R.I.P. Etta James

[Reza]

Washington Post


Etta James, Grammy-winning blues singer with pop appeal, dies




By Adam Bernstein, Friday, January 20, 2012 8:38 AM

Etta James, a Grammy Award-winning singer whose
forceful renditions of At Last, I'd Rather Go Blind,
Tell Mama and Something's
Got a Hold on Me made her a widely admired
musical interpreter of love and pain and one of
the first rhythm-and-blues singers with a large
mainstream following, died Jan. 20 at a hospital
in Riverside, Calif. She was 73.

She had complications from leukemia, her manager
Lupe De Leon told the Associated Press. She also
suffered from dementia and hepatitis.

Ms. James was reported to have been diagnosed
with dementia and leukemia, a form of cancer. Her
illnesses were made public as part of a court
battle between her husband and her children
concerning $1 million of the singer's fortune, in
part to cover her health expenses.

Ms. James attracted a broad following in the
1960s with her interpretations of jazz-inflected
pop. Many of her songs, especially her 1961
string-backed version of the big-band-era pop
standard At Last, are frequently heard on film and television soundtracks.

She influenced later generations of singers from
Janis Joplin to Bonnie Raitt, who
called her the bridge between R&B, blues and pop
singing. . . . Like Ray Charles, Etta brought the
passion of gospel, R&B and gutbucket raw soul
music into the mainstream in a way that very few
people have ever crossed over.

She made more than 40 albums and received the
1994 Grammy for best jazz vocal performance for
Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday. She also
experimented with rock music and was the opening
act for the Rolling Stones in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Foremost she saw herself as a blues musician. She
wrote in her 1995 autobiography, Rage to
Survive,No matter how pop or schmaltzy a song,
I can't help but put a gospel and blues hurting on it.

She often made a connection between her music and
her anguished life, which included heroin
addiction, drastic weight fluctuations and a
troubled childhood. She had been born to a
14-year-old single mother with a rebellious
streak and once wrote that if her mother was
going to be bad, I was going to be superbad.

And so Ms. James snorted cocaine, shot heroin and
smoked marijuana. She associated with gangsters
and pimps. She was arrested for forging bad
checks. When not in jail, she said she was
involved with abusive men, some of whom nearly beat her to death.

She said the Betty Ford clinic weaned her off of
drugs in the late 1980s; her cocaine habit began
while on tour with the Stones, she said. But even
during the worst of times, she recorded
well-received albums, and reviewers noted how her
personal turmoil seemed to enhance her performing talent.

She said the song Feeling
Uneasy on the 1974 album Come a Little Closer
illustrated her experience undergoing drug
treatment. Critic Richie Unterberger called the
performance one of her career highlights,
emphasizing the wrenching, near-wordless
scat-moan vocal over a suitably languorous, melancholy
blues-jazz arrangement.

Ms. James told the trade publication Billboard in
2001: I don't pick a song cause I think the
music sounds cool. . . . I don't want to sing
Fly me to the moon and let me swing amongst the
stars. I want to sing something that either I've
experienced or that I know is real.

She was born Jamesetta Hawkins on Jan. 25, 1938,
in Los Angeles. For years, she insisted her
father was pool shark Minnesota Fats, a habitue
of L.A.'s Central Avenue jazz clubs. Her
paternity never was resolved, even after she
confronted the pool hustler in his Nashville apartment in 1987.

She was raised by her mother's landlady, a woman
named Mama Lu, who took her to a local Baptist
church where she fell in love with singing. When
Mama Lu died in 1950, Ms. James went to live with
relatives in San Francisco but was largely unsupervised.

I went from being this nice little church girl
to living in a rooming house, she told the Los
Angeles Times. I just turned incorrigible,
drinkin' wine, smokin' weed and running the streets.

While weaned on church music, she said she began
to like the blues and the feeling it gave me. It
gave me a naughty-girl feeling. She recalled her
mother's fury when she came home one day and saw
her daughter listening to a 78 rpm of Guitar
Slim's The Things That I Used to Do. Her mother
preferred Holiday and insulted her daughter's
taste. She claimed her mother never saw her perform until the late 1980s.

Ms. James hung out in gangs and began singing on
the street in a cappella groups. One of them, the
Peaches, provided her with her lifelong nickname Miss Peaches.

In the early 1950s, she met bandleader and
promoter Johnny Otis, who rechristened her by a
simple flip of her first name. He guided her
early career, leading to her first
rhythm-and-blues hit, Roll With Me, Henry (1955).
The tune, which she wrote, was a suggestive musical reply to Hank
Ballard and the Midnighters Work With Me, Annie.

The song was released on Modern Records as The
Wallflower to cloak the sexual theme. Singer
Georgia Gibbs sang a sanitized version called
Dance With Me, Henry that was a pop-chart
success, and Ms. James said she was incensed about receiving no credit.

Ms. James toured with Little Richard and Bo
Diddley and was a frequent performer on the black
theater circuit. In 1960, she joined a major
label for blues artists, Chicago-based Chess
Records, and by the end of the decade began
earning favorable comparisons with Aretha Franklin.

Label owner Leonard Chess reportedly thought Ms.
James had a mass appeal that eluded many on his
roster of primarily male, Delta blues musicians.
He took special interest in guiding her career,
which led to such broadly popular albums as At
Last! The title song, written in 1941 by Harry
Warren and Mack Gordon, had been a big-band standard.

Besides the title song, the album contained many
songs with which she would remain associated:
Trust in Me, All I Could Do Was Cry and I
Just Want to Make Love to You.

Ms. James and Chess were portrayed as lovers in
the 2008 movie Cadillac Records, a
fictionalized account of the record label's
history, but Ms. James said their relationship
was strictly business. Contemporary singer
Beyonce played Ms. James in the movie.

Ms. James's more current albums included Time
After Time (1995), Heart of a Woman (1999) and
Blue Gardenia (2001). She was inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 and the Blues
Foundation's Blues Hall of Fame in 2001.

Survivors include her husband, Artis Mills, whom
she married in 1969, and two sons from previous relationships.

Ms. James sang at the opening ceremony of the
1984 summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles and
remained a concert performer through recent
years. Describing herself as statuesque, she
had once stood at 5-foot-11 and weight well over
200 pounds. But with a series of health reversals
toward the end of her life, she was forced to use a wheelchair onstage.

Nevertheless, she still gave audiences some of
the randy onstage writhing they had come to
expect during her most vibrant days sucking her
thumb, cupping her breasts and growling her voice.

She frequently was caustic about where many
modern singers had taken the rhythm-and-blues
music that she pioneered, naming Paula Abdul and
Janet Jackson, for example, as hotshot dancers
with little to recommend them vocally.

A lot of people think the blues is depressing,
but that's not the blues I'm singing, she told
the Los Angeles Times in 1992. When I'm singing
blues, I'm singing life. People that can't stand
to listen to the blues, they've got to be phonies.

Staff writer Terence McArdle contributed to this report.