Etta James: A Voice That Refused to Be Quieted Parts 4-7

Part Four

The Long Fall and the Long Climb Back

3min read·1966 to 2002

The years after Tell Mama are the hardest part of this story, and they need to be told without flinching, because the flinching is how we lose the actual person. By the mid 1960s Etta James was addicted to heroin. To pay for it she bounced checks, forged prescriptions, and stole from her own friends.¹ In 1966 she was arrested for writing bad checks, placed on probation, and ordered to pay a five hundred dollar fine. In 1969 she spent ten days in jail for violating that probation.¹

Her husband, Artis Mills, took responsibility when the two of them were arrested together for heroin possession, and he served a ten year prison sentence, released only in 1981.¹ In 1973 she was arrested again for possession, and in 1974 a judge sent her to drug treatment instead of prison. During that time she became addicted to methadone, sometimes mixing it with heroin. She spent seventeen months at Tarzana Psychiatric Hospital, beginning at the age of thirty six.¹

She wrote about those years plainly in her 1995 autobiography, Rage to Survive, co-written with David Ritz. She said the time in the hospital changed her life, and she also admitted that after leaving treatment the substance abuse continued, especially once she got involved with a man who was using too.¹ That honesty is the reason the book still matters. She did not turn her life into a tidy redemption arc. She told the truth, including the parts where the truth was ugly.

There were still bright spots. In 1978 she released her final two albums for Chess and opened for the Rolling Stones on the road behind Some Girls.² She sang at the 1984 Olympics and appeared in the Chuck Berry concert film Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, even as addiction and alcohol largely sidelined her through much of that decade.¹⁴

The turn came in 1988. After treatment at the Betty Ford Clinic she finally beat the addiction that had owned her for more than two decades, and she released Seven Year Itch, an album that showcased a raunchier, more confident style of singing. It was her first record contract in seven years.²¹³ She had spent her whole adult life being told what she could not do. On that record she wanted to prove that a woman could sing just as strong, just as raunchy, and just as weak as any man.¹³

Then came a different kind of battle. In 2002, weighing more than four hundred pounds, she had gastric bypass surgery and lost about two hundred pounds, which allowed her to return to active singing and performing.¹³ She had already given the world one comeback. She was about to earn a second one, on her own terms, with her body and her voice both finally her own.

What strikes me most about these decades is not the wreckage. It is the persistence. She kept going back to the microphone, again and again, after every fall. That stubborn refusal to quit is the thing her fans recognized in her voice long before any award committee did.

References for Part Four

1. Etta James, Wikipedia.
2. Obituary: Etta James, BBC News.
13. Etta James obituary, by Garth Cartwright, The Guardian.
14. Etta James, 1938 to 2012, JazzTimes.

Part Five

The Honors She Waited a Lifetime For

3min read·1993 to 2008

Recognition came late, and that lateness is its own kind of indictment. Etta James had been making records since 1954. She did not win her first Grammy until 1995, forty one years later.² The industry that had leaned on her voice for decades finally caught up to what her fans already knew.

The first major honor arrived in 1993, when she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The singer k.d. lang did the inducting, and the Hall's own citation is worth quoting, because it gets at something the charts never measured. It calls her a woman who delivered nuanced wisdom and raw power in equal measure, one of the greatest voices of her century, and forever the matriarch of the blues.¹⁵

Two years later she won that first Grammy, and the category tells you how impossible she was to pin down. It came for Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday, a 1994 album of Holiday material that won Best Jazz Vocal Performance. After some forty years spent chasing rhythm and blues dreams, her first Grammy came in jazz.¹⁶¹⁷ The album peaked at number two on Billboard's Top Jazz Albums chart, and it remains one of the finest tributes to Lady Day ever recorded.¹⁷

The awards kept coming, slowly, then all at once. In 2003 she received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.⁴ In 2004 she won Best Contemporary Blues Album for Let's Roll, and in 2005 she won Best Traditional Blues Album for Blues to the Bone. Her final tally stood at three Grammy wins and seventeen nominations.¹⁶

The honors for "At Last" are a story of their own. The recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999, and in 2008 it was selected for the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, which preserves recordings of enduring cultural and historical importance.⁴⁵ In its official essay, the Library called it her definitive version and her crowning achievement, and noted that James herself wrote in her autobiography, "Thirty five years later, they're still asking for it."⁵

By then a new generation had found her. Singers from Janis Joplin to Christina Aguilera, from Adele to Amy Winehouse, had all been shaped by that voice.⁴ Adele put it in a way that cuts straight to the bone. She said Etta James was the only artist she had ever properly believed when she listened to her.⁴ And in 2011, the Swedish DJ Avicii built a global hit, "Levels," around a sample of James's 1962 song "Something's Got a Hold on Me," carrying her voice into clubs she never set foot in.¹

It is tempting to read this part of the story as justice. I think it is more complicated than that. She was honored late, and some of the people who honored her late were the same industry that had let her struggle for decades. But she lived to see it. She got to stand on those stages and hear the applause, and that matters more than any argument about who deserved what and when.

