Freeman Is As Dinah Was

Singing legend Dinah Washington was as famous in her day as Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.

Now, television and stage actress Yvette Freeman,is trying to familiarize today's audiences with Washington's name and music. In the musical Dinah Was, now playing in New York City, Freeman, who is a regular on the television sit-com Working and the prize-winning TV drama E.R., has the title role.

"I was singing in Chicago, and people would come up to me and say, 'You look like Dinah. You sound like Dinah.' and I went, 'h-m-m-m,'" Freeman told CBS This Morning co-anchor Mark McEwen.

"I came back to New York and I got all the research and I thought I could write it and I couldn't...I moved out to L.A. and met Oliver Goldstick who knew Dinah and knew all about her and asked if he would co-write it for me.

"He came back with this fabulous project, and we started to do auditions and here we are,"recalled Freeman.

Freeman says Dinah was no victim. Unlike many singers of her time, she was not at the mercy of others. Dinah sang her own story and ran her own business managing singers back in the '40s and '50s, blazing a trail for other black women.

The New York musical is set in Las Vegas of the 1950s, where racism was rampant. Dinah was not allowed to have a room in the hotel, but was forced to stay with other black performers in trailers in the parking lot. Freeman says even Sammy Davis Jr. stayed in a cheap hotel in the black part of town when he came to perform with the Rat Pack.

Washington has had a profound influence on female vocalists over the last 40 years.

Born in Tuscaloosa, Ala. in 1924, she was steeped from an early age in church music, which would forever mark her voice. Gospel style infused her phrasing and intonation, and by the late 1940s, white artists were emulating her sound.

Washington's tumultuous private life included failed marriage and alcohol addiction, and an untimely death.