The soul of the 60’s- The story of Etta James

Etta James, born with the name Jamesetta Hawkins, (January 25, 1938 – January 20, 2012) was a phenomenal American singer who performed in a wide range of genres, such as blues, R&B, soul, rock and roll, jazz and gospel. Started her career in 1954, she gained fame with hits like “At Last” “Tell Mama”, “Something’s Got a Hold on Me”, “I’d Rather Go Blind” and many more. Throughout her carrer she won many awards, among them 6 Grammy Awards and 17 Blues Music Awards. The Rolling Stone magazine ranked Etta number 22 on its list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. She was also ranked number 62 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

Etta’s powerful, deep, earthy voice bridged the gap between R&B and rock and roll which added to her uniqnes. Her soulful, touching songs are able to creat an atmosphere and feel hard to ignore. Her songs can bring one back in time to the 60’s, are full of emotions and can take one away to different moments in his life, along with the feel it gives to him.

Etta’s music is very unique and inspiring, since it is not only fun to listen to, but enables to experience deep emotional expriences clearly and vividly, which is very rare.

It is also possible to hear through her music, that eventough she sings happy songs, she have been through a very tough life and suffered a lot, as will be discussed later on.

Etta was born in Los Angeles, California, to Dorothy Hawkins, who was 14 at the time and her father who has never been identified. Her mother was frequently absent from their apartment in Watts, conducted relationships with various men. That way Etta lived with a series of foster parents, most notably “Sarge” and “Mama” Lu.

Etta received her first professional vocal training at the age of 5 from James Earle Hines, musical director of the Echoes of Eden choir at the St. Paul Baptist Church. Under his tutelage, she suffered physical abuse during her formative years, with her instructor often punching her in the chest while she sang to force her voice to come from her gut. As a consequence, she developed an unusually strong voice for a child her age.

Sarge, her foster parent, like the musical director for the choir, was also abusive. During drunken poker games at home, he was awaken Etta early in the morning and forced her with beatings to sing for his friends. This trauma of her foster father forcing her to sing under these humiliating circumstances caused her to have difficulties with singing on demand throughout her career.

In 1950, Mama Lu died, and Etta’s biological mother took her to the Fillmore district of San Francisco. In a few years, she began listening to doo-wop (A genre of rhythm and blues music that originated among African-American youth in the 1940’s) and was inspired to form a girl group, named the Creolettes.

At the age of 14, she met the musician Johnny Otis, who took the group under his wing, helped them sign to Modern Records and changed their name from the Creolettes to the Peaches. He also gave the Etta her stage name, transposing Jamesetta into Etta James.

In 1954, Etta recorded a song, for which she was given credit as co-author, released in the early 1955 as “Dance with Me, Henry”. The original title of the song was “Roll with Me, Henry”, but it was changed to avoid censorship due to the controversial word (roll implying sexual activity). In February of that year, the song reached number 1 on the Hot Rhythm & Blues Tracks chart. Its success gave the group an opening spot on Little Richard’s national tour.

While Etta was on tour with Richard, the pop singer Georgia Gibbs recorded a version of Etta’s song “Dance with me Henry”, released under the title “The Wallflower” and became a crossover hit, reaching number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, which angered Etta. After leaving the Peaches, Etta had another R&B hit with “Good Rockin’ Daddy” but struggled with follow-ups. When her contract with Modern ended in 1960, she signed a contract with Chess Records. Shortly afterward she got in a relationship with the singer Harvey Fuqua, the founder of the doo-wop group the Moonglows.

Dueting with Harvey Fuqua, Etta recorded for Argo Records, a label established by Chess. their first hit singles were “If I Can’t Have You” and “Spoonful”. Etta’s first solo hit was the doo-wop–styled R&B song “All I Could Do Was Cry”, which was a number 2 R&B hit.

Chess Records co-founder Leonard Chess envisioned Etta as a classic ballad stylist who had potential to cross over to the pop charts, and surrounded the her with violins and other string instruments. The first string ballad Etta recorded was “My Dearest Darling” in May 1960, which peaked in the top 5 of the R&B chart. Etta also sang background vocals for her labelmate Chuck Berry on his “Back in the U.S.A.”

