Esther Phillips was born Esther Mae Jones in Galveston, Texas, on December 23, 1935. Her parents separated while she was a child and she divided her time between her father in Houston and her mother in the Watts district of Los Angeles. It was in Watts, in 1949, that Johnny Otis heard her win an amateur talent contest at his own club, the Barrelhouse. He put her in his California Rhythm and Blues Caravan and billed her as "Little Esther."

The records came immediately. "Double Crossing Blues," cut for Savoy with the Johnny Otis Quintette and the Robins, went to number 1 on the Billboard rhythm and blues chart in 1950, when she was 14. Four more of her sides reached the R&B top ten in that same year: "Mistrustin' Blues" and "Cupid's Boogie" both went to number 1, "Deceivin' Blues" reached number 4 and "Wedding Boogie" reached number 6. She left Otis and Savoy at the end of 1950 and signed with Federal, where she recorded more than thirty sides and charted only once, with "Ring-A-Ding-Doo" at number 8 in 1952.

Then it fell apart. Heroin addiction, which had begun in her teens, took over. She left the business in 1954, went home to Houston, worked small clubs when she worked at all, and was treated repeatedly at the federal narcotics hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. Eight years passed without a hit.

The comeback came in 1962, and it came from an unlikely direction. Kenny Rogers heard her singing in a Houston club and helped get her signed to Lenox Records, run by his brother Lelan. She recorded a country song, "Release Me," and it went to number 1 R&B and number 8 pop. It also marked the moment she stopped being Little Esther. Atlantic signed her, and the mid-1960s produced a string of albums and singles including "Try Me," with King Curtis on saxophone, and a 1965 reading of the Lennon and McCartney song "And I Love Her" with the pronouns reversed, released as "And I Love Him," which reached number 54 pop, number 11 R&B and number 14 easy listening. Her one official live album, Burnin', was recorded at Freddie Jett's Pied Piper in Los Angeles and released by Atlantic in 1970. That year she was also nominated for her first Grammy Award, for "Set Me Free."

In 1969, between contracts, she recorded something that sits apart from the rest of the catalogue. The Sounds of Synanon were the band and choir of Synanon, the California drug rehabilitation organisation, and Epic released their album The Prince of Peace: A Rock-Jazz Cantata that year, following a Metromedia television special. Phillips sings the solo on its closing piece, "I Will Greatly Rejoice," alongside Wendell Harrison on tenor saxophone. On the single Epic drew from the album, her lead vocal carries no credit at all.

The chapter she is remembered for began in 1971, when she signed to Kudu, the rhythm and blues and soul label Creed Taylor had set up alongside CTI. From a Whisper to a Scream was the first album Kudu released, in January 1972, and its centrepiece was Gil Scott-Heron's "Home Is Where the Hatred Is," a song written from inside heroin addiction and sung by a woman who had lost a decade of her career to it. The record brought a Grammy nomination for Best Rhythm & Blues Vocal Performance, Female. Aretha Franklin won the category that year for Young, Gifted and Black, and then handed the trophy to Phillips, saying Phillips should have won it instead.

Seven albums followed for Kudu between 1972 and 1976, and the personnel on them reads like a directory of the CTI house style. Alone Again, Naturally (1972) has George Benson, Ron Carter, Billy Cobham, Eric Gale, Hank Crawford, Cornell Dupree, Richard Tee, Bernard Purdie and Maceo Parker on it, with Don Sebesky writing the strings. Black-Eyed Blues (1973) has Bob James arranging strings. Performance (1974) puts Bob James at the piano, Hubert Laws on flute, Steve Gadd and Purdie both behind drum kits, Michael Brecker taking the tenor solo, and Patti Austin and Deniece Williams in the background vocal section. Rudy Van Gelder's name is on all seven.

The commercial peak arrived in 1975. "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes" began life in 1934 as "Cuando vuelva a tu lado," a bolero by the Mexican songwriter Maria Grever. Joe Beck arranged it as a disco record and played lead guitar on it, with David Sanborn on alto saxophone, Michael Brecker on tenor, Randy Brecker on trumpet, Don Grolnick on keyboards, Steve Khan on rhythm guitar, Will Lee on bass, Chris Parker on drums and Ralph MacDonald on percussion. It reached number 20 on the pop chart, number 10 rhythm and blues, number 2 on the US dance chart and number 6 in the United Kingdom, and brought a fourth Grammy nomination. On November 8, 1975 she sang it on Saturday Night Live, in the fourth episode of the show's first season, on a night hosted by Candice Bergen.

She left Kudu after Capricorn Princess in late 1976 and made four albums for Mercury between 1977 and 1981, beginning with the well-received You've Come a Long Way, Baby. Her final chart entry was "Turn Me Out," which reached number 85 rhythm and blues in 1983. She completed a last album, A Way to Say Goodbye, in the months before she passed away on August 7, 1984, at UCLA Medical Center in Carson, California, at 48, of liver and kidney failure. Muse Records released it in 1986. She had been nominated for four Grammy Awards and won none of them.

Johnny Otis, who had found her in 1949, conducted her funeral. She was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave at Lincoln Memorial Park in Compton. In April 1985 Otis organised a benefit at the Vine St Bar & Grill in Hollywood and raised the money to move her to Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills, where a bronze marker now stands. She was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2023.

Phillips had one of the most immediately identifiable voices in American popular music: a thin, nasal, slightly frayed tone with a pronounced vibrato and a habit of bending into a note from underneath rather than landing on it cleanly. It is a voice that carries wear in it, and she used that rather than hiding it. Dinah Washington is the reference point most often reached for, and Phillips's 1975 version of "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes" is a direct engagement with Washington's 1959 hit reading of the same song.

What separates her from her contemporaries is repertoire rather than technique. She moved between blues, country, soul, pop and jazz standards without treating any of them as a departure, and she did it from the beginning: a jump blues singer at 14, a country singer at 26, a soul singer at 30, and a jazz-backed pop singer at 36. The country records are not a novelty in her catalogue, they are a third of it. That refusal to stay inside one market is exactly what made her right for Kudu, where the working method was to put a singer with jazz players on material from anywhere and aim the result at radio.