References for Part Five

1. Etta James, Wikipedia.
2. Obituary: Etta James, BBC News.
4. Etta James, Chess Records.
5. "At Last," Etta James (1961): essay by Cary O'Dell, Library of Congress, National Recording Registry.
15. Etta James, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
16. Etta James: Grammy Awards and Nominations, Grammy.com.
17. Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday, Wikipedia.

Part Six

The Last Years and the Song That Keeps Returning

4min read·2008 to today

The final chapter opens with a strange kind of echo. In 2008 the film Cadillac Records told a heavily fictionalized version of the Chess Records story, and the singer Beyoncé played Etta James on screen.¹³ A new audience met the music through a movie, which is how most people meet the past.

Then, in January 2009, Beyoncé sang "At Last" at the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball, the first dance of President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama.⁵ James was not asked to sing her own signature song at the event, and she was hurt by it. At a concert in Seattle on January 28, 2009, she let that hurt out in public. She told the crowd she could not stand Beyoncé, and that the younger singer had no business singing the song she had been singing forever.¹⁹

It became a feud in the press, the kind of story that gets flattened into a soundbite and never recovers. But the fuller record is sadder and more human than the headline. James later said she had been joking, that she had always had a comedian's attitude, and that her words had not come from a vicious place. She admitted she was feeling left out of something that was basically hers, a song she had done every time anyone looked around.¹⁹ It is hard to read that and not feel for her. She spent a lifetime being told she was too much and not enough at the same time, and here was the culture taking her song and handing the microphone to someone else.

Her health had already begun to fail. By 2010 she was cancelling concert dates because of her declining condition, and by then she was suffering from dementia and leukemia.¹ She was diagnosed with leukemia in 2011, and her husband Artis Mills was appointed sole conservator of her estate, tasked with overseeing her medical care.¹

Etta James died on January 20, 2012, at Riverside Community Hospital in Riverside, California. She was seventy three years old, five days short of her seventy fourth birthday, and her husband and two sons were by her side.¹¹⁸ Her death came only three days after that of Johnny Otis, the man who had once heard a frightened girl sing through a bathroom door and decided to change her life.¹⁴

There is something almost unbearable about that timing. The two of them had been linked from the beginning, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame one year apart, and now they left within days of each other. It reads like the closing of a circle, even if circles are something we invent to make loss easier to carry.

What remains is the voice, and one song above all the others. "At Last" was not even a pop hit when she released it. It reached number two on the R&B chart and missed the pop Top 40, and yet it has outlived nearly everything that beat it on the charts that year.¹ The Library of Congress, in explaining why it preserved the recording, noted that no amount of time or other covers seem likely to ever diminish it.⁵ People still dance their first dance to it. People still cry to it at funerals. A shy girl from Los Angeles, born to a fourteen year old mother and raised on chaos, left behind a song that millions of strangers have folded into the most important moments of their lives.

That is the legacy. Not the awards, though she earned them. Not the charts, though she climbed them. It is the plain fact that when Etta James opened her mouth, people believed her. They still do. And they probably always will.

References for Part Six

1. Etta James, Wikipedia.
5. "At Last," Etta James (1961): essay by Cary O'Dell, Library of Congress, National Recording Registry.
13. Etta James obituary, by Garth Cartwright, The Guardian.
14. Etta James, 1938 to 2012, JazzTimes.
18. Etta James, 73, Dies from Leukemia Complications, ABC News.
19. Etta James: "I Can't Stand Beyonce", NBC Washington.

Part Seven

The Stage Was Where She Came Alive

6min read·1963 to 2008

Astudio recording freezes a singer into a single version of a song, polished until the mistakes disappear. A stage does the opposite. It leaves the breathing in. For Etta James the live room was where the hurt, the humor, and the fury all arrived at once, and that is why her concert recordings and filmed shows matter as much as the albums she made in a booth. The records show you what she could do. The stage shows you who she was.

She had been a live performer since she was a teenager, but the first time anyone captured it properly was in the fall of 1963. On the nights of September 27 and 28, she took the microphone at the New Era Club in Nashville, Tennessee, and the result was Etta James Rocks the House, her first live album, released on Argo on December 13, 1963, and produced by Leonard Chess and James herself.²¹ The New Era was not a huge room. It held roughly one hundred and fifty people, and it sat at the center of North Nashville's entertainment district, a place with a national reputation strong enough that Chess decided to record her there.²² You can hear all of it on the record, the small wooden stage, the crack band behind her, a twenty five year old singer in a sparkling white dress wailing into a room that could not have held more than a couple hundred souls.²² It is widely considered one of her strongest showings, and the atmosphere on it is electric.²²

Twelve years later she crossed the Atlantic for the first time. In May 1975 she was due to perform at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, and she needed a bass player. The man who stepped in was John Paul Jones, the bassist for Led Zeppelin, who happened to be in the middle of the band's own peak years.²⁵ It was her first time in Europe, and the performance that night survives in rough video and surprisingly strong audio. She opened with a sanctifying, extended take on "Respect Yourself," dancing across the stage, then moved through "Drown in My Own Tears" and a near raunchy "W.O.M.A.N.," and closed with an early version of "I'd Rather Go Blind."²⁶ The film quality is poor. The performance is not.

