Etta James

Jamesetta Hawkins was born on January 25, 1938, in Los Angeles, California, to Dorothy Hawkins, who was fourteen years old at the time ^[1]. Her mother was frequently absent during her childhood, and the girl never learned her father's identity with certainty, though she later wrote that Dorothy told her he was the pool player Rudolf Wanderone, known as Minnesota Fats ^[2]. She spent much of her early childhood in the care of a couple she called Sarge and Mama Lu, boarding-house keepers who raised her in the Watts district.

Her musical education began at St. Paul Baptist Church in South Central Los Angeles, where she sang in the choir under the direction of James Earle Hines, a demanding teacher who trained her voice from around age five ^[1]. The child became a minor attraction; her guardian's husband would wake her at night to sing for guests, an experience James later described with lasting resentment ^[2]. When Mama Lu died in 1950, the twelve-year-old moved to San Francisco to live with her mother in the Fillmore district, a neighborhood then dense with nightclubs and rhythm and blues.

In San Francisco she formed a vocal trio with two other teenage girls, calling themselves the Creolettes. The group rehearsed doo-wop harmonies and worked up an answer song to Hank Ballard's suggestive hit 'Work with Me, Annie' ^[3]. That song would pull her out of obscurity before she turned sixteen.

The bandleader Johnny Otis heard the Creolettes in 1954 and brought them to Los Angeles to record. Accounts of the meeting differ; James recalled auditioning for Otis in a hotel, while Otis remembered discovering the group at one of his shows ^[1]. Either way, Otis reworked her first name into a stage name, Etta James, renamed the trio the Peaches, and produced their answer record, 'The Wallflower', better known as 'Roll with Me, Henry' ^[3].

Released on Modern Records, 'The Wallflower' reached number one on the Billboard rhythm and blues chart in 1955 ^[3]. A sanitized cover by the white pop singer Georgia Gibbs, retitled 'Dance with Me, Henry', outsold the original on the pop chart, a pattern common in the segregated record business of the era that James openly resented ^[2]. She followed with 'Good Rockin' Daddy' in 1955 and spent the rest of the decade touring the rhythm and blues circuit, sharing bills with performers including Little Richard, and recording without another major hit.

Her fortunes changed in 1960 when she signed with Chess Records in Chicago, recording for its Argo subsidiary ^[4]. Leonard Chess saw her as more than a rhythm and blues shouter and framed her voice with strings and polished arrangements, aiming at the pop market. The gamble worked almost immediately.

At Chess, James produced the run of records on which the Etta James biography largely rests. 'All I Could Do Was Cry' reached the rhythm and blues top ten in 1960, and her duets with Harvey Fuqua charted the same year ^[3]. Her debut album, At Last!, appeared in late 1960, and its title track, a 1941 Mack Gordon and Harry Warren song, became her signature ^[4]. 'At Last' was only a modest pop hit on release, peaking outside the top forty, but over the following decades it grew into a standard, fixed in American culture through films, advertisements, and countless weddings ^[5].

She kept scoring through the early 1960s with 'Trust in Me', 'Something's Got a Hold on Me', 'Stop the Wedding', and 'Pushover' ^[3]. In 1967 Chess sent her to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where she cut the album Tell Mama with Rick Hall producing. The title song and the ballad 'I'd Rather Go Blind' came from those sessions; the latter, though never a major American hit for her, became one of the most covered soul ballads of its generation ^[4].

Recognition arrived heavily in her later career. Among the most cited Etta James achievements are her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003, and six competitive and honorary Grammy wins in total, including Best Jazz Vocal Performance for Mystery Lady, her 1994 album of Billie Holiday songs ^[5][6]. She also received induction into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2001 and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003 ^[6].

James wrote candidly about her private struggles in her 1995 autobiography, Rage to Survive, written with the music journalist David Ritz ^[2]. She began using heroin in the early 1960s, and the addiction dominated nearly fifteen years of her life. She passed bad checks, pawned possessions, and repeatedly entered treatment; a court sent her to the Tarzana Psychiatric Hospital in 1974 for a stay of more than a year, which she credited with beginning her recovery ^[2]. Battles with weight and prescription painkillers followed in later decades.

In 1969 she married Artis Mills, who accepted responsibility when the couple was arrested on drug charges and served a prison sentence of several years ^[2]. The marriage endured for the rest of her life. James raised two sons, Donto and Sametto, both of whom became musicians and performed in her band, Donto on drums and Sametto on bass ^[7].

Offstage she was blunt, profane, and funny, a personality that matched the rasp and growl of her singing. Interviewers found her unguarded about racism in the record industry, about money she believed she was owed, and about her own failings, which she cataloged without self-pity ^[2].

Clean of heroin by the late 1970s, James rebuilt her career slowly. She opened for the Rolling Stones on tour in 1978 and sang at the opening ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, performing 'When the Saints Go Marching In' ^[7]. A contract with Island Records produced Seven Year Itch in 1988, her first album in a decade, recorded again at Muscle Shoals.

The 1990s and 2000s brought steady work and her strongest reviews in years. Mystery Lady won the 1995 Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, and Let's Roll (2003) and Blues to the Bone (2004) each won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album ^[6]. In 2008 the singer Beyoncé portrayed James in the film Cadillac Records, a fictionalized account of Chess Records, renewing public interest in her catalog ^[5].

Her health declined sharply at the end of the decade. Her family disclosed diagnoses of leukemia, hepatitis C, and dementia, and her sons and husband contested control of her care and finances in court ^[7]. Etta James died of complications from leukemia on January 20, 2012, at a hospital in Riverside, California, five days before her seventy-fourth birthday ^[5].

Few American singers moved between genres with her authority. Critics and historians place James among the essential links between 1950s rhythm and blues and the soul music of the 1960s, and Rolling Stone ranked her among the greatest singers of the rock era ^[8]. Her Muscle Shoals recordings in particular shaped the sound later called southern soul.

Her influence runs through generations of vocalists. Janis Joplin absorbed her phrasing in the 1960s; decades later Adele, Christina Aguilera, and Bonnie Raitt named her as a formative model, and 'I'd Rather Go Blind' remains a rite of passage for blues and soul singers ^[8]. When Beyoncé sang 'At Last' at an inaugural ball for President Barack Obama in January 2009, the moment confirmed how completely the song had come to belong to James, whatever its Tin Pan Alley origins ^[5].

Among the plainest Etta James facts is this: she recorded for nearly sixty years, from a teenage answer record in 1955 to The Dreamer, an album released in November 2011, weeks before her death ^[7]. The voice coarsened and deepened over that span, but it never lost the mixture of hurt and defiance that made her singular.