Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,708

This is the grave of Etta James.

Born in 1938 in Los Angeles, Jamesetta Hawkins grew up hard. Her father was unknown (she later came to believe it was actually Minnesota Fats, the pool legend and basis of Jackie Gleason’s character in The Hustler, and she actually met him later in life to talk about this, but I don’t think there’s any real evidence here), her mother was hard partying and very uninterested in her daughter, and so she grew up mostly in the homes of extended family and friends. But there was the church. She was with her grandparents for a time and they took her to the local church and even though she was a small girl, everyone there was like, what is with this voice? This is something! The local pastor started training her, but that was mostly through abuse, like he would punch her to force her to sing from her gut.

Hawkins then had a foster father who would wake her up in the middle night through beatings to force her to sing for him and his drunken friends. This was bad stuff. In 1950, her mother reappeared and moved her daughter to San Francisco. Soon Hawkins got involved in the local music scene and started a girl group of doo wop, the Creolettes. Then she met Johnny Otis, who became a mentor. He hired the Creolettes to sing with him and got them a contract too. He also changed her named to Etta James, which made all the sense in the world. The Creolettes also changed their name to the Peaches (good call) and they had a big hit in 1955 with “Work With Me, Annie” a very slightly hidden song about sex that went to #1 on the R&B charts and led to opening for Little Richard.

James decided to go out on her own and signed with Chess in 1960, soon becoming one of the label’s biggest stars. She had some early singles hit and then released her debut album At Last!, later that year. It’s an all-time classic, with its title track being the soundtrack to many a wedding first dance, including my own. And if there’s a slight cliché to that, well, let’s just say that a) my wife picked it and b) I was delighted to have one of the all-time great songs do the thing that needed to be done. As for me dancing, well, let’s just pretend that didn’t happen. Chess strongly believed in James’ pop crossover potential and so, sure, the album is rather dripping in strings, so if those arrangements don’t please you, well, neither will the album. I’ve never had a problem with that stuff, including in my beloved country music, where fetishization of A MAN AND HIS GUITAR plagues conversations about authenticity. But R&B fans never had such tender feelings about such things and people loved this album. In fact, I would highly recommend the 3-disc Etta James box set to anyone. It’s one of the best box sets I own and while I don’t sit down and listen to it–75 minutes on one album is a lot of Etta James–when a song comes up on shuffle, I am always happy for it.

Not surprisingly, Chess repeated the formula with 1961’s The Second Time Around. She started doing more gospel after that. Her 1963 album Etta James Rocks the House is an important early live release that captures her early career well. Her first five years was pretty much gold. Songs such as “Something’s Got a Hold on Me” and “The Wallflower” added to her legend. The late 60s of course saw a transformation in musical taste and she did work to try to stay relevant, including recording at the legendary FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals. More classics came out of these sessions, as they often did in the oddly fertile musical fields of north Alabama, such as “Tell Mama” and “I’d Rather Go Blind,” which Rod Stewart had a hit with as well. She remained relevant into the late 60s and early 70s, though not selling nearly as much as did in the early 60s, but a lot of rockers were fans and she tried to adjust her sound, to mixed success, at best.

But these years were also awful for James. Let’s be honest–anyone growing up as hard as she did is likely to have issues through their whole life. She did a lot of drugs and was in a lot of physically abusive relationships. For awhile, she was in the Nation of Islam and went by Jamesetta X privately, but was never super committed to the NOI. Not only did she continue to eat pork, but she definitely did not dress in the conservative manner demanded of women in that group. She was also doing heroin and that got a lot worse by the late 60s. She started getting arrested for heroin possession and the things junkies to do keep it going, like forging checks. She finally received 17 months in prison in 1974 and while the heroin use wasn’t as bad after going through that withdrawal, she struggled with addiction her whole life, later with painkillers taking over.

On a better note, like a lot of older musicians, the 90s were good for James, with a lot of interest developing in once popular musical styles. Her fans had kept her going to some extent in the 80s, including the Grateful Dead, who had her open a couple of times. In 1989, she got a new record contract with Island and while the records didn’t exactly sell a lot, her classics got a lot more attention from this generation, with a lot of them showing up in commercials and bringing her money again. She did a Billie Holiday tribute album, a Christmas album, stuff like that. She became a headliner on the jazz festival circuit. She won three Grammys in the 90s and 2000s.

Unfortunately, as she aged, she got kind of cranky about things she should not have, such as Beyoncé playing her in Empire Records. But about that time, it came out that she was starting to have Alzheimer’s symptoms, which probably does explain some things. When Barack Obama asked Beyoncé to sing “At Last” at his inauguration, she publicly groused about it. All the drugs definitely did not help with her increasing dementia. She last performed in public in 2009 and died in 2012, of leukemia. She was 73 years old.

Etta James is buried in Inglewood Park Cemetery, Inglewood, California.

Let’s listen to some Etta James, a great way to start a day.

Etta James was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. If you would like this series to visit other members of that 1993 class, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Ruth Brown is in Chesapeake, Virginia and Frankie Lymon is in The Bronx. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.