impressed with her unusual alto voice and extensive range, and hired her to sing on demonstration records he was making with his songwriting partner Hal David. They played one of these demos for Florence Greenberg, head of the small independent Scepter Records, and Greenberg signed Warwick as an artist to the label. Scepter released her debut single, "Don't Make Me Over"—written and produced by Bacharach and David, and inspired by a comment the singer herself had made to them—in the fall of 1962. It became a top-twenty pop and a top-five rhythm and blues (R&B) hit. Despite her success, Warwick managed to continue her schooling, completing her bachelor's degree and in 1976 earning a master's degree in music from Hartt.

During this period, Warwick married musician/actor Bill Elliot. They divorced after less than a year of marriage, but reconciled and remarried. They had two sons, but divorced again in the 1970s.

Warwick's follow-up singles to "Don't Make Me Over" were not as successful, but in early 1964 "Anyone Who Had a Heart" peaked in the top ten of the pop, R&B, and easy-listening charts, as did its follow-up, "Walk On By." The British invasion led by the Beatles temporarily sidelined the work of songwriters such as Bacharach and David, but some of Warwick's less-popular recordings of the mid-1960s have weathered well, particularly her summer 1964 single pairing "You'll Never Get to Heaven (If You Break My Heart)" and "A House Is Not a Home." Although American artists often were robbed of hits in Britain by covers of their records that were quickly released by native singers, Warwick was able to mount her own invasion of Europe, taking "Walk On By" into the top ten of the U.K. charts. She followed this with numerous other chart entries, and performed successfully on the Continent. Her concert at the Olympia Theater in Paris on 18 January 1966, at which she was introduced by Marlene Dietrich (for whom Bacharach had served as musical director), was captured on the album Dionne Warwick in Paris.

Warwick finally returned to the U.S. Top Ten in 1966 with "Message to Michael." Follow-ups "Trains and Boats and Planes" and "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself" were less successful, but have since joined the list of Bacharach and David standards. In the spring of 1967, Warwick finally launched a sustained period of success with her top-twenty recording of the philosophical "Alfie." The theme song from a motion picture of the same name released the previous year, it had already been recorded without notable success by others. There followed a string of top-ten hits: "I Say a Little Prayer" later in 1967; the million-selling "(Theme From) Valley of the Dolls" (written by André and Dory Previn but produced by Bacharach and David); and "Do You Know the Way to San Jose" (which won her a Grammy Award for best female contemporary pop vocal performance, the first of her five Grammys) in 1968; and "This Girl's in Love with You" and "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" in 1969. The last of these won her a second Grammy Award for best female contemporary vocal performance. She also earned gold-record certifications for her albums Here Where There Is Love (1966), Valley of the Dolls (1968), and Dionne Warwick's Greatest Motion Picture Hits (1969). In 1968 she launched a film career, acting in the movie Slaves, but it was not a success, and she took on only occasional acting assignments thereafter.

In 1971 Warwick temporarily changed her name to Warwicke on the advice of a numerologist, and moved from Scepter to Warner Bros. Records in a deal that included Bacharach and David. Dionne, their first album together under the new deal, was only a moderate seller in 1972. Unfortunately, the songwriting team then broke up in the wake of their work on the disastrous film remake of The Lost Horizon in 1973, and Warwick was forced to sue them for failing to write and produce for her. The parties eventually reached a legal settlement. Warwick topped the charts in 1974, singing with the Spinners on the million-selling "Then Came You" and had another gold record in 1979 with "I'll Never Love This Way Again," which brought her another Grammy Award for best female pop vocal performance. The latter song came from her million-selling Arista Records debut (also called Dionne) produced by Barry Manilow, which also featured "Deja Vu," a Grammy winner for best rhythm and blues vocal performance, female. In 1983 she returned to the top ten with "Heartbreaker," written for her by the Bee Gees and coproduced by Barry Gibb. A reconciliation with Bacharach led in 1986 to the number-one single "That's What Friends Are For," which she recorded as "Dionne & Friends" with Elton John, Gladys Knight, and Stevie Wonder. Together, they won the Grammy Award for best pop performance by a duo or group with vocals. During the 1980s she served as a host on the Solid Gold television series. In 1994 she hosted television infomercials for the Psychic Friends Network, later quitting the network after it tarnished her image. She continued to record and perform into the early twenty-first century.

No biography of Warwick has yet been written. A good biographical article is Clarence A. Moore, "Dionne Warwick: Forever Gold," Goldmine (26 Jan. 1990). Also useful are David Nathan's liner notes to the album From the Vaults (1995).

William Ruhlmann