A Rockin' Good Way (To Mess Around And Fall In Love)

A Rockin' Good Way: Dinah Washington and Brook Benton, Summer 1960

When two giants share a microphone, the result is rarely predictable, and the collaboration between Dinah Washington and Brook Benton that produced A Rockin' Good Way (To Mess Around and Fall in Love) was about as unpredictable as the summer of 1960 got. Washington was the self-proclaimed "Queen of the Blues": imperious, technically peerless, famous for the wit and authority she brought to every style of music she touched. Benton was one of the most commercially polished baritone voices in pop and rhythm and blues, a man whose natural elegance seemed to make everything he recorded sound inevitable. Together, they made a record that sounded like two people genuinely enjoying each other's company.

Two Artists at Their Peaks

The pairing was commercially logical as well as artistically inspired. Brook Benton was on an extraordinary commercial run in 1960, with multiple chart entries across the year. Dinah Washington had been a dominant figure in rhythm and blues since the 1940s, had recently crossed over significantly to the pop mainstream, and was at a point in her career where her name on a record was a commercial guarantee to a substantial audience. Matching the two of them on a playful, back-and-forth rhythm number was the kind of strategic thinking that Mercury Records, their shared label, was well positioned to execute.

The Sound of Genuine Chemistry

What separates a genuinely good duet record from a merely competent one is whether the two voices actually seem to be responding to each other rather than just alternating, and by that measure, A Rockin' Good Way is an outstanding duet record. Washington and Benton trade lines with the ease of two performers who are comfortable enough with their own abilities to leave room for the other. Washington's voice, sharp and pointed and full of personality, plays beautifully against Benton's smoother, more velvet-edged delivery. The contrast is the point: they sound like two completely different kinds of attractive, and their conversation has an energy that makes the whole thing feel alive.

Thirteen Weeks and a Summer Peak

Debuting on the Hot 100 on May 23, 1960 at position 61, the record climbed steadily through the early summer weeks, reaching its peak of number 7 on June 27, 1960. It spent thirteen weeks on the chart in total, making it one of the major pop-R&B crossover records of the season. The peak position of number 7 put it in genuine hit territory: high enough to be a significant radio presence, high enough to move units in the kind of numbers that mattered to labels tracking the crossover market. The record succeeded because it appealed to multiple demographics simultaneously without feeling calculated about it.

Dinah Washington's Crossover Moment

For Washington in particular, this record represented a meaningful pop mainstream moment. She had been recording since the early 1940s and had built an unassailable reputation in jazz and blues circles, but the crossover pop audience was newer territory, and she navigated it on her own terms. She did not soften her delivery or sand down her personality to court a more mainstream audience; she simply applied her full instrument to material that happened to be commercially accessible, and the audience responded. Her subsequent chart entries confirmed that the crossover was not an accident: she had arrived on the pop mainstream's terms without abandoning any of what made her extraordinary.

A Record Worth Rediscovering

The joy of A Rockin' Good Way has not diminished. It is a record built on pleasure: the pleasure of two gifted people making music together, the pleasure of a rhythm that makes you want to move, the pleasure of a lyric that winks at its audience without ever condescending to them. Washington and Benton were two of the finest interpreters of their era, and on this record, you can hear them playing. Press play and spend three minutes in the summer of 1960 with two of the best.

"A Rockin' Good Way (To Mess Around And Fall In Love)" — Dinah Washington & Brook Benton's singular moment on the 1960s charts.