The Full Biography
Etta James. Singer. The Los Angeles girl who made “At Last” a civic wedding and then spent a long life singing as if the wedding were the least true thing she knew.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is a swell of strings, a vow, a voice that can make a rented hall feel like a decision. What the still cannot show is Jamesetta Hawkins of Los Angeles, a mother who was a child herself, a pair of San Francisco gospel mentors, Chess Records, heroin, and a death in 2012 after leukemia and dementia had already started taking the last years apart.
She was born on January 25, 1938, at Los Angeles County General, the daughter of Dorothy Hawkins, who was fourteen. The father has been a rumor with famous names attached — she wondered, in print, about pool players and, at times, about the white celebrity the columns preferred to invent; she did not get a clean certificate. She was raised, for long stretches, by foster parents, Lula and Jesse Rogers, and by the church. At St. Paul Baptist Church on South McKinley she sang for James Earle Hines and the Echoes of Eden choir, a gospel machine that already treated a child’s voice as a job. She was seven, then eleven, then a teenager who knew what a microphone was for. The church came first. The toughness is not a stage costume only. It is a childhood.
Johnny Otis heard her in San Francisco around 1954. He compressed Jamesetta into Etta James, put her with two other girls as the Peaches, and cut “The Wallflower (Roll with Me, Henry),” an answer record to Hank Ballard’s “Work with Me, Annie.” In 1955 it went to number one on the R&B chart. Some stations would not play the original title. Modern Records issued it. She was seventeen, on the road, already a professional the adult rooms had not planned for. Follow-ups — “Good Rockin’ Daddy” — kept her in the R&B weather. She was not yet the woman the weddings hire. She was a West Coast teenager who had already learned what a hit does to a night and what a night does to a body.
In 1960 she signed with Chess Records in Chicago — Leonard and Phil, the same shop as Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters — and the catalog that lasts began. At Last! (1960) paired her grit with Riley Hampton’s strings. “At Last,” a Mack Gordon and Harry Warren song that had already lived other lives (Glenn Miller, 1941; movie versions after that), became the life. She did not write it. She occupied it so completely that the wedding-industrial complex still pays the estate for those three minutes. The same stretch gave “A Sunday Kind of Love,” “Trust in Me,” “Don’t Cry Baby,” and “Something’s Got a Hold on Me,” a gospel-charged side that other decades would sample without always printing her name. She was twenty-two and already two singers: the ballad the rented hall wants, and the shouter the church had trained.
Muscle Shoals is the other room. In 1967, at FAME Studios in Alabama, with Rick Hall, she cut Tell Mama. The title side is a soul peak, Top 10 R&B, a band that will not sit down. The B-side, “I’d Rather Go Blind,” written with her friend Ellington Jordan and Billy Foster, is the monument the weddings do not hire. She recorded it as if the strings on “At Last” had been paper. The rest of the Chess and Cadet years — “Security,” “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” live sets that leave the pain on the tape — is the woman the reception DJ never has to meet. She was also, often, late, difficult, and the best singer in the building.
She used heroin for years. She wrote about it in Rage to Survive (1995), with David Ritz, a memoir that does not sand the institutions or the arrests. She went in and out of hospitals and county facilities the way some singers go in and out of keys. In 1969 she married Artis Mills. He did prison time that was, in part, about her habit — a sentence the household has had to live next to. She had two sons, Donto and Sametto, who would, in time, play in her bands. The 1970s were a thin professional weather: Chess fading, rock rooms that wanted a legend more than a session, a body that the drug had already been working on. She cut Etta James Rocks the House, a live set that is all throat, and then albums the shop did not know how to sell. In 1973, at the Newport Jazz Festival, and in rooms that still booked blues as a living grammar, she was the woman the weddings had not hired. In 1978 she opened for the Rolling Stones on an American tour, a bill that treated her as a root the headliners still needed. She was not grateful in the decorative way. She was a professional who took the dates. She went into Tarzana Psychiatric Hospital and other rooms whose names the memoir prints, and she came out, more than once, and went back to work. The comeback was never a single season. It was a habit of returning.
The 1980s and 1990s were comebacks that were also simply work. Seven Year Itch (1988), on Island, put her back in a studio that wanted the live throat. Stickin’ to My Guns (1990) and The Right Time (1992), with Jerry Wexler, kept the comeback as work rather than a tribute. Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday (1994) brought the first Grammy, a jazz vocal album, a singer occupying another woman’s catalog the way she had occupied Gordon and Warren. Time After Time and Blue Gardenia followed in the same jazz weather. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2001, and given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003. Six competitive Grammys in all, on top of the lifetime. She recorded Let’s Roll, Blues to the Bone, All the Way. The voice thickened. It still knew where the hurt sat. Beyoncé played a version of her in Cadillac Records (2008) and sang “At Last” at Barack Obama’s inaugural ball. Etta was not gracious about the tribute in public. A complete reader can hold a woman’s territorial pride and a younger woman’s tribute without making either of them small.