Etta’s debut album, At Last!, was released in late 1960 and was noted for its varied geners of music, from jazz to blues to doo-wop and R&B. The album included the future classic “I Just Want to Make Love to You” and “A Sunday Kind of Love”. In early 1961, Etta released what was to become her signature song, “At Last”, which reached number 2 on the R&B chart and number 47 on the Billboard Hot 100. Though the record was not as successful as expected, her rendition has become the best-known version of the song. She followed that with “Trust in Me”, which also included string instruments. Later that same year, Etta released a second studio album, The Second Time Around. The album like her first, featured jazz and pop with strings on many of the songs. It produced 2 hit singles, “Fool That I Am” and “Don’t Cry Baby”.

Etta started including gospel elements in her music the following year, releasing “Something’s Got a Hold on Me”, which peaked at number 4 on the R&B chart and was a Top 40 pop hit. That success was followed by “Stop the Wedding”, which reached number 6 on the R&B chart and also had gospel elements. In 1963, she had another major hit with “Pushover” and released the live album Etta James Rocks the House, recorded at the New Era Club in Nashville, Tennessee.

Not everything went well, as by the mid-1960’s, Etta was addicted to heroin. She bounced checks, forged prescriptions and stole from her friends in order to finance her addiction. Later on, was got arrested in 1966 for writing bad checks, was placed on probation and ordered to pay a $500 fine. Later in 1969, she spent 10 days in prison for violating probation.

During a couple of years of minor hits, Etta’s career started to suffer. After a period of isolation, she returned to recording in 1967 and reemerged with more gutsy R&B songs. Among them was her comeback hit “Tell Mama”, co-written by Clarence Carter, that reached number 10 R&B and number 23 pop. An album of the same name was also released that year and included her take on Otis Redding’s “Security”. The B-side of “Tell Mama” was “I’d Rather Go Blind”, which became a blues classic and has been recorded by many other artists. In her autobiography, Rage to Survive, she wrote that she heard the song outlined by her friend Ellington “Fugi” Jordan when she visited him in prison. According to her account, she wrote the rest of the song with Jordan, but for tax reasons gave her songwriting credit to her partner at the time, Billy Foster.

Following this success, Etta became an in-demand concert performer, though she never again reached the peak of her mid-1960’s success. Her records continued to chart in the R&B Top 40 in the early 1970’s, with singles such as “Losers Weepers” and “I Found a Love”. Though Etta continued to record for Chess, she was devastated by the death of Leonard Chess in 1969. Etta was married to Art Mills from at the same year, until her death in 2012. 

In 1973, Etta ventured into rock and funk with the release of her self-titled album, produced by the famed rock producer Gabriel Mekler, who had worked with Steppenwolf and Janis Joplin, and admired Etta. The album, known for its mixture of musical styles, was nominated for a Grammy Award.

Etta continued to record for Chess, releasing one more album in 1976, Etta Is Betta Than Evvah! and in 1978 the album Deep in the Night, incorporated more rock music. The same year, Etta was the opening act for the Rolling Stones and performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival and another festivals after that. Later she left Chess Records and did not record for another 10 years as she struggled with drug addiction and alcoholism.

Meanwhile, Etta encountered a string of legal problems during the early 1970s due to her heroin addiction. She was continuously in and out of rehabilitation centers. One time she and her husand were arrested for heroin possession and her husband Artis Mills accepted responsibility, served a 10-year prison sentence and released in 1981.

In 1973, Etta was arrested for possession of heroin and in 1974 was sentenced to drug treatment instead of serving time in prison. During this period, she became addicted to methadone and would mix her doses with heroin. Etta was in the Tarzana Psychiatric Hospital for 17 months, at the age of 36, and went through a great struggle at the start of her treatment. In her autobiography, she said that the time she spent in the hospital changed her life. After leaving treatment, however, her substance abuse continued after she developed a relationship with a man who was also using drugs.

In 1988, at the age of 50, Etta entered the Betty Ford Center, in Rancho Mirage, California, for treatment. Next in 2010, James received treatment for a dependency on painkillers.

