Legendary blues singer Etta James dies in US

James

ROBERT JABLON

Asso­ci­ated Press

LOS ANGELES — Etta James, the feisty rhythm and blues singer whose raw, pas­sion­ate vocals anchored many hits and made the yearn­ing bal­lad “At Last” an endur­ing anthem for wed­dings, com­mer­cials and even Pres­i­dent Barack Obama, died Fri­day. She was 73.

James had been suf­fer­ing from demen­tia and kid­ney prob­lems, and was bat­tling leukemia. In Decem­ber 2011, her physi­cian announced that her leukemia was ter­mi­nal, and asked for prayers for the singer.

Dur­ing her ill­ness, her hus­band Artis Mills and her two sons fought bit­terly over con­trol of her $1 mil­lion estate, though a deal was later struck keep­ing Mills as the con­ser­va­tor and cap­ping the singer’s expenses at $350,000.

James died at River­side Com­mu­nity Hos­pi­tal, with her hus­band and sons at her side, her man­ager, Lupe De Leon, said.

“It’s a tremen­dous loss for her fans around the world,” he said. “She’ll be missed. A great Amer­i­can singer. Her music defied category.”

Bold­ness was as much a trade­mark of James, a mem­ber of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as her platinum-dyed mane.

“Etta James was a pio­neer. Her ever-changing sound has influ­enced rock and roll, rhythm and blues, pop, soul and jazz artists, mark­ing her place as one of the most impor­tant female artists of our time,” said Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Pres­i­dent and CEO Terry Stewart.

She scored her first hit when she was just a teenager with the sug­ges­tive “Roll With Me, Henry,” which had to be changed to “The Wall­flower” in order to get air­play. Over the years, she’d notch many more, carv­ing a niche for her­self with her husky, soul­ful voice and her sassy atti­tude, which per­me­ated her songs.

But it was her jazz-inflected ren­di­tion of “At Last” that would come to define her and make her leg­endary. The song, which starts with sump­tu­ous strings before James begins to sing, was a remake of a 1941 stan­dard. James made it her own, and her ver­sion became the new standard.

Over the decades, it’s been pop­u­lar at wed­dings and has been fea­tured in com­mer­cials and films like “Amer­i­can Pie.” But per­haps most famously, Obama and the first lady danced to a ver­sion of “At Last” at his inau­gu­ra­tion ball.

But the ten­der, sweet song belied the tur­moil that James — born Jame­setta Hawkins in Los Ange­les — would endure for much of her life. Her mother — whom she described in her 1995 auto­bi­og­ra­phy “Rage to Sur­vive” as a scam artist, a sub­stance abuser and unsta­ble — was a fleet­ing pres­ence in her life dur­ing her youth.

She never knew her father, although she had been told that he was the famous bil­liards player Min­nesota Fats. When she was older, she met him and asked about the rumor. He wouldn’t con­firm or deny it: as James recalled, he sim­ply told her: “I don’t remem­ber every­thing. I wish I did, but I don’t.”

Her mother would come in and out of her life, so she was raised by Lula and Jesse Rogers, who owned the room­ing house her mother once lived in. The pair brought up James in the Chris­t­ian faith, and even as a young girl, her voice stood out in the church choir. James would soon get solos and became so well known, she said that Hol­ly­wood stars would come to see her perform.

But she wouldn’t stay a gospel singer for long. Rhythm and blues soon lured her away from the church, and she found her­self drawn to the grit­ti­ness of the music.

“My mother always wanted me to be a jazz singer, but I always wanted to be raunchy,” she recalled in her book.

She was doing just that when band­leader Johnny Otis found her singing on San Fran­cisco street cor­ners with a cou­ple of girl­friends in the early 1950s.

“At the time, Hank Bal­lard and the Mid­nighters had a hit with ‘Work With Me, Annie,’ and we decided to do an answer. We didn’t think we would get in show busi­ness, we were just run­ning around mak­ing up answers to songs,” James told The Asso­ci­ated Press in 1987.

And so, they replied to Bal­lard with the song “Roll With Me, Henry.”

When Otis heard it, he told James to get her mother’s per­mis­sion to accom­pany him to Los Ange­les to make a record­ing. Instead, the 15-year-old went home and forged her mother’s name on a note claim­ing she was 18.

After her 1955 debut, James toured with Otis’ revue, some­times earn­ing only $10 a night. Things changed for the bet­ter in 1959, when she signed with Chicago’s leg­endary Chess label and began crank­ing out the hits and going on tours with per­form­ers such as Bobby Vin­ton, Lit­tle Richard, Fats Domino, Gene Vin­cent, Jerry Lee Lewis and the Everly Brothers.

“We would travel on four buses to all the big audi­to­ri­ums. And we had a lot of fun,” she recalled in 1987.