Montreux became one of her homes. From that first 1975 concert through her final appearance there in 2008, she returned to the festival again and again, and a collection titled Live at Montreux 1975-1993 gathers the best of those first twenty years, when she was at her absolute peak.²⁶ The centerpiece is her July 15, 1993 set, eleven songs that include "Hold On, I'm Coming," "I Just Want to Make Love to You," and "Hard to Handle."³² One reviewer described her 1993 version of "I'd Rather Go Blind" as so riveting that it brought him to tears, and noted that the band behind her fit so tight in the pocket that it hurts.²⁶ That is the sound of a singer who had been doing this for four decades and still had somewhere to go.

Her biggest rock audience came in 1978. The Rolling Stones were on their twenty five show American run behind Some Girls, and Keith Richards personally asked James to open for them.²³³¹ She played the Capitol Theatre in Passaic on June 14, the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C. on June 15, the Greensboro Memorial Coliseum on June 26, the Tucson Community Center on July 21, and the Anaheim Stadium dates on July 23 and 24, sharing bills with acts like Peter Tosh and Van Halen.²³ Richards had been a devoted fan for years, and he wrote about her with real affection, calling her incredibly strong, a woman with a voice that could take you to hell or take you to heaven.⁹ The two of them even staged a backstage wedding on one tour, exchanging rings and vows on top of the backstage stairs, a bit of show business ceremony between two people who recognized something in each other.⁹

She was back out with the Stones three years later, opening the Richfield Coliseum in Cleveland on November 16 and 17, 1981, during the band's Tattoo You tour.²⁴ Those years on the road did something the charts never managed. As one biography puts it, she toured with the Rolling Stones and performed at blues and jazz festivals, and the result was that white listeners finally began to buy her albums.³⁰ A Black woman who had been boxed into the R&B market for two decades was suddenly singing to rock crowds that had never known her name.

Then came a stage larger than any club. In 1984 she reached out to David Wolper and asked to perform in the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, and she got it.¹ She led a three hundred member gospel choir through "When the Saints Go Marching In," staged inside a nineteenth century New Orleans church set, in front of a packed Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.²⁹ A woman the industry had largely written off for most of the previous decade was now singing to the whole world at once.

She was still showing up for the people who mattered to her. In 1986 she joined the two concerts at the Fox Theatre in St. Louis that celebrated Chuck Berry's sixtieth birthday, taking lead vocals on "Rock and Roll Music" alongside Keith Richards and Eric Clapton.²⁷³³ The shows became the 1987 documentary Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, released that October, and her turn in it is one of the film's high points.²⁷

The last great live document came in 2002. Burnin' Down the House: Live at the House of Blues, her third live album, was recorded at the House of Blues in Hollywood between December 9, 2001 and January 15, 2002 with her band the Roots Band, and released on May 7, 2002.²⁸ She was in her sixties, she had survived addiction and illness and a body that had been through surgery, and she still burned the room down. The title was not a boast. It was a description.

What the live recordings give us is the thing no studio could ever fake, which is the sound of a person refusing to be reduced. She could be tender and then furious inside the same song. She could joke with a crowd and then break its heart. On stage there was no producer to smooth her edges and no committee to tell her to be smaller. There was only the voice, the band, and the people who had come to hear the truth. That is why, if you want to understand who Etta James really was, you should not stop at the albums. You should find a room where she is singing to a crowd, and listen to what she does when nobody is trying to hold her back.

References for Part Seven

1. Etta James, Wikipedia.
9. Etta James, FAME Studios.
21. Etta James Rocks the House, Wikipedia.
22. Etta James once rocked the New Era Club, one of North Nashville's most famous stages, WPLN News.
23. The Rolling Stones US Tour 1978, Wikipedia.
24. The Rolling Stones American Tour 1981, Wikipedia.
25. 22 May Montreux 1975 with Etta James, John Paul Jones official site.
26. Etta James, "Live at Montreux 1975-1993" DVD review, by Bob Putignano, Sounds of Blue / Blueswax.
27. Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, Wikipedia.
28. Burnin' Down the House: Live at the House of Blues, Wikipedia.
29. 1984 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, Wikipedia.
30. Etta James, Encyclopedia.com.
31. The Rolling Stones 1978 U.S. Tour, Rolling Stones Data.
32. Gimme Gimme: Etta James Live at Montreux, 1993 DVD review, Houston Press.
33. Revisit Chuck Berry's 60th birthday show featuring Keith Richards, Etta James and Eric Clapton, Far Out Magazine.

A Note on the Series

This series was built from verified public sources, and every factual claim carries a numbered citation that links to the source it came from. Citation numbers are consistent across all seven parts, so a source used in more than one part keeps the same number. The reference block at the end of each part lists only the sources cited in that part, with the displayed numbers matching the numbers used in the body.

Etta James is not a story about a flawless person. She was a person who was hurt early and often, who hurt herself and others along the way, and who kept singing anyway. If this series does anything, I hope it sends you back to the records, especially At Last! and Tell Mama. That is where the real biography lives.