Etta James
A singer who carried the cry she learned in church and the wounds of the blues in a single voice, rising again through song each time she fell.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
People in her life ⏳🌊
- FamilyDorothy Hawkins
The mother who bore her at fourteen; though always distant, she took her daughter to San Francisco and opened the door to a new life.
- PatronageJohnny Otis
The bandleader who discovered her in 1954, brought her to Los Angeles, guided her first recording, and gave her the name Etta James.
- PatronLeonard Chess
As head of Chess Records he shaped her into a singer of string-laden ballads, and she looked up to Leonard as a father.
- ColleagueHarvey Fuqua
Leader of the Moonglows and her lover, the colleague who brought her to Chicago and recorded duets with her; later introduced Marvin Gaye to Motown.
- FriendshipKeith Richards
Wrote to her during rehab to offer a tour, and in 1978 she opened for the Rolling Stones on the road.
- InfluenceBillie Holiday
The elder singer in whom she saw her own life and songs; the 1994 tribute album Mystery Lady brought her first Grammy.
I. Daughter of a fourteen-year-old mother · 1938–1950
(Birth) She was born in January 1938 in Los Angeles, California. Her given name was Jamesetta Hawkins. Her mother, Dorothy Hawkins, was fourteen when she gave birth to her daughter, and her father was never officially identified. The young mother was often away from home, and the child was raised by foster parents in the neighborhood. Years later she spoke openly of a childhood spent forever waiting for her mother. (Choir) At around five she joined the choir of St. Paul Baptist Church in Los Angeles and learned to sing under its director, James Earle Hines. Hines taught her to push the sound up from the belly rather than the throat, and little Jamesetta was soon taking solos, her voice carried over the church's radio broadcasts. The big sound that rings through the whole body, and the push-and-pull breath of gospel delivered like a sermon, settled into her then. (Shadows) Her memories of the foster home were not all bright. According to her autobiography, Rage to Survive, her foster father would get drunk, wake the child in the middle of the night, and make her sing for his card-playing guests. She wrote that she carried a lifelong aversion to singing on someone else's command. She traced back to those years the stubbornness with which she sang her own way on stage to the very end. (Parting) When her foster mother died in 1950, Dorothy took her twelve-year-old daughter north to San Francisco. The shelter of choir and church vanished all at once, and the streets and clubs of an unfamiliar city began to take its place.
II. Miss Peaches · 1950–1959
(Fillmore) San Francisco's Fillmore District was a neighborhood teeming with Black clubs and street-corner vocal groups. At around fifteen, Jamesetta formed a trio, the Creolettes, with two sisters from the neighborhood, singing at parties and on street corners. Her mother's supervision was loose, and the girl learned more on the street than in school. (Otis) In 1954 the bandleader Johnny Otis, in San Francisco on tour, heard the girls sing. He brought the three to Los Angeles to record for Modern Records. The group became the Peaches, and Jamesetta was reborn as Etta James, the two halves of her name swapped. The nickname Peaches would follow her for years to come. (Answer song) Her first recording, “The Wallflower,” was an answer song, a talk-back to a Hank Ballard hit. In 1955 it reached No. 1 on the rhythm and blues (R&B) chart, but a cover by the white singer Georgia Gibbs, its lyrics toned down, took the top of the pop chart. At seventeen she learned that someone else could walk away with more money and more fame from the very same song. (Touring) The follow-up, “Good Rockin' Daddy,” also made the R&B chart, and she went out on tours of the South with Little Richard and others. It was a time when Black performers were turned away from restaurants and hotels. But her later singles for Modern drew less and less response, and by the late 1950s she was close to a fading teen singer.
The answer song sixteen-year-old Etta first recorded with Johnny Otis; it hit No. 1 R&B but lost the pop chart to a white singer's cover.
- From start to finish the vocal romps lightly over a rolling shuffle rhythm (a beat that bounces between alternating short and long notes).
- Here and there a deep, low male voice cuts in to talk back, a part taken by Richard Berry, who would later write “Louie Louie.”
- Teenage Etta's voice is still bright and brash. Heard beside her later, rougher sound, it shows vividly how a singer changed.
- The squawking, clipped blasts of the Otis band's saxophone carry the giddy air of 1950s Los Angeles R&B.
