Amy Winehouse

Amy Winehouse dated her whole vocal education to one record her father played at home: "I learned to sing from Dinah Washington," she said. She meant something specific, not imitation but ownership, the way a standard could stop belonging to anyone else once Washington had finished with it. It's why she refused to touch Washington's own songbook directly: "I don't do Dinah songs because she made them her own," she said. "It would be a bit like slitting your own throat really, pointless." She built her own catalogue on the same principle instead.

listen: upstream & heresource: Classic Album Sundays — Amy Winehouse's Top Five Albums as a Child (Janis Winehouse interview; Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, Thelonious Monk childhood exposure) ↗share

1959

What a Diff'rence a Day MakesDinah Washington

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2006

Love Is a Losing GameAmy Winehouse

listen forOn "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes," Washington barely ornaments the melody, letting the word "day" sag half a beat behind the band, as if she's still deciding whether to believe her own good luck. Winehouse's "Love Is a Losing Game" works the same trick in reverse: a spare guitar-and-strings arrangement gives her voice nowhere to hide, and she under-sings the title phrase instead of building it into a note. Both performances get their power from what the singer withholds, not what she adds.

Before Back to Black had a single track finished, producer Mark Ronson sat down with Winehouse just to find out what she liked. "She said she liked to go out to bars and clubs and play snooker with her boyfriend and listen to the Shangri-Las," he recalled, and that was the tell he built the album around. Winehouse's own case for the group was blunt: "I love the drama, I love the atmosphere, I love the sound effects," she said. The devotion outlasted the studio: once the record was out, she'd regularly swap her own bridge onstage for the Shangri-Las' "Remember (Walking in the Sand)" instead.

listen: upstream & heresource: Far Out Magazine — How the Shangri-Las shaped Amy Winehouse (Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse quotes on the group's influence on Back to Black) ↗share

1964

Remember (Walking in the Sand)The Shangri-Las

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2006

Back to BlackAmy Winehouse

listen for"Remember (Walking in the Sand)" opens with crashing surf and gulls before its teenage narrator breaks into a spoken-word confession mid-song, melodrama staged as sound design. Play "Back to Black" next to it: no seagulls, but the same theatrical instinct survives in what the music site Far Out Magazine called "the doo-wop piano of the intro," and in horns that hit like punctuation on every chorus. It's the production template Winehouse loved enough to sing over live, swapping her own bridge for the Shangri-Las' every night on tour.

In a 2006 interview that surfaced only after her death in 2011, dug up by the British station Smooth Radio, Winehouse recalled that she hadn't given soul music serious thought until she heard Otis Redding at fourteen or fifteen, and that the discovery pulled gospel music in right behind it. That single afternoon reoriented her whole artistic direction, from a teenager raised on Carole King into a devotee of Stax horns and Southern-soul testifying that never let go.

listen: upstream & heresource: Smooth Radio — The voices that influenced Amy Winehouse (Dinah Washington and Otis Redding quotes; Ray Charles anecdote) ↗share

1966

Try a Little TendernessOtis Redding

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2006

You Know I'm No GoodAmy Winehouse

listen for"Try a Little Tenderness" builds from a murmured verse into Redding tearing the final chorus into a shout, horns surging to match him bar for bar. "You Know I'm No Good" runs a smaller version of the same arc: Winehouse's voice thins to a near-whisper on the verses, then roughens into a rasp exactly where the horns punch in behind her, the same restraint-then-rupture Redding built a career on, compressed into a three-minute pop single.