Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 260 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
Over the years here on Black Music Sunday, I’ve featured many female jazz, blues, gospel, and R&B vocalists. I have been remiss in not covering an artist who excelled not only in music but also in film and television. On the anniversary of her birth, allow me to introduce Della Reese.
Delloreese Patricia Early was born on July 6, 1931, in Detroit. She would become known to the world as simply “Della Reese.”
Sandy J. Stiefer and Jeanne M. Lesinski wrote about how she got started in her biography for Musician Guide:
The youngest in a family of six children, she grew up in Detroit, Michigan, where the Baptist church and gospel singing greatly influenced her career. At age six, Deloreese Patricia Early was singing in the church’s junior choir.
For the next seven years Deloreese continued her gospel singing in the church. By the time she was 13, the singer had developed such vocal power and talent that she caught the attention of the legendary Mahalia Jackson. Known as the “Queen of Gospel Music,” Jackson recruited Deloreese for her Mahalia Jackson Troupe gospel singers. “This opportunity to sing with the world’s foremost gospel singer was a thrilling experience,” Reese noted in a 1992 press release. “I will never forget the wonderful association which lasted for five consecutive summers, and the lasting things I learned from her … how to communicate with people through song.” The teenaged Reese toured with the gospel group from 1945 through 1949.
Although Reese studied psychology at Wayne State University in Detroit, singing remained very important to her. She formed a women’s gospel group called the Meditation Singers during her first year at Wayne State. By the end of that year, Reese’s mother had died and her father had become ill. Reese ended her college education to help support her family, working variously as a receptionist and switchboard operator, barber, taxicab driver, and even as a truck driver.
Her early gospel singing:
Reese gives a humorous account of her stint as a truck driver in an interview with The Visionary Project:
Musician Guide continued:
During this time Reese continued to perform with the Meditation Singers. She also had the occasional opportunity to perform with the Clara Ward Singers, the Roberta Martin Singers, and Beatrice Brown’s Inspirational Singers. Reese did not consider singing as a career, however. In a December 1957 interview with Don Nelsen for the New York Sunday News, she said, “I was interested in singing, but I thouht of it as something to do when you didn’t have anything else to do.”
Since gospel singers made very little money, Reese thought a career in business would be the best way for her to earn a living. Nevertheless, she toyed with the idea of making music her profession. She knew that making a career as a singer would mean performing popular music in nightclubs; this caused her some distress, since the extravagance and excesses she associated with club life clashed with her religious beliefs. Yet when the Reverend E. A. Rundless of Detroit’s New Liberty Baptist Church encouraged Reese to pursue a singing career, she put her reservations aside. A short time after Reese became a hostess-singer at a local bowling alley/nightclub, she won a contest in which newspaper readers voted for their favorite local singer. The prize was a week-long engagement at Detroit’s famous Flame Showbar.
The History Makers continue her story:
Her big break came when she won a contest that gave her a week singing at Detroit’s famed “Flame Show Bar.” That week soon became eight weeks. This experience and others exposed Reese to the talents and styles of such music greats as Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughn, Billie Holiday, Al Hibbler, Billy Eckstine and others.
In 1953, Reese moved to New York City and became a vocalist with the Erskine Hawkins Orchestra, and shortly thereafter, signed a recording contract with Jubilee Records. Reese had her first major hit with “And That Reminds Me (of you).” That same year, she was voted “The Most Promising Singer” by Billboard, Cashbox, and Variety, as well as the Disc Jockeys of America and the Jukebox Operators Association.
Reese signed a new recording contract in 1959, with RCA, and subsequently enjoyed her biggest hit, a tune adapted from Puccini’s La Boheme, entitled “Don’t You Know”. Acknowledgement from the music industry followed as she was nominated for a Grammy Award as best female vocalist. This led to Reese performing for the next nine years in Las Vegas, Nevada. In the thirty years that followed “Don’t You Know,” Reese has continued recording.
