Remembering Etta James

Story by The Root
Written by Paul Devlin

Music has lost another icon, the miraculously voiced Etta James, whose sultry soul, going back to the 1950s, provided a mature sound track for several generations.

The 73-year-old singer died Friday, Jan. 20, of complications from leukemia, her friend and manager, Lupe de Leon, told CNN. She would have turned 74 on Jan. 25. Her leukemia was declared incurable in early December, according to a report by the Associated Press. Court records in a probate case indicated that she also suffered from dementia and kidney failure.

Known for her incomparable ballad skills, James could also sing the heck out of the blues, not to mention gospel. The heyday of her music career was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, although after she was thrust back into the spotlight by the 2008 biopic Cadillac Records, in which her character was played by Beyoncé Knowles, James had begun to receive the recognition that was long overdue. (Her influence spanned the pop-and-rock spectrum. Check out young Christina Aguilera singing "Sunday Kind of Love" in 1988.)

While the film, which depicted the rise of Chess Records, didn't put up spectacular numbers at the box office, James' music ("At Last" in particular) certainly found a new audience and was rescued from the lucrative purgatory of overplay in commercials. The disassociation of her mega-hit "At Last" from the many products it's been used to sell couldn't have hurt, either.

And yet when Beyoncé sang "At Last" as Barack and Michelle Obama danced at their inaugural ball in 2009, James stepped back into the spotlight for the wrong reason. It was probably a poor choice of song, given its overuse in advertising, coupled with Desiree Rogers' infamous statement about Obama being a "brand."

James reacted by saying she couldn't "stand Beyoncé" for singing the song she'd been "singing forever" on "big ol' President Day." This was so unfortunate (not to mention unfair to Beyoncé, who needed James less than James needed her in terms of contemporary music promotion). It prompted James' son, Donto, to tell CNN a year later that his mother had been suffering from "drug-induced dementia" at the time. As the singer's health faded, her offspring and her husband battled over control of her $1 million estate.

Etta James was born Jamesetta Hawkins (now, there's a cool stage name: the reverse of a real name) in Los Angeles in 1938 to a 14-year-old single mother, Dorothy Hawkins. James would later claim that her father was the infamous white pool hustler Rudolph Wanderone, first known as "New York Fats" and later known as "Minnesota Fats" after the character Jackie Gleason made famous in The Hustler.

There is strong circumstantial evidence, not to mention an oral tradition, to back the unusual claim. James' mother had told her that her father was a white boy, "one of those real slick white boys." The actor Willie Best later confirmed that it was Minnesota Fats. The billiards historian R.A. Dyer, who has written two books about Wanderone, seems to support the idea. Dyer writes, "In photographs both [Wanderone and James] look startlingly alike with their wide faces, their tiny tulip mouths, their small but piercing eyes."

I don't know if I'd go so far as to co-sign "startlingly" alike, but the plausibility is there. If true, it's another sad chapter in the long history of mixed-race children in America unacknowledged by their white fathers. But at least young Jamesetta seemed to have inherited some swagger. But without a father, she surely struggled mightily with her teenage mother until she was discovered by the great Johnny Otis.

Unfortunately, she became close to Best, who gave her the lowdown about her father but who was also someone she got to know through drug addiction. Heroin plagued her and so many musicians of those years (so memorably captured by Jamie Foxx in Ray).

But her addiction also led her to be immortalized in what many critics have called one of the best books of 2010 (and best books of many years), the exceptional memoir Life, by Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. (James mentions her respect for Richards in her 1995 memoir The Rage to Survive: The Etta James Story.) Richards memorializes her lovingly in his book, and his statement will surely, along with her music, outlast the Beyoncé controversy:

Another great singer and a girl after my own heart -- as well as my bride in a rock-and-roll "marriage" -- is Etta James. She'd been making records from the early '50s, when she was a doo-wop singer. She's expanded into every range since then ... Now, Etta had been a junkie. So we found reciprocation almost immediately ... It takes one look in the eye for one to know another. Incredibly strong, Etta, with a voice that could take you to hell or take you to heaven. And we hung in a dressing room, and like all ex-junkies, we talked about the junk. And why did we do this, the usual soul-searching. This culminated in a backstage wedding, which in show business terms is like, you get married but you're not really married. You exchange vows and stuff, on the top of the backstage stairs. And she gave me a ring, I gave her a ring, and actually that's where I decided her name's Etta Richards. She'll know what I mean.