Etta James’s journey to stardom began when she got a chance as a teenager to audition for the singer Johnny Otis. She was too shy to sing in front of Otis in his hotel room, so she belted out a number from inside the bathroom. Otis liked what he heard and wanted to sign James up as a backing singer on the spot, but said he’d need her parents’ consent. James had never known her father, and her mother was in jail, so she forged her mother’s signature and kicked off a career in blues and R&B that would span half a century.
Etta James was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles, said The Washington Post, to a 14-year-old mother and an unknown father she always suspected to be the infamous pool shark Rudolf “Minnesota Fats” Wanderone. After moving with her mother to San Francisco at age 12, James fell in with an unruly crowd and began frequenting jazz clubs. The blues she heard there, she would later recall, “gave me a naughty-girl feeling.” She joined a band, the Peaches, and caught Otis’s eye in 1952.
Under Otis’s guidance, James released her first record in 1953, said The Village Voice, the “provocative” R&B song “Roll With Me, Henry.” Its sexually charged lyrics established the young singer as a “rock ’n’ roll rebel alongside the likes of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis.” In 1960, she joined Chess Records, and achieved fame with such “silky crossover ballads” as “At Last” and “rockin’ dance numbers” like “Something’s Got a Hold on Me.”
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But as James’s career at Chess progressed, said the London Independent, her life descended into “incarceration and heroin addiction.” She got hooked on drugs in 1961, and was jailed twice in the ensuing years for passing bad checks. All her role models, from Billie Holiday to Ray Charles, were heroin addicts, she later said. “Subconsciously, I thought that was a cool thing.” She gave up heroin in 1974, but became addicted to cocaine while on tour with the Rolling Stones in 1978.
James had a “personal and professional renaissance” in the 1980s, said the Los Angeles Times, kicking drugs for good and re-establishing her credibility in the process. She won her first Grammy in 1994 for an album of Billie Holiday covers, won two more in the 2000s, and continued touring until 2010. Despite the troubles in her life, James believed that music could help transcend unhappiness. “A lot of people think the blues is depressing, but that’s not the blues I’m singing,” she said. “When I’m singing blues, I’m singing life.”
