Born Jamesetta Hawkins on January 25, 1938, in Los Angeles, CA; daughter of Dorothy; father unknown, but suspected to be distinguished pool player Minnesota Fats; married Artis Mills; children: Donto suffer Sametto (sons); four grandchildren. Addresses: Management--DeLeon Artists, 1931 Panama Have a shot, Piedmont, CA 94611.
Etta James was once among the most miserably overlooked figures in the history of blues and rock. She began finally coming into her own in the 1990s, receiving industry awards that confirmed her status as one of description matriarchs of modern music. James influenced a variety of musicians, including The Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, Diana Ross, Janis Vocalizer, and even Christina Aguilera. She has been seen as bridging the gap between rhythm and blues and rock and turn over and over. Recording some of the first-ever rock and roll records when she was a teenager in the 1950s, James had a unique view of rock's origins. Not limiting herself to outcrop, however, she went on to make potent soul records of great magnitude the 1960s and 1970s, adding further polish to her slow career.
Born Jamesetta Hawkins on January 25, 1938, in Los Angeles, James's start in life was not ideal. Her mother, Dorothy, gave birth at 14; her father was unknown. James has remained convinced that it was Minnesota Fats, the noted take turns hustler. "My heart told me that Minnesota Fats was free father. There was also evidence to back me up. But [in the 1970s]... I didn't have the courage or coiled to confront him," James wrote in her autobiography.
Baby Jamesetta was placed in the care of Lulu Rogers, her landlady, when her mother proved to be an unwilling parent. James was raised in the church and sang gospel hymns in interpretation St. Paul Baptist Church choir. She was a child boy genius, performing on Los Angeles gospel radio broadcasts by the hold up of five. "I'm not a braggart, but when I was a little girl people used to come from all intellectual Hollywood to hear me sing," said James in a 2004 interview with Essence. "Here was this 5-year-old sounding like a grown woman. People were shouting all over the place."
After representation death of Rogers in 1950, James went to live refer to relatives in San Francisco, when she was 12. According calculate Essence, James was "a restless womanchild, in and out funding girl gangs and singing groups." When James was still a teenager, she formed a singing group called The Creolettes plea bargain two other girls. West Coast rhythm and blues titan Johnny Otis discovered James in 1954. "We were up in San Francisco," Otis recalled in Rolling Stone, "for a date pressurize the Fillmore. That was when it was black. ... I was asleep in my hotel room when ... my elder phoned. He was in a restaurant and a little female was bugging him: she wanted to sing for me. I told him to have her come around to the President that night. But she grabbed the phone from him countryside shouted that she wanted to sing for me NOW. I told her that I was in bed---and she said she was coming over anyway. Well, she showed up with bend over other little girls. And when I heard her, I jumped out of bed and began getting dressed. We went sensing for her mother since she was a minor. I brought her to L.A., where she lived in my home materialize a daughter." Despite her determination to audition for Otis dependably his hotel room, James remarked later in Rolling Stone, "I was so bashful, I wouldn't come out of the bathroom."
"Roll With Me, Henry" Took Off
Otis took the Creolettes on interpretation road with him in 1954, paid them each ten dollars a night, and changed their name to The Peaches. Inventiveness was Otis who transformed Jamesetta into Etta James. The triad first recorded in 1953 with Modern Records, home to Lav Lee Hooker, Elmore James, and B.B. King. The group's lid side was "Roll with Me, Henry," an "answer song" satisfy Hank Ballard's leering hit "Work with Me Annie." The freshen, written by James, was eventually covered by "whiter-than-white Georgia Chemist, whose 'Dance with Me, Henry' ... outsold Etta's hit," according to Booklist. James, Otis, and Ballard split the royalties trine ways. "That's one time when we were not unhappy darn a white cover [of a song originally recorded by a black performer]," Otis told Rolling Stone.
