Pickle Barrel
DEBORAH COX’S CAREER has taken her all over the media map: pop, R & B, dance, Broadway musicals, even movies. Now with her new album due out this month, she’s experiencing a homecoming of sorts, savouring the childhood sounds of her parents’ home in North York.
While Cox is better known stateside, her roots are local. She grew up listening to her mom’s favourite jazz standards: Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Washington. She may be an American success story, but Cox is distinctly a Torontonian. Growing up, Cox and her siblings enjoyed the benefits of Toronto’s vibrant arts community.
She’s in New York when we finally catch up, caught in the whirlwind of a publicity push for her new album, Destination Moon.
“Both my parents dabbled in music growing up, but it wasn’t respected as a real job, so they went on to do other things,” she says. “But they never killed our dreams.”
“[Our parents] always introduced us to plays, took us out to different movies, took us to live concerts. We weren’t sheltered,” she says. “We were always exposed to the arts, so we grew a real appreciation for different styles.”
As a teenager, Cox was already an active musician, singing ad jingles, playing gigs in clubs and studying at Claude Watson School for the Arts. “I wanted to be in a school that was like Fame,” she says. “I had heard about the program, so I went to audition, and I got in. It was just nice to be able to connect to other people who were in the same boat that I was in. We all had this love, this creative side, and it was great to be able to explore it.”
Thanks to the school’s creative bent, the staff and teachers were understanding of her special needs and gave her the necessary understanding to follow her dreams. “I was the one in my class that was always doing gigs at night and was really tired in the morning. I didn’t even go to graduation. I had a gig,” she says and laughs.
But in the early ’90s Cox’s favourite genres, like R & B, hadn’t quite found a place in the Canadian mainstream.
“When I was a teenager, my mentors were on the radio. I didn’t have anyone who I could listen to locally that I could really relate to.”
Soon after high school, Cox landed an highly sought-after gig as a backup singer for Celine Dion, who was touring extensively to promote her 1992 album, The Colour of My Love. And it was the perfect opportunity for Cox to network, meet industry leaders and get her own deal. In 1994, Cox signed with legendary producer Clive Davis, moved south and claimed the spotlight.
13 years later, after five albums, multi-platinum chart-topping hits and three Junos, Deborah Cox is going back to her roots.
On her new album she pays tribute to Dinah Washington, the voice that lured her into music as a child. The album is a new direction for Cox — no dance remix, nothing added, just classic Dinah. “Stylistically it’s quite different. But it’s not a departure for me personally because this is music I grew up listening to,” says Cox.
“She was one of many great vocalists that I heard [as a child],” she explains. “But Dinah, I think — the tonality of her voice, her bluesy side, her gospel side, the way that she was a belter — we share those qualities vocally. It’s much different than Sarah Vaughan’s sassiness or Billie Holiday’s smokier, laid-back quality. Dinah was someone I could easily relate to on a vocal level.”
Cox says she felt a strong emotional connection to the album. “It brought me back to the time when I fell in love with music,” she says.
Cox’s parents — who still live in Toronto — were “tickled” by the project. But there’s more than just nostalgia that ties Cox to Washington’s music. “She was this fearless woman who took on any challenge and was not afraid to speak her mind. In a time when women were not allowed to have a voice, she was pretty outspoken,” she says. “She did not want to be put in a box, she wanted to explore many different genres, and I feel I am the same way.”
Clearly, the legend captivates Cox as much as the music. Aside from promoting the album, Cox is pouring her energies into a biopic of Washington’s life, which she’s developing. “I plan on doing a bit of touring, and I plan to bring her life to the screen as well. We’re developing the script right now, and we don’t know who’s going to partner with us to do it, but the script is in the works as we speak."
There should be plenty of material. Dinah Washington, called the “Queen of the Blues” and the “Queen of the Jukebox” was a legend known as much for success as scandal. Inspiring everyone from Aretha Franklin to Amy Winehouse, she had a run of hits, including “What a Difference a Day Makes” and “This Bitter Earth.”
“That was the song that did it for me when I heard it [as a child]. It just kind of ignited something,” Cox recalls.
Born in Alabama in 1924 — almost exactly 50 years before Cox — Washington rose dramatically to fame and was the first black woman to headline Vegas. As serious about music as she was about the music business, she was also the first woman to open her own booking agency. Her career was short, but broad, crossing boundaries of gospel, jazz, pop and R & B, and her personal life was equally prolific: she married seven times.
“She found herself really gravitating toward a lot of musicians, and she fell in love with a lot of her bandmates, and she ended up marrying them,” Cox says. “A lot of men just couldn’t keep up with her pace. She was a woman on the go, who knew what she wanted and was fearless.”
Cox has been a little more lucky. She met her future husband while in high school in North York, and the two have been married for two years now. Best of all — and in true Washington fashion — he also serves as her producer and manager. It’s a relationship that takes a lot of trust and a lot of strength.
There’s a word commonly used for women with this strength: “diva.” The archetype of the stubbornly determined and ambitious woman in show business. It’s something Cox has personal experience with.
“There’s always a negative connotation associated with [the term] ‘diva,’” she says. “Strong women are always perceived negatively, as opposed to the real strength. And that’s who she was, she was a woman of strength.”
But despite her successes, Dinah Washington struggled with her weight and the pressures of fame throughout her career. She died young: an accidental but lethal mixture of diet and sleeping pills killing her at the age of 39.
At 32, and with enough experience to merit reflection, Cox is luckier. She is wiser and calmer now than she was as a younger artist.
Today she’s grounded in a relationship that predates her career and has two small children who keep her company on the road. “I’m definitely more comfortable in my skin,” she says.
“It took a long time because this business can thrive on your insecurities,” she says. “It’s such a cookie-cutter business: they want you to be the same or: ‘Look at such and such, who’s on the charts, you should be doing that.’”
“It becomes more about that then
it is about originality. So I’m kind of
holding onto wanting to be original.” 
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