The Duchess of Coolsville arrives by way of a Saturday night

Rickie Lee Jones was born in Chicago on 8 November 1954, the third of four children. Her father, whom she was named after, was a singer, songwriter, painter and trumpet player, and her grandparents were vaudevillians: her grandfather Frank "Peg Leg" Jones sang, danced and told jokes with a ukulele. She spent ages four to fourteen in Phoenix, Arizona.

At 21 she was singing traditional jazz and her own songs in bars and coffee houses in Venice, California. In 1977 she met Tom Waits at The Troubadour, and they dated for about two years. Her song “Chuck E.'s in Love” was occasioned by their mutual friend Chuck E. Weiss, who phoned her and Waits in the autumn of 1977 to say he had fallen in love.

Her self-titled debut came out in March 1979, with guests including Dr. John, Randy Newman and Michael McDonald. “Chuck E.'s in Love” reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100, the album went to number three and platinum, and “Young Blood” gave her a second top 40 hit. On 7 April 1979, a month after the record appeared, she performed on Saturday Night Live, which made her an overnight sensation. Time magazine dubbed her The Duchess of Coolsville after her very first professional show, in Boston, and she played Carnegie Hall that July.

At the 1980 Grammys she was nominated four times and won Best New Artist. Pirates followed in 1981, then The Magazine in 1984 and Flying Cowboys in 1989, and a second Grammy came in 1990 for “Makin' Whoopee”, a duet with Dr. John. AllMusic describes her as a vocalist with an expressive and smoky instrument, a composer who weaves jazz, folk and R&B together. She published a memoir, Last Chance Texaco, in 2021, and her fifteenth studio album, Pieces of Treasure, earned an eighth Grammy nomination in 2023.