In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, Reese launched a successful television career. She appeared on many television shows that are now considered classics, including The Perry Como Show, The Jackie Gleason Show, as well as more than twenty appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. Her success continued over the years, with numerous appearances on television and in movies. In 1994, Reese was tapped to star in the hit series Touched by an Angel. Reese was honored for her talents in 1994 with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
In addition to her singing and acting, Reese led a deeply spiritual life. In 1986, she was ordained as a minister by the Rev. Dr. Johnnie Colemon, and she gave weekly sermons at her church, Understanding Principles For Better Living, in Los Angeles.
The HistoryMakers presented this absorbing hourlong interview/documentary with Reese, hosted by Lorraine Toussaint. Reese has an amazing sense of humor—give it a watch:
In 1957, Reese would record her first hit, “And That Reminds Me”:
Then, in 1959, she’d have her biggest hit, “Don’t You Know.”
The Michigan Rock and Roll Hall of Fame notes:
In 1959, Reese signed with RCA Records and released her first RCA single, called “Don’t You Know?”, which was adapted from Giacomo Puccini’s music for La boheme, specifically the aria “Quando m’en vo” (Musetta’s Waltz).
“Don’t You Know?” became her biggest hit, reaching the # 2 spot on the Billboard Pop chart and topping the R&B chart that year. It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc
“Don’t You Know”
Reese recorded a jazz/funk/soul album “Black is Beautiful” in 1970.
[Verse 1] If you had a choice of colors
Which one would you be, my brothers
If there was no day or night
Which would you prefer to be right
How long have you hated your white teachers
Who told you to love only your Black preachers
Do you respect your brother’s woman friend
And share with Black folk that are not of kin [Refrain]People must prove it to the people
A better day is coming for you and for me
With just a little more education
A little love for our nation
We can do it, we can make a better sociеty [Verse 2]Now some of us would rather cuss and make a big fuss
Than to do somеthing to bring about a little trust
Lord knows I hope we overcome our beliefs someday
It might help a little bit if you’ll listen to what I have to say
And I will not have you hating your white teachers
Please don’t only love your Black preachers
And learn that you can respect your brother’s woman friend
And you got to share with Black folks other than those that are your kin
Reese sang blues as well as jazz and gospel. These two albums are a great example:
Journalist Donald Travis Stewart, known as Trav S.D., wrote about Reese the actor on his “Travalanche” blog: “A Different Della Reese.”
Towards the late ’60s Reese began to get her feet wet in acting on shows like Mod Squad and McCloud. I first became aware of her in the mid ’70s, when she was a regular on Chico and the Man, made an appearance on Sanford and Son, and was frequently on shows like Merv, Mike Douglas, and Dinah. She had a recurring role on the sit-com It Takes Two (1982-83) with Richard Crenna and Patty Duke, and a regular on The Royal Family (1991-92) opposite Redd Foxx. The Royal Family was exec produced by Eddie Murphy, who had worked with Reese and Foxx on the movie Harlem Nights (1989). Sadly Foxx died in the middle of the first season, meaning the end of the promising series. She also guested on shows like 227, Picket Fences, etc. and starred in several other made-for-tv and theatrical films (often ones similar in theme to Touched By An Angel).
So by the time of Touched by an Angel, she was a beloved American institution and seeing her playing a mentor to an angel is very much analogous to Morgan Freeman’s several appearances as God, or the President, or whatever. Some might argue that Tess is a bit of a “Magical Negro” character, closer in spirit in some ways to the 1930s and ’50s than to the 2020s. It’s almost an Ethel Waters thing. A kindly, saintly spirit, gently nudging poor, erring mortals into more Godly directions by virtue of a pure, uncomplicated heart. There are worse things, no doubt, but there are also more progressive ones. Thus we remind you that, a quarter century prior to her best known show, Della Reese was already on her way to making history, and that’s what we like to celebrate.
In case you never saw Reese in “Harlem Nights”—she certainly doesn’t portray a character (a brothel Madam) in line with her real-life occupation as a reverend.
I’ll close with Reese and B.B. King, at the White House in 1999, introduced by then-President Bill Clinton.
When Reese joined the ancestors, on Nov. 19, 2017, every major news organization reported her passing. The obituaries are too numerous to post here today, a quick Google search will lead you to them.
I hope you will join me in the comments section below for more of her music, and those of you who are fans, please post your favorites.
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