GHOST NOTES: The voice they tried to erase.

Martha Wash’s voice is on some of the biggest dance records of the 1990s. It just wasn’t her face.

Wash sang the actual vocals on Black Box’s “Everybody Everybody” and C+C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now),” two of the era’s biggest hits. Record labels hired other women, thinner, conventionally marketed women, to lip-sync her vocals in the music videos and in some live performances. Audiences heard Martha Wash. They were shown someone else.

She sued. She won, against both labels, and her case helped push the U.S. music industry toward a rule that seems obvious now and wasn’t guaranteed then: if your voice is on the record, your name goes with it.

This is not a story about a sample taken without credit. It is a story about a woman’s actual body being replaced on camera while her voice carried the song. The photograph is ordinary, a performer on an ordinary day. What isn’t ordinary is that for years, this was the part of her nobody let the public see.

Martha Wash is one of the few whose name came back. The industry has erased many more who are still waiting.