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Tribute to Etta James

By Jillian Timko, Gavel Media Staff, on January 26, 2012 7:32 PM

On January 20^th, 2012, Grammy-winning singer Etta James died at the age of 73.  James was diagnosed with terminal leukemia in 2011 and had been struggling with Alzheimer’s disease since 2008 and an infection caused by MRSA bacteria in 2010.

James enjoyed a successful 49-year long career singing a variety of blues, rhythm and blues, soul, jazz, gospel, and rock and roll songs.  Some of her most popular songs include “I’d Rather Go Blind,” “At Last,” “Tell Mama,” and “Dance With Me, Henry.”  Over the course of her career, she won six Grammys and seventeen Blues Music Awards.  She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Grammy Hall of Fame, and the Blues Hall of Fame.  James was ranked number 22 on Rolling Stone’s list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time and number 62 on their list of 100 Greatest Artists.  James was credited with successfully bridging the gap between rhythm and blues and rock and roll over the development of her career, and has influenced a number of other American singers.

In2003 the Grammy Awards program book printed a tribute to James in honor of her Lifetime Achievement Award that stated, “Etta has won our hearts by putting her own into every captivating syllable…Etta was a young black woman in a business that, at the time, was especially hard on both blacks and women.  Yet through the road shows of the ’50s and ’60s, through the evolutionary years of soul music and rock and roll, through her reign as the queen of the famed Chess Records label, through lean times and golden years, Etta James endured and triumphed without compromising her honesty or the pure joy she feels making music.”

In the tribute, James professed, “I sing what I feel — R&B, blues, gospel, and rock and roll, the music that came out of the South.  That’s the music that I have always believed in.”

James was born Jamesetta Hawkins on January 25, 1938 in Los Angelos, California.  She learned to sing in her church choir and started recording songs and touring with a girl-group called the Peaches at the age of fifteen.  In the late fifties she left the Peaches to focus on her solo career.  She married Artis Miller in 1969 and they had two sons named Donto and Sametto.  Both sons started performing with their mother in 2003.  James died surrounded by her family at Riverside Community Hospital in Riverside, California.