A voice worth returning to

Etta James was born Jamesetta Hawkins on January 25, 1938, in Los Angeles, California, to a fourteen-year-old mother, Dorothy Hawkins. Raised largely by foster parents, she sang in the St. Paul Baptist Church choir as a child, where her powerful voice drew attention early. By her early teens she had left the choir behind for the nightclub circuit, and at sixteen she was discovered by bandleader Johnny Otis, who helped her cut her first record.

That record, “The Wallflower” — better known as “Dance with Me, Henry” — was an answer to Hank Ballard’s “Work with Me, Annie.” Released in 1955 on Modern Records, it went to number one on the R&B chart and announced a singer who sounded decades older than her years. The follow-up years were uneven, but in 1960 she signed with Chess Records in Chicago, and everything changed. Her debut album, At Last!, arrived in late 1960, and its title track, released as a single in early 1961, reached number two on the R&B chart. “At Last” would become her signature — the wedding song of the American century — but the album around it showed her full range, from the weeping ballad “All I Could Do Was Cry” to the blues stomp “I Just Want to Make Love to You.”

The mid-1960s brought personal struggle and professional drift. Then, in 1967, Chess sent her to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to work with producer Rick Hall and his legendary house band. The sessions produced “Tell Mama,” a Top 10 R&B hit, and its B-side, “I’d Rather Go Blind” — a slow-burning blues performance that many consider the single greatest vocal of her career. The Tell Mama album (1968) captured her at her rawest and most commanding.

James’s later career was a long second act. She recorded through the 1970s and 1980s, won Grammy Awards in the 1990s and 2000s, and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. Her voice — equal parts gospel fire and late-night tenderness — influenced everyone from Janis Joplin to Adele. She died on January 20, 2012, in Riverside, California, at seventy-three.

This collection traces her from the teenage answer record to the Muscle Shoals comeback: ten recordings, each with its own story. Listen for the way she bends a note until it breaks open — that is where the feeling lives.

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