Etta James and the voice that crossed every border

Etta James was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles in 1938, to a mother who was only fourteen and often away. Her father was never identified, though she suspected the pool player Minnesota Fats. She called her mother “the Mystery Lady”. Raised by foster parents and relatives, she found her first stability in a Baptist church choir, where at five she became a soloist.

Her training was harsh. Her choir director punched her in the chest while she sang to push the sound from her gut, and a foster father woke her during drunken poker games to make her sing for his friends. The humiliation left her with a lasting difficulty singing on demand. Still, the voice that came out of that childhood was deep, earthy and impossible to ignore.

She started her career in 1954 and played the clubs of the Chitlin’ Circuit, building toward hits such as “The Wallflower” in 1955 and “At Last” in 1960. “Something’s Got a Hold on Me” followed in 1962, then “Tell Mama” and “I’d Rather Go Blind” in 1967. She sang gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, rock and roll and soul, and her voice is considered a bridge between R&B and rock and roll.

The middle years were rough. She faced heroin addiction, severe physical abuse and incarceration before a comeback in the late 1980s with the album Seven Year Itch. Recognition piled up afterward: three Grammy Awards for albums, seventeen Blues Music Awards, and inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, the Grammy Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame called her “forever the matriarch of blues”. She died in January 2012, days before her 74th birthday, and what remains is a voice that took everything life threw at it and sang it back.