III. Strings at Chess · 1960–1965
(Chicago) The one who brought her to Chicago was Harvey Fuqua, leader of the vocal group the Moonglows. The two were lovers, and in 1960 she signed with Chess Records, the label of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry. Leonard Chess placed her on the subsidiary label Argo and set out to make her not a raw R&B singer but a ballad singer wrapped in strings. She said many times that she looked up to Leonard like a father. (Gordy) With Fuqua she released duets as Etta & Harvey. Fuqua soon went to Detroit, married Gwen Gordy, and is said to have helped the young Marvin Gaye find his way to Motown. That same year, the writers of Etta's first Chess hit, “All I Could Do Was Cry,” were none other than Berry and Gwen Gordy and Billy Davis. Her Chess years thus run in a single line with the beginnings of Motown. (Strings) Over violin and cello accompaniments (string arrangements) written by the arranger Riley Hampton, she sang 1940s film songs and jazz standards. “At Last,” released late in 1960, reached No. 2 on the R&B chart and became the song that would stand for her name for the rest of her life. On 1962's “Something's Got a Hold on Me,” by contrast, she let loose the shout she had learned in church. (Heroin) Her heroin addiction began around the same time as her success. She did not hide this period in her autobiography. The raw, burning voice on Rocks the House, the live album recorded in 1963 at the New Era Club in Nashville, was set down alongside a life slowly crumbling offstage.
Written by Berry·Gwen Gordy and Billy Davis, it was her first big hit at Chess and the starting point of Etta the ballad singer.
- The song is built as the story of watching the one you love marry someone else, and it unfolds like a short story.
- Over a slow triplet feel (a swaying rhythm that splits each beat into three), the chorus offers soft support while Etta steadily lifts the emotion above it.
- Toward the end her voice breaks as if swallowing a sob, yet it sounds not like a staged cry but like the vocal power she built in the choir.
A 1941 film song recast in Riley Hampton's string arrangement, the high point of the ballad singer Leonard Chess dreamed Etta could be.
- Violins swell like a wave to open the song, a string arrangement rarely so lavish on a 1960 R&B record.
- Etta comes in a hair behind the beat, drawing the words out as if pulling them toward her. That ease makes the song languid and sensual.
- She rations the technique of bending one syllable across many notes (melisma), pushing her voice high only at the decisive moments.
- On release it peaked at just No. 47 on the pop chart, but through weddings, films, and a 2009 presidential inaugural ball it became her signature.
Amid the string ballads, a song that brings the church shout out head-on, the clearest sign that Etta came from a gospel choir.
- The opening is sung slowly and out of tempo, drawn out like a hymn beginning in a chapel.
- Then it suddenly flips into a fast tempo, with handclaps and chorus surging in. This abrupt turn is the heart of the song.
- The back-and-forth of the chorus answering and Etta firing back (call and response) carries over the ways of Black church worship intact.
- In 2011 Avicii's “Levels” cut out a snippet of its vocal (sampling), bringing it to a new generation.
IV. Muscle Shoals · 1966–1969
(Alabama) In 1967 Leonard Chess sent her to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Part of the aim, it is said, was to get her away for a while from the drug scene in Chicago. Earlier that same year Aretha Franklin had recorded “I Never Loved a Man” at this very studio, announcing a fresh start. (Hall) Producer Rick Hall and the studio's rhythm section laid down not strings but a band of trumpets and saxophones (a horn section), organ, and hard-hitting drums. A room of white Southern musicians playing Black soul was unfamiliar to her, but the sessions came together quickly. The album also included Otis Redding's “Security,” linking her to Redding in the shared language of Southern soul. (Tell Mama) “Tell Mama,” a Clarence Carter song reworked for a woman's voice, reached No. 10 R&B and No. 23 pop, her biggest pop hit of the Chess years. On the flip side of the single (the B-side) was “I'd Rather Go Blind,” a ballad of someone who would sooner lose their sight than watch a lover with another, and over the years it came to outlive the A-side. (Loss) In 1969 Leonard Chess died. With the one who had believed in her and entrusted her with albums gone, Chess Records was soon sold to another company, and her own place grew shaky. That same year she married Artis Mills, and the two remained married until the end of her life.
Cut with Rick Hall at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, it became her biggest pop hit of the Chess years.
- From the very first bar, a pack of trumpets and saxophones (the horn section) grabs the ear with a short, punchy, clipped repeating figure (the riff).
- The drums, striking hard on the second and fourth beats (the backbeat), are locked firmly in place, giving the record a Southern soul heft wholly unlike her string-laden Chicago sessions.
- Etta mixes in a rough, throat-scraping sound (the growl), drawing the narrator who promises comfort as at once tender and self-assured.
- At just over two minutes, the song carries no excess. The band drives the voice and the voice pulls the band, and the tension holds to the very end.
