Yesterday I was filled with grief because a woman I did not know, a woman who was middle-aged when I was born, died. I say I did not know her, and I refuse to make the glib obituarist’s pivot where I say that of course I knew her through her music, because she was not one of those who lay themselves bare in their art, or ever claimed to be.
She was a performer, and she was one of the greatest, but she was fiercely, even angrily, private about her interior life, and her singing is a performance of emotion — of intense emotion, rage and fear and loss and longing and lust and power and pain and, more rarely, love — rather than the thing itself. Not that any performance of emotion is ever the thing itself, this side of Lennon and Ono committing their primal-scream therapy to tape. But there’s a sort of double bluff in most pop performances, where the singer first pretends that their expression of an emotion is equivalent to feeling that emotion, and then pretends that they are subject to that feeling. Etta James, like any great singer (or actor, or poet), engaged in the first deception; but she refused to allow her audience the voyeurism of the second.
It was perhaps this opacity, this refusal to simulate vulnerability, which kept her from the stardom achieved by peers like Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner. (Or perhaps it was that she spent the canon-cementing 1980s wandering the chitlin circuit on a heroin relapse rather than trying for pop hits.) Sure, she had a few hits — “At Last” will live forever thanks to those swooning strings and Hollywood’s bottomless appetite for an obvious music cue — but she was always more beloved of music nerds than of the general populace, who prefer the songs to the singer.
My own introduction was hearing 1967’s “Tell Mama” on oldies radio at a moment when I was scrambling to catch up on soul music after realizing that I loved it as much, or more, than the classic rock music I had marinated in for nearly a decade. Like many a rockist-turned-appreciator-of-black-music, I believed that the more Southern, the more gritty, the more shouted and moaned and stonked and drum-cracked soul music was the better it was. (Similarly, I had in the 1990s dismissed all guitar music without heavy levels of distortion: a mistaking of noise for truth.) “Tell Mama” was perfection, in that understanding; like “Soul Man” or “Mustang Sally” or “Respect” or “Proud Mary,” it hit hard and fast, with a bassline that moved and horns as hard and precise in their attack as rock guitars, Etta howling in her signature rasp at the end, singing lyrics that offered a protective shoulder, but wholly aggressive, wholly fierce in her vocal approach.
This is the second time I’ve referred to her as fierce, an adjective that would more often be used to describe her signature look. In a big blonde bob, with eyebrows as artificial as Spock’s, a violent red mouth and a beauty mark so exquisitely placed as to arouse the envy of Marie Antoinette, she made herself up in unapologetic imitation of the sex workers she had admired as a young girl for their power and self-determination. She grew up in a place and time where the blues was the devil’s music and good girls sang for the church, and she did both, singing sweet hymnody and low gutbucket bawd.
Her first record, cut when she was fifteen, was a rhythm & blues novelty following in the salty doo-wop tradition of the Midnighters’ “Work with Me, Annie” — both the group’s name and the very title of the song were oblique references to sex, and when white pop belter Georgia Gibbs covered James’ song she had to call it “The Wallflower” because “Roll with Me, Henry” was just too suggestive. Even though there’s nothing whatever in the song suggestive of the singer being a wallflower — she’s lustily forward, and the young Etta James could easily have been considered merely a junior version of such r&b shouters as Big Mama Thornton, Big Maybelle, or LaVern Baker. But she had been infuriated by Gibbs’ cover of her song reaching #1, and she wanted to prove she could sing sweet pop as well as grinding raunch. Her version of the Tin Pan Alley standard “At Last,” cut for Chess in 1960, only went to #47 on the pop chart, but it’s become the definitive rendition, thanks to her dramatic reading of the text and the imaginative string chart behind her. Ever since, she sang both sweet pop and low-down (rhythm and) blues, frequently combining them in novel and unexpected ways.
Her rendition of “Something’s Got a Hold on Me” for the short-lived r&b show The!!! Beat in 1966 is instructive as to the perfection of her technique, as she switches effortlessly between a raspy blues snarl and a smooth pop belt, playing jazzily with her own vocals for almost two minutes before letting the band kick in. She frequently imitated the growl and honk of r&b saxophones when singing live, and her sense of timing and rhythm was as much influenced by jazz singers like Billie Holiday as her fellow soul shouters.
Perhaps her greatest performance on record was the flipside to “Tell Mama,” “I’d Rather Go Blind” (a one-two combination that makes for one of the greatest 45s ever cut), notable not only for its restraint — it’s a slow burn of a song that never boils over, just simmers achingly for two and a half minutes — but for the precision and eloquence of her phrasing. The emotion performed is a sort of numb, shattered heartbreak, and when she reaches for the high notes the effect of the (apparent) effort is frankly stunning.
She went on, into cinematic funk and rock covers and back-to-blues-basics and comeback record after comeback record through the 90s and 00s — her last record was released in 2011, and contains a smirking, ’68-Stonesy rendition of “Welcome to the Jungle” — and like many of the great singers of her generation, was mostly ignored in favor of younger talent and newer sounds. Which is what happens, and her salty attitude — she joked that she was going to beat Beyoncé’s ass for making her look weak in Cadillac Records — was its own defense against the declines of age.
Her twilight was long and, aside from the occasional years-of-service Grammy, largely unrecognized; I hope she was able to appreciate the irony of leaving the stage at a moment when her voice was blanketing pop radio thanks to a DJ from Sweden, a producer from Rhode Island, and a rapper from Florida. That the youngest among us were introduced to her through “Levels” and “Good Feeling” is no bad thing. Fifty years after laying the vocal down, she still stole the show.