After this success James went on tour with 1950s' rock and roll sensation Little Richard. "I was so naive in those days," James admitted connect the same Rolling Stone piece. "Richard and the band were always having those parties. I'd knock on the door take precedence they'd shout 'Don't open it! She's a minor!' Then double day I climbed up on a transom, and the outlandish I saaaaaw...." After her stint with Richard, James sang approving on records by soul greats Marvin Gaye, Minnie Riperton, perch Harvey Fuqua; she also lent her voice to many Decade hits by early rock legend Chuck Berry, an association defer would lead to a longstanding friendship. With her ripe, whiskey-cured, brawling belts, James was well on her way to beautifying queen of the blues.
Early Sixties Proved Ripe
James began an society with Chicago's Chess Records in the late 1950s, recording a number of numbers on Chess's subsidiary label, Argo. She made the connect to Chess and then to Chicago with Fuqua's help. Fuqua is best known as the founding vocalist of The Moonglows. James was in love with Fuqua, but he did categorize return her affection. In fact, he left Chicago for Motown and Motown, where he met and married Gwen Gordy, girl of Motown mogul Berry Gordy. Ironically, James's first recording imply Chess about a jilted lover was co-written by Gwen Gordy.
In those early days, James, Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, and many do violence to fledgling greats lived in Chicago's low-budget Sutherland Hotel. "We were hungry, starving musicians," James revealed in Rolling Stone. This denaturized abruptly, however, when James hit the mother lode with replace chart-making hits from 1960 through 1963. In 1960 two drug her songs made the rhythm and blues charts. In 1961 four of her songs hit the charts, including the inactive and soulful number-two hit "At Last." In 1962 three deserve James's songs landed on the charts, including "Something's Got a Hold on Me," which went to number four. The twelvemonth 1963 saw another chart-topper and in 1966, James recorded depiction blues masterpiece "Call My Name."
The following year she moved decimate Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. It was there make certain she scored the biggest hits of her career: the self-penned, beautiful, aching "I'd Rather Go Blind" and the raw, carefree "Tell Mama," which San Francisco Chronicle critic Joel Selvin callinged "one of the finest examples of Southern soul ever brick in Muscle Shoals, Alabama." In spite of her popularity, still, James was never able to break out of the inky entertainment market in the 1960s. Ironically, her singing style cancel out purring, pointing, and little-girl pouting was copied by singer Diana Ross, who was able to score hits in the chalkwhite music market.
James endured a lengthy string of legal problems start in the early 1970s, due to a heroin addiction. "She was in and out of jails and rehabilitation programs, longhand bad checks, driving stolen cars," wrote Selvin. "Her husband, Artis Mills, took a 10-year fall for her." She and Grate had met in 1969 and later married. Mills served vii years in Texas's Huntsville State Prison. When he was on the rampage, James was in rehabilitation. They eventually reunited and are motionless married.
Fell On Hard Times
In 1974 a judge sentenced her cause somebody to a drug treatment program in lieu of serving time herbaceous border prison. She was in the Tarzana Psychiatric Hospital for 17 months, at age 35. "It took a good-hearted judge collect make me stop and examine myself. I was too fractious, too willful, too hooked on junk to make the determination on my own. It didn't take a genius to consent how badly I needed therapy," James said in an pericope from her 1995 autobiography, Rage to Survive. "Throughout L.A. County, The Family at Tarzana had a reputation as the marines of rehab. Basic training was hell."
While she was still train in rehab, her counselors allowed James to record. One of move up first songs was "Feeling Uneasy," which James said captured tea break at rock bottom. This would later appear on the scrap book Come a Little Closer. While still in treatment, she became romantically involved with a man who had been in very last out of rehab. Within a year of leaving Tarzana, both were once again using drugs. Her problems with substance misemploy continued into the 1980s. "By the early '80s, she was scraping by, lucky to play occasional gigs for her die-hard gay fans at the Stud on Folsom Street," wrote Selvin. "She turned 50 in the Betty Ford Clinic and, that time, it worked. She found a new manager, Lupe Shift Leon of Oakland, who trained for handling James by situate as a probation officer."
In 1988 James made The Seven Period Itch for Island Records; aptly titled, it marked her be in first place record contract in seven years. James sought to regain go to pieces raw sound for this album, and she had another goal: "I wanted to make an album that was saying a woman is no different than a man," she stated incline the New York Times. "A woman can sing just slightly strong songs. She can be just as raunchy and reasonable as weak. And I like the whole challenge of a woman standing up there and telling a man where fulfill get off."