A ballad first issued on the flip side of “Tell Mama,” it has over the years become the most covered of all her songs.
- Over a low bed laid down by the organ, the guitar tosses back short replies, and the whole song settles slow and heavy.
- Etta begins low in her range, as if worn out, dragging behind the beat, then late in the song pushes her voice up high until it seems to tear. That cracking sound says everything the song feels.
- Rather than railing against the betrayal she has witnessed, the narrator confides it in a tone close to resignation, and that makes it hurt all the more.
- In the 2008 film “Cadillac Records,” Beyoncé sang this song, and more listeners began hearing it side by side with the original.
V. The long dark · 1970–1987
(Addiction) In the early 1970s she hit the deepest bottom of her addiction. She stood in court several times on drug-related matters, and in 1974 a judge ordered her into a treatment facility in Los Angeles instead of jail. In her autobiography she looked back on that treatment as a crossroads in her life, but the fight with addiction went on long afterward. (Mekler) Even so, the music never stopped. Her 1973 album “Etta James,” made with producer Gabriel Mekler, embraced the textures of rock and funk and earned a Grammy nomination. Her two sons would grow up to play in their mother's band. (Stones) In 1978 she opened for the Rolling Stones on their American tour. Keith Richards is said to have written to her while she was in rehab, proposing that they tour together. In 1984 she sang at the opening ceremony of the Los Angeles Olympics before an enormous television audience. (Clubs) Yet the labels that followed Chess had no idea how to sell her. By the mid-1980s she was making a living without a major contract, working the circuit of clubs and blues festivals. The names of her hits still carried weight, but the charts had drifted away, and she held on by sheer skill on the stage. In the performances of this period her voice grew lower and thicker than it had been in her youth.
VI. A second song · 1988–2002
(Recovery) In 1988 she entered the Betty Ford Center for another round of addiction treatment. That same year she returned to the major-label stage at Island Records with “Seven Year Itch,” made with Muscle Shoals producer Barry Beckett. Its solid Southern soul sound called back memories of FAME Studios twenty years before. (Honors) In 1993 she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The following year she released “Mystery Lady,” an album of Billie Holiday songs, and in 1995 it won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. It was her first Grammy, forty years after her debut. As a young woman she had seen her own circumstances reflected in Holiday's tragic life, and that feeling runs through the album's restrained singing. (Autobiography) In 1995 came her autobiography, “Rage to Survive,” written with David Ritz. She set down, without embellishment, her memories of foster homes, her addiction and her questions about her real father. True to its title, a rage to survive, the book read less like a success story than a record of endurance. (Body) For years her weight troubled her knees and her health. In 2002 she underwent gastric bypass surgery and lost a great deal of weight, and afterward she moved far more lightly on stage. Around this time she released album after album on the Private Music label, ranging across blues, soul and jazz, leaving behind the sound of a ripened voice.
A tribute album of Billie Holiday songs, it brought her a first Grammy forty years after her debut.
- Etta does not imitate Holiday's thin, lonesome timbre; she rereads the same songs in her own thick, low voice.
- A small jazz combo built on piano·bass·drums supports her quietly, and the drums flow softly under brushes swept across the drumhead.
- In place of the big cries of her youth, what stands out is restraint: breath held in reserve, notes clipped short. The older voice only adds weight to the songs.
VII. The last dream · 2003–2012
(Tributes) In 2003 she received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and her name was set into the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She went on to win back-to-back Grammys: Best Contemporary Blues Album in 2004 for “Let's Roll” and Best Traditional Blues Album in 2005 for “Blues to the Bone.” On the threshold of seventy, she was still very much at work. (Cadillac) In the 2008 film “Cadillac Records,” which told the story of Chess Records, Beyoncé played Etta James and sang “At Last” and “I'd Rather Go Blind.” In January 2009 Beyoncé sang “At Last” again at an inaugural ball for President Barack Obama, and it became the first dance of the president and first lady. It was the moment a ballad from half a century earlier once more became a whole nation's song. (Illness) In her last years she suffered from dementia and hepatitis C, and in 2011 it was made public that she had been diagnosed with leukemia. That same year she released “The Dreamer,” which she announced would be her final album. Her voice had turned rough and low, but she sang in the studio her own way to the end. (Farewell) On January 20, 2012, five days before her seventy-fourth birthday, she died of leukemia in Riverside, California. At her funeral Stevie Wonder and Christina Aguilera sent her off in song. Born the daughter of a fourteen-year-old mother, she had come through foster homes, the streets and the long tunnel of addiction, and so her life came to its close inside a song.