She also had a lot of suc­cess. James went on to record a string of hits in the late 1950s and ’60s includ­ing “Trust In Me,” ”Something’s Got a Hold On Me,” ”Sun­day Kind of Love,” ”All I Could Do Was Cry,” and of course, “At Last.”

Chess Records, whose founder, Leonard Chess, called James their first soul singer, she wrote.

“He went up and down the halls of Chess announc­ing, ‘Etta’s crossed over! Etta’s crossed over!’ I still didn’t know exactly what that meant, except that maybe more white peo­ple were lis­ten­ing to me. The Chess broth­ers kept say­ing how I was their first soul singer, that I was tak­ing their label out of the old Delta blues, out of rock and into the mod­ern era. Soul was the new direc­tion,” she said in her auto­bi­og­ra­phy. “But in my mind, I was singing old style, not new.”

In 1967, she cut one of the most highly regarded soul albums of all time, “Tell Mama,” an earthy fusion of rock and gospel music fea­tur­ing blis­ter­ing horn arrange­ments, funky rhythms and a churchy cho­rus. A song from the album, “Secu­rity,” was a top 40 sin­gle in 1968.

Her pro­fes­sional suc­cess, how­ever, was bal­anced against per­sonal demons — mainly drug addiction.

“I was try­ing to be cool,” she told the AP in 1995, explain­ing what had led her to try heroin.

She was addicted to the drug for years, begin­ning in 1960, and it led to a har­row­ing exis­tence that included time behind bars and sapped her singing abil­i­ties and her money, almost destroy­ing her career. It would take her at least two decades to beat her drug prob­lem — her hus­band even went to prison for years, tak­ing full respon­si­bil­ity for drugs dur­ing an arrest, even though James was culpable.

“My man­age­ment was suf­fer­ing. My career was in the toi­let. Peo­ple tried to help, but I was hell-bent on get­ting high,” she wrote of her drug habit in 1980.

After she hit rock bot­tom, she finally quit the habit and man­aged her­self for a while, call­ing up small clubs and ask­ing them, “Have you ever heard of Etta James?” in order to get gigs. Even­tu­ally, she got reg­u­lar book­ings. In 1984, she was asked to sing the national anthem at the Olympic Games in Los Ange­les, and her career got the resur­gent boost it needed, though she fought addic­tion again when she got hooked on painkillers in the late 1980s.

Drug addic­tion wasn’t her only prob­lem. She strug­gled with her weight, and often per­formed from a wheel­chair as she got older and heav­ier. In the early 2000s, she had weight-loss surgery and shed some 200 pounds (90 kilograms).

James per­formed well into her senior years, and it was “At Last” that kept bring­ing her the biggest ova­tions. The song was a peren­nial that never aged, and on Jan. 20, 2009, as crowds cel­e­brated that — at last — an African-American had become pres­i­dent of the United States, the song played as the first cou­ple danced.

But it was super­star Bey­once who ser­e­naded the Oba­mas, not the leg­endary singer. Bey­once had por­trayed James in “Cadil­lac Records,” a big-screen retelling of Chess Records’ hey­day, and had started to claim “At Last” as her own.

An audio clip sur­faced of James at a con­cert shortly after the inau­gu­ra­tion, say­ing she couldn’t stand the younger singer and that Bey­once had “no busi­ness singing my song.” But she told the New York Daily News later that she was jok­ing, even though she had been hurt that she did not get the chance to par­tic­i­pate in the inauguration.

Upon hear­ing of her death, Bey­once released a state­ment on her web­site that read: “This is a huge loss. Etta James was one of the great­est vocal­ists of our time. I am so for­tu­nate to have met such a queen. Her musi­cal con­tri­bu­tions will last a life­time. Play­ing Etta James taught me so much about myself, and singing her music inspired me to be a stronger artist. When she effort­lessly opened her mouth, you could hear her pain and tri­umph. Her deeply emo­tional way of deliv­er­ing a song told her story with no fil­ter. She was fear­less, and had guts. She will be missed.”

James did get her acco­lades over the years. She was inducted into the Rock Hall in 1993, cap­tured a Grammy in 2003 for best con­tem­po­rary blues album for “Let’s Roll”; one in 2004 for best tra­di­tional blues album for “Blues to the Bone”; and one for best jazz vocal per­for­mance for 1994’s “Mys­tery Lady: Songs of Bil­lie Hol­i­day.” She was also awarded a spe­cial Grammy in 2003 for life­time achieve­ment and received a star on the Hol­ly­wood Walk of Fame.

She suf­fered from demen­tia, kid­ney prob­lems and leukemia. In Octo­ber 2011, it was announced that James was retir­ing from record­ing, and a final stu­dio record­ing, “The Dreamer,” was released, fea­tur­ing the singer tak­ing on clas­sic songs, from Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Dreamer” to Guns N’ Roses “Wel­come To the Jun­gle” — still rock­ing, and a fit­ting end to her sto­ried career.

Posted by AP News on Jan 20 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.