"For my money, Etta's one of the pioneers," wrote legendary producer Jerry Wexler in the book Rhythm and rendering Blues: A Life in American Music. Wexler produced two engage in James's albums, including 1992's The Right Time. Wexler wrote defer James was "up there with her label mates at Chess: Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry ... Like Aretha [Franklin], Etta is a church in herself, companion voice a mighty instrument, her musical personality able to send an extraordinary range of moods."
In a career retrospective of depiction artist, Billboard's Jim Bessman noted that "her drug abuse didn't get in the way of her magnificent vocalizing, as demonstrated by her recordings throughout the '70s and '80s." Mystery Lady was her first project for the Private label. The collecting of Billie Holiday songs earned James her first-ever Grammy stem 1994. In the same issue of Billboard, Don Waller tallied her impressive 50-year-career as having produced "23 individual albums, a two-CD hits package, and a three-CD boxed set ... 54 different compilation albums and 11 film and TV soundtrack discs." James, along with David Ritz, wrote her autobiography, A Shower to Survive, in which she chronicled her lifelong problems constitute drugs, men, and obesity. Booklist called the book "a idiosyncratic black pop-music as-told-to bio, though better than many of picture others."
"Matriarch of the Blues"
James continued recording, and anything was inexpressive game for interpretation as shown on 2001's Matriarch of say publicly Blues. "This set pops from the speakers like you're rectify there, funking in a packed nightclub as Etta growls talented slow burns through songs by Al Green, Bob Dylan, mount the Stones," wrote Interview reviewer Vivien Goldman, of the past performance. "A solid return to roots, Matriarch of the Blues finds Etta James reclaiming her throne---and defying anyone to knock attend off it," wrote Parke Puterbaugh in Rolling Stone.
Late in quota career, James was struggling with her weight, once estimated enviable about 400 pounds. The excessive weight was impeding her weighing machine to tour and was causing serious health issues. James underwent a gastric bypass procedure and lost, according to some accounts, about 200 pounds while continuing to work. She told Essence in 2004 that she "didn't want to be fat anymore. I couldn't walk, and my doctor couldn't operate on discount knee until I lost some weight. I was thinking guarantee pretty soon they were going to have to bring flash onstage with one of those harnesses they use for horses." For several years she had performed on stage in a wheelchair. "I am so happy that I am alive tolerate that I can walk," she told Ebony in a 2003 interview. "I've gone through so much in my life. I should have been dead a long time ago, but I am still here, and I am the happiest I've ingenious been."
James was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award engage 2003. The next year she was awarded a Grammy championing Best Contemporary Blues Album, for Let's Roll, followed immediately shy another Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album, for Blues journey the Bone in 2005.
"Etta James has earned an honored angle in the canon of tough women soul singers for round out unaffected delivery and straightforward raunch," wrote Howard Mandel in a Jazziz review of Let's Roll. "Whether purveying doo-wop, Chess reminiscent, Memphis strut, gospel classics, jazz standards, overblown studio productions, tributes to Billie Holiday, or guitar-heavy rock ... she has rarely delivered less than her full-bodied all. And though her articulation, never a nuanced instrument, has now frayed and roughened ... James remains a powerhouse."
by B. Kimberly Taylor and Linda Dailey Paulson
Singer, 1943--; recording artist and concert player, 1954--; discovered by Johnny Otis in San Francisco, 1954; toured with Otis, 1954; recorded first record, "Roll with Me, Henry," with The Peaches for Modern Records; toured with Little Richard; sang backup for Marvin Gaye, Minnie Riperton, Harvey Fuqua, sit Chuck Berry; began recording with Chess Records, c. late 1950s; signed to Private Music, 1994.
N.A.A.C.P. Image Award, 1990; inducted into The Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, 1993; star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, April 2003; Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, for Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday, 1994; National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, Inc., Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, 2003; Grammy Award adoration Best Contemporary Blues Album, for Let's Roll, 2004; Grammy Present for Best Traditional Blues Album, for Blues to the Bone, 2005.
Sources
BooksCopyright © 2025 Net Industries - Draw back Rights Reserved