Though she continued to perform, little was heard of Etta until 1984, when she contacted David Wolper and performed in the opening ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympics, where she sang “When the Saints Go Marching In”. In 1987, she performed “Rock & Roll Music” with Chuck Berry in the documentary film Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll. In 1989, she signed with Island Records and released the albums Seven Year Itch and Stickin’ to My Guns. Etta also participated with the rap singer Def Jef on the song “Droppin’ Rhymes on Drums”, which mixed James’s jazz vocals with hip-hop. In 1992, she recorded the album The Right Time, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.

In 1993, Etta recorded a Billie Holiday tribute album, Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday. It set a trend of incorporating more jazz elements in Etta’s music, and won her her first Grammy Award, for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Female, in 1994. In 1995, her autobiography, A Rage to Survive, co-written with David Ritz, was published. Also in 1995, she recorded the album Time After Time and in 1998, Etta James Christmas, was released.

By the mid-1990’s, Etta’s earlier classic music was being used in commercials, including “I Just Wanna Make Love to You”. After an excerpt of the song was featured in a Diet Coke advertising campaign in the UK, it reached the top 10 on the UK charts in 1996.

Etta had two sons, Donto James and Sametto James, born to different fathers. Both started performing with their mother — Donto played drums at Montreux in 1993, and Sametto played bass guitar circa 2003.

By 1998, with the release of Life, Love & the Blues, she had added as backing musicians her sons, Donto and Sametto, on drums and bass, respectively. They also continued as part of her touring band. In 2000, Etta released the blues album Matriarch of the Blues, on which she returned to her R&B roots. In 2001, she was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame and the Rockabilly Hall of Fame, the latter for her contributions to the developments of both rock and roll and rockabilly. In 2003, she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. On her 2004 release, Blue Gardenia, she returned to a jazz style. Her final album for Private Music, Let’s Roll, released in 2005, won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album.

Etta performed at the top jazz festivals in the world, such as the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1977, 1989, 1990 and 1993. She also often performed at free summer arts festivals throughout the United States.

In 2008, Etta was portrayed by Beyoncé Knowles in the film Cadillac Records, where the pop hit “At Last” was performed. Etta had critical remarks about Knowles for having performed “At Last” at the inauguration of Barack Obama. Later she said it was a joke stemming from how she felt hurt that she herself was not invited to sing her song. It was later reported that Alzheimer’s disease and “drug-induced dementia” had contributed to her negative comments about Knowles.

In April 2009, at the age of 71, Etta made her final television appearance, performing “At Last” on the program Dancing with the Stars. In May 2009, she received the Soul/Blues Female Artist of the Year award from the Blues Foundation, the ninth time she won the award. She carried on touring but by 2010 had to cancel concert dates because of her gradually failing health, after it was revealed that she was suffering from dementia and leukemia. In November 2011, Etta released her final album, The Dreamer, which was critically acclaimed upon its release. She announced that this would be her final album. On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed Etta James among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.

Etta was hospitalized in January 2010 to treat an infection caused by MRSA, a bacterium resistant to many antibiotics. During her hospitalization, her son Donto revealed that she had received a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in 2008.

Etta was diagnosed with leukemia in early 2011. The illness became terminal, and her husband Art Miller was appointed oversee her medical care. She died on January 20, 2012, five days before her 74th birthday, at Riverside Community Hospital in Riverside, California.

Her funeral was presided over by Reverend Al Sharpton and took place in Gardena, California eight days after her death. She was buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery in Los Angeles County, California.

Etta leaved after her a great legacy, and fantastic timeless masterpieces. Her life were harsh, she suffered from abuse, heroin addiction and alcoholism. But however, she managed to not let it define her, and her music is mostly happy and joyful. She indeed was one of the greatest artists of all time, and her death was a great loss, but however her existance was a gift to us.

Etta released many albums, and her music is relatable and nice to listen to. She is a very inspiring person and artist, and probably will stay in consciousness for many years.

Later on, some of her songs were sampled by DJs and reached success.