Dee Dee Bridgewater was born May 27, 1950, in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised in Flint, Michigan, where her father, Matthew Garrett, was a jazz trumpeter and teacher. After high school she attended Michigan State University before transferring to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in 1969 toured the Soviet Union with the university's big band.

In 1970 she married trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater and moved to New York City, where she sang lead vocals for the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra in the early 1970s. She released her debut album, Afro Blue, in 1974, the same year she began a run in the Broadway musical The Wiz, for which she won the 1975 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.

After touring France in 1984 with Sophisticated Ladies, Bridgewater relocated to Paris in 1986, where she spent 15 years developing a deeper level of jazz mastery and gained wide recognition for the first time as a jazz vocalist rather than a theater performer. Her 1997 tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, Dear Ella, won her a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, and her 2010 album Eleanora Fagan (1917-1959): To Billie with Love from Dee Dee earned her another. She has released more than 20 albums as a jazz vocalist, received seven Grammy nominations, owns her own production company and record label, and has hosted NPR's syndicated radio show JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater since 2001.

Bridgewater's path from Broadway to jazz vocals, sharpened during her fifteen years based in Paris, gave her a theatrical command of phrasing and storytelling that set her interpretations of the American songbook and tribute projects to Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday apart from more strictly instrumentalist-influenced vocalists.