R&B and blues singer Esther Phillips is among the 2023 inductees into The Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame. Phillips had two top 20 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 — “Release Me” (1962, when she ...

Little Esther Mae Jones was born in Galveston, Texas. Her folks' early divorce saw her to bounce between Texas and Watts, California. She'd discovered early on that music was one thing that couldn't ...

The decades-long battle with drug addiction, which ultimately led to her untimely demise, contributed to vocalist Esther Phillips' status as a tragic second-tier figure in the larger annals of popular ...

It was only a few years ago that I discovered Esther Phillips. I don’t recall ever hearing her records while growing up in the ’80s, when she had long fallen into obscurity and was dead by the middle ...