Lesser-known stories
For years she believed that her real father might be Rudolf Wanderone, the famed pool hustler better known as Minnesota Fats. According to her autobiography her mother hinted as much, and in 1987 she even met Wanderone in person. But this was her belief and was never confirmed by any test, which is why most official biographies simply list her father as unknown. Her name does not appear in the songwriting credits of “I'd Rather Go Blind.” In her autobiography she said she wrote the song with Ellington Jordan but signed her share of the credit over to Billy Foster, her boyfriend at the time. This gap between the name on the record and the actual authorship survives only in her own recollection and has never been widely known. The same song found its life in Britain before it did in America. In 1969 the blues band Chicken Shack took it onto the British charts with the voice of Christine Perfect, later Christine McVie, and countless singers, Rod Stewart among them, have recorded it since. Because the original was a B-side in the United States, it is often remembered as though it had been her signature song from the start. “At Last,” too, was not the song of its era from the beginning. Its peak on the 1961 pop chart was No. 47. It became a wedding standard only over decades of use in commercials and films, with the 2009 inaugural ball as its high point. It is an easy thing to miss when we look at the past through the lens of present-day fame.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Rhythm and blues (R&B)
(Meaning) A compound of rhythm and blues. It came into wide use in 1949, when the American music magazine Billboard renamed its chart for Black music with this term. (In pop) It refers to Black popular music that fused the sorrow of the blues, the powerful cries of gospel and a beat made for dancing. In the 1950s, when Etta James made her debut, it went almost hand in hand with rock and roll. Think of it as music like a jump-rope chant, where the body catches the beat first, but where the stories in the song are grown-up ones, of parting and longing.
Answer song
(Meaning) From the English answer song, a song that answers back. (In pop) A song written as a retort to an earlier hit. A different character replies to the figure in the original, or the same story is retold from the other side. It is a bit like writing a reply on a note a friend passed you in class and sending it back. “The Wallflower” was a woman's reply to a hit sung by a man.
Cover
(In pop) Recording a fresh version of a song another artist released first. In 1950s America it was common for white singers to smooth out a Black artist's hit and re-record it, getting more radio play and earning more money. If one friend made up a dance and another friend copied it and drew bigger applause at the school show, the friend who made it up would feel hurt. That is what happened to Etta James with “The Wallflower.” (Elsewhere) In everyday use it means a lid or a book jacket; in insurance, the scope of what is covered.
B-side
(Meaning) The reverse side of a record. The front is called the A-side. (In pop) Old singles carried one song on each side; the record company put the song it wanted to push on the A-side and a bonus track on the B-side. Now and then, though, the B-side ends up the more beloved. It is like the time the extra side dish at school lunch turned out to be the best thing that day. “I'd Rather Go Blind” is exactly that kind of song.
String arrangement
(Meaning) A string is a cord, and by extension the stringed instruments, such as violin·viola·cello, that sound when their strings are bowed. Pyeongok (編曲), 'arrangement,' means to weave (編) a piece of music together. (In pop) The work of writing separate parts for strings to play behind a song. The arranger decides which instruments come in when and how loudly they sound. Just as the same instant ramen can taste completely different depending on what you add and when, the same song changes its mood with its arrangement. The elegance of “At Last” came from Riley Hampton's string arrangement.
Horn section
(Meaning) A horn was originally a trumpet made from an animal's horn; today the word covers wind instruments such as the trumpet. A section is a part, a group. (In pop) Grouping wind instruments such as trumpet·trombone·saxophone into one team that plays together. In soul music they give a song its punch with short, punchy, clipped repeated phrases. It is like the moment a cheering squad at a school field day shouts a short chant in one voice and the whole crowd comes alive.
Growl
(Meaning) The English growl means the low snarl of an animal such as a dog or a lion. (In pop) A vocal technique that deliberately mixes in a rough, hoarse, throat-scraping sound. It is used to convey anger or desperation that a clean tone cannot hold. Think of how your voice sounds the day after cheering too hard at a field day. A singer, though, controls the sound so as not to injure the throat.
Sampling
(Meaning) A sample is a specimen, a piece cut from a larger whole. (In pop) Cutting part of an existing recording and using it as material for a new song. A single vocal phrase or a drum sound may be looped underneath. It is the same as cutting a scene from one video and splicing it into another while editing. Avicii's use of a cut of Etta James's voice in 2011 is a famous example. (Elsewhere) In statistics it means drawing part of a whole population to study.