Dinah Washington presents a problem for biography. She is all show, a performing self. Perhaps there is no more to her than that, but if she had an inner life, Nadine Cohodas gets nowhere near it in her new biography, “Queen” (Pantheon, 560 pages, $28.50).To be fair, I’m not sure anyone did.

The biographer races through Washington’s club dates, recording sessions, and road trips – or is it just Dinah who did the running, with the biographer trying to play catch-up? Washington rarely took a breather. She did return home occasionally to visit her mother and her two sons, and at these points the biographer includes a dutiful paragraph about domestic life as Washington is glimpsed bolting out the door.

Cut this biography by a hundred pages, and I think my doubts about it would vanish. Then you would have the peripatetic and picaresque Dinah in all her glory. Too much detail just bogs down the biographer.

Dinah Washington, born Ruth Jones, was brought up in a religious home singing in church. Indeed, this biography could have been titled “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Singing.” That Ruth had the gift was apparent from the time she could talk. Music, for Ruth, was part of what Ms. Cohodas aptly calls “spiritual theater.”

Living on Chicago’s South Side, young Ruth hung around the jazz clubs, craving not only the music but also the men. While still a youngster, she told her mother she wanted to be a showgirl. And unlike other African-Americans who switched from sacred to secular music, Ruth had no qualms about forsaking gospel for the blues. Her mother disapproved of her departure from the church, yet she felt powerless to control the resolute Ruth.

Ms. Cohodas suggests that Ruth’s first marriage was nothing but opportunism; the man promised to make her a star. She quickly abandoned him when the great Lionel Hampton spotted her talent and made her a regular singer in his band. He disliked the ordinary sound of “Ruth Jones,” and so Dinah Washington was born – an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Dinah Shore, while providing a last name that evoked American aristocracy.

(This is how stars were born in the 1940s: Marilyn from Marilyn Miller, a Broadway star, and Monroe, an allusion to another president. The number of syllables have to be right too – a 3-2 combination, or 2-3.)

Discovered by Hampton in 1943, by the following year Dinah was already one of the three or four most popular African-American singers, placing just behind Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Lena Horne. She sustained an impressive 20-year career. But despite several hits and always being in demand, she was never able to quite cross over from the blues to mainstream fame.

So why did Dinah Washington become a superstar only in the African-American community? She had a better voice than Holiday or Horne, although no one can surpass the incomparable Ella. Washington was no beauty – so the cruel critics would reiterate, commenting on her plump figure or on her slimmer one as she tried one crash diet after another. She was dark-skinned and short. Her best features – she said it herself – were her smile and her beautiful hands.

Washington sang the blues best, and perhaps no other reason is needed to explain the shape of her career. Ms. Cohodas describes obstacles: recording companies that did not know how to promote her; a singer who seemed willing to work on whatever material was offered to her. She seems to have had very little sense of structure, or of how an album might advance her.

Washington was volatile. She once pulled a gun on a Southern gas-station attendant who refused to let her use the ladies room. She was married seven times. But this is good copy and certainly no barrier to stardom. She was also a hard worker, and this, I think, was the problem. She exhausted herself. She had no sense of strategy, of how a career is built. She bulled her way through life.

Or so I suppose. Ms. Cohodas provides very little commentary, and so the reader does not know what to think of this marvelous singer who just kept singing and never seemed to confide in anyone. Washington’s interviews were hopeless and rather embarrassing. Asked about the blues, she tells the interviewer that you have to feel it inside. True but trite. She comes off sounding like those inane athletes on local sports reports.

Why was Washington “Queen of the Blues”? There is no doubt that her fans and certain critics thought this, but the nature of Washington’s authority is never explored in this biography. Washington souped up her stocky figure with cinch waists and flamboyant outfits, and her manner was certainly regal when it was not, as the biographer says, “earthy and spontaneous.” But I longed for at least a few crisp paragraphs on what made her blues singing distinctive.

Part of the biographer’s problem is that Washington’s life has no arc. From 1943 to 1963, she just put her pedal to the floor until she ran out of gas. She was hospitalized several times during her last year and died of a diet-pill overdose. Addicted to barbiturates, her system mortally weakened, she was all played out – not a surprising end for a singer who was also called “Queen of the Jukeboxes.”

Diana’s seventh husband, the football star Dick “Night Train” Lane, discovered her unconscious, and she died shortly thereafter. Suicide seems unlikely. The achievement of this biography is to show that Washington always wanted to live to sing another day.