I wanna show that gospel, country, blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, rock ’n’ roll are all just really one thing.Etta James
The turn is the sobriety she found often enough to make records that are not only documents of damage, and then the illness that took the filing system. She got clean enough, for long enough stretches, to tour as a family trade — Donto on drums, Sametto on bass — and to walk into halls that had only hired the strings. Then leukemia. Then dementia. A body that had already been asked for too much. She died on January 20, 2012, at Riverside Community Hospital, in Riverside, California. She was seventy-three. The strings on “At Last” did not miss a date.
Six things most people never knew
- Jamesetta is the given name. Johnny Otis compressed it. St. Paul Baptist and the Echoes of Eden came first.
- Her mother was fourteen. The toughness is not a stage costume only. It is a childhood.
- “At Last” is a cover she occupied, not a song she wrote. 1960, Chess. Gordon and Warren. Glenn Miller had it first. She made the occupancy permanent.
- “I’d Rather Go Blind” is the other monument. Muscle Shoals, 1967. A B-side. The weddings can keep the strings. The blues keep the blind.
- The habit is in the memoirs, not only in the gossip. Rage to Survive. Heroin, institutions, a husband who did time. She wrote it down.
- The last years included dementia as well as leukemia. 2012, Riverside. The throat had already started to lose the filing system.
Donto and Sametto played in her bands. The house was music as a family trade, not only a legend. Friends from the Chess years describe a woman who could wreck a session and then save it with one take. The take is why the weddings still call. Artis outlived the worst of the habit years and remained, in the public file, the husband who had paid a legal price the columns preferred to treat as color.
The later years
Home, after the Hall of Fame had already put her in a glass case, was Southern California — Riverside and the rooms around it — and a working band that included her sons. She toured from a wheelchair when the knees and the weight asked for one, and from her feet when they did not. The voice had gravel and still had silk. She treated a casino date and a festival date as the same job: hit the mark, leave the pain on the tape, do not owe the room a confession. The Dreamer (2011) is the last studio album, cut when the leukemia was already in the file, a set of blues and soul standards that does not perform a farewell. She was still a professional. She was not a tribute special.
The body had been keeping a different set of books for a long time. Hepatitis C sat in the medical file beside the heroin years. In 2010 she was diagnosed with leukemia. In 2011 doctors also named dementia. She cancelled dates. She made others. She appeared, thinner, at events that wanted the woman from the strings and got, instead, a singer who had already started to lose the names of the rooms. The household handled the decline the way the household had handled the habit: as a private fact the public would find out anyway. On January 20, 2012 — a day before her seventy-fourth birthday — she died in Riverside. Artis and the sons were the house. The coroner’s language was leukemia. The dementia had already been taking the filing system apart. That is the last chapter in a sentence. The chapter under it is a woman who had already, in the Muscle Shoals hours and the memoir, told you what the strings were papering over.
The honors in those last decades were a civic inventory the girl from St. Paul Baptist had not been raised to expect. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 1993. Blues Hall of Fame, 2001. Grammy Lifetime Achievement, 2003. A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Rolling Stone lists that put the voice in a numbered climate. She accepted the plaques and then asked where the bus was. She did not become a museum lecturer on her own throat. She kept singing until the throat and the mind would not file the next song. She played the Montreux Jazz Festival, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, the Hollywood Bowl, rooms that still treated blues as a living grammar. She sat in with B.B. King and other heads of the same house. She did television when television asked — awards shows, a late-night stool — and then asked where the bus was. The voice in those rooms was not the 1960 strings. It was the woman the weddings do not hire, still working. The last public work was not a White House ball she did not sing. It was a date, a band with her sons in it, and a catalog that had become bigger than the habit. Private Music and RCA put out the last studio sets. She treated a label change as a booking, not a rebirth.
Beyoncé’s “At Last” at the 2009 inaugural ball is the civic footnote the columns still attach. Etta watched another woman occupy the occupancy and said, in interviews, that she wished she had been asked. The territorial pride is in the file. So is the fact that the song was already bigger than any one throat. A complete life holds both. The estate still invoices the weddings. The blues hours still invoice anyone who thinks the strings were the whole woman.
After she was gone
Every wedding DJ still owes the estate. Every singer who treats a standard as a wound is in her house. Chess is a museum. The throat is the document. Rage to Survive is still the book that refuses the cleaned room. “I’d Rather Go Blind” still plays in rooms that do not serve cake. Donto and Sametto have had to share a mother the country reduced to a swell of strings. The Hall of Fame plaque is the civic object. The B-side is the correction.
She came out of a fourteen-year-old’s household, sang for Otis, occupied “At Last,” went blind in a different song, used a drug that used her back, and died after the filing system began to go. If you only remember the strings, you have the wedding. If you remember Jamesetta, Chess, and “I’d Rather Go Blind,” you have her.
Portrait: Roland Godefroy · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons