At the 22nd Grammy Awards, Warwick won Best Pop and Best R&B Vocal Performance, Female, the first woman ever to win in both fields in one night.
On February 27, 1980, at the 22nd Annual Grammy Awards, Dionne Warwick achieved an unprecedented feat: she won Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female for "I'll Never Love This Way Again" and Best R&B Vocal Performance, Female for "Déjà Vu" on the same night — making her the first woman in Grammy history to win awards in both the Pop and R&B categories in a single ceremony.
This dual win was a landmark demonstration of Warwick's remarkable versatility as a vocalist, capable of excelling within the stylistic conventions of two distinct but related genres. It came after a period in the mid-1970s where Warwick's commercial fortunes had dipped following the end of her partnership with Bacharach and David, making this comeback all the more significant — the album Dionne (1979), produced by Barry Manilow, revitalized her career entirely.
The achievement broke new ground for what a single artist, and specifically a Black woman, could accomplish within an industry that had often segregated musical genres along racial lines, implicitly limiting artists to categories based on assumptions about their audience. Warwick's dual win challenged those boundaries, proving that a single artist's voice could be recognized as excellent across multiple genre classifications simultaneously.
This moment remains a touchstone in histories of women breaking barriers in the music industry and is frequently cited as one of the defining highlights of Warwick's long and celebrated career.