![]() There were ballads (“All I Could Do Was Cry”), duets (“If I Can’t Have You”), guest appearances (she sings backup on Chuck Berry’s “Almost Grown” and “Back in the USA”), but her most successful early moment was the title track of her début album: “At Last,” which was written by Mack Gordon and Harry Warren and recorded by Glenn Miller, among others. In 1960, at the still tender age of twenty-two, James moved from Modern Records to Chess, got involved with the songwriter and singer Harvey Fuqua, and launched the second phase of her career. ![]() ![]() To say she belted it out was an understatement. Her first hit, “Dance With Me, Henry”-previously known as “Roll With Me, Henry” (too risqué) and later known as “The Wallflower” (after a hit version by George Gibbs)- was an answer song to Hank Ballard’s “Work With Me, Annie,” and found James already in possession of a cannon of an instrument. As a teen-ager, she began to sing doo-wop, and was soon discovered by the bandleader Johnny Otis (who died, in sad coincidence, just three days before James). She had been suffering from dementia and leukemia for the past two years, had not performed in public for longer, and had, upon the release of “The Dreamer” last November, announced that it would be her final album.īorn Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles to a mother who was rarely around and a father she never knew-later in life, she speculated that it might have been the pool player Minnesota Fats-James had a Dickensian childhood, shuttled from caregiver to caregiver, treated rough, forced to grow up fast. ![]() The death of Etta James on Friday, at the age of seventy-three, came as no surprise. ![]()
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