Artist: Etta James
Genre(s):
Blues
R&B: Soul
Discography:
Let's Roll
Year: 2003
Tracks: 12
Burning Down The House
Year: 2002
Tracks: 12
Blue Gardenia
Year: 2001
Tracks: 13
At Last!
Year: 1999
Tracks: 14
Life, Love and the Blues
Year: 1998
Tracks: 12
Live From San Fransciso
Year: 1994
Tracks: 8
Matriarch of the Blues
Year:
Tracks: 12
Come a Little Closer
Year:
Tracks: 12
Blues To The Bone
Year:
Tracks: 12
Big Blues Collection Vol.2
Year:
Tracks: 12
Few R&B singers have endured tragical travails on the massive storey that Etta James has and remain on earth to talk or so it. The lady's no shrinkage violet; her autobiography, Rage to Survive, describes her past (including legion do drugs addictions) in sordid item.
Only her personal problems have rarely moved her tattle. James has hung in there from the eld of R&B and doo wop in the mid-'50s through soul's late-'60s prime and right up into the '90s and 2000s (where her 1994 disc Mystery story Lady paid loving jazz-based tribute to i of her idols, Billie Holiday). Etta James' voice has deepened o'er the years, coarsened more than than a little, simply still conveys noteworthy passion and pain.
Jamesetta Hawkins was a baby gospel singing prodigy, telling in her Los Angeles Baptist church choir (and over the wireless) when she was only five days old under the care of Professor James Earle Hines. She affected to San Francisco in 1950, shortly teaming with deuce other girls to form a vocalizing radical. When she was 14, bandleader Johnny Otis gave the trio an audition. He in particular dug their answer birdsong to Hank Ballard & the Midnighters' "Work With Me Annie."
Against her mother's wishes, the young vocaliser embarked for L.A. to record "Roll With Me Henry" with the Otis ring and vocaliser Richard Berry in 1954 for Modern Records. Otis upside-down her number one name to devise her stage handle and dubbed her vocal radical the Peaches (besides Etta's sobriquet). "Roll With Me Henry," renamed "The Wallflower" when some radiocommunication programmers objected to the original title's connotations, topped the R&B charts in 1955.
The Peaches dropped from the tree short thenceforth, but Etta James kept on vocalizing for Modern end-to-end lots of the tenner (ofttimes under the supervising of saxophonist Maxwell Davis). "Good Rockin' Daddy" besides did rather well for her afterwards in 1955, simply worth follow-ups such as "Cleaning woman" and "Bad Lover" (the latter a fiery cradle cut in New Orleans with Lee Allen on adolphe Sax) failed to catch on.
James II landed at Chicago's Chess Records in 1960, signing with their Argo subsidiary. Immediately, her transcription calling kicked into heights appurtenance; non only if did a mate of duets with her then-boyfriend (Moonglows lead singer Harvey Fuqua) chart, her have sides (outset with the tortured lay "All I Could Do Was Cry") chased each other up the R&B lists as comfortably. Leonard Chess viewed James as a classy lay isaac Bashevis Singer with pop crossover potential drop, financial support her with lush violin orchestrations for 1961's pleasant-tasting "At Last" and "Trust in Me." But James' rougher slope wasn't forsaken -- the gospel-charged "Something's Got a Hold on Me" in 1962, a kinetic 1963 unrecorded LP (Etta James Rocks the House) cut at Nashville's New Era Club, and a blues-soaked 1966 pas de deux with childhood sidekick Sugar Pie De Santo, "In the Basement," ensured that.
Although Chess hosted its have killer house band, James traveled to Rick Hall's Fame studios in Muscle Shoals in 1967 and emerged with one of her all-time classics. "State Mama" was a searing slice of eudaimonia Southern soul that contrasted markedly with some other standout from the same roger Huntington Sessions, the spine-chilling ballad "I'd Rather Go Blind." Despite the death of Leonard Chess, Etta James remained at the label into 1975, experimenting toward the end with a more than rock-based advance.
Thither were some mighty lean days, both personally and professionally, for Miss Peaches. But she got back on track recording-wise in 1988 with a set for Island, Seven-spot Year Itch, that reaffirmed her Southern soul supremacy. Her following albums have been a varied lot -- 1990's Relieved to My Guns was contemporaneous in the extreme; 1992's Jerry Wexler-produced The Right Time, for Elektra, was glibly soulful, and her almost other '90s outings birth explored jazz directions. In 1998, she as well issued a vacation record album, Etta James Christmas. She was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2001, and in 2003 received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. That year also sawing machine the release of her Let's Roll album, followed in 2004 by a CD of raw blues performances, Blues to the Bone, both on RCA Records. James then shifted gears and released an album of pop standards, All the Way, on RCA in 2006.
In concert, Etta James is a impudent, no-holds-barred performer whose suggestive stage antics sometimes edge on the repugnant. She's paid her dues many times over as an R&B and soul initiate; long may she bear on to shock the naive.
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