From the fabulous re-issue The Complete Modern and Kent Recordings, I selected her first hit single that dates back to 1954, Wallflower. The Johnny Otis penned and produced tune put the young Jamesetta Hawkins on the map and launched one of the most prolific and eclectic careers in recording history. These sides represent a wonderful early career document and a look at a singer who even at a very young age had an incredibible maturity and sense of her own power and control.



Her first album on the Chess label, At Last, released in 1960 found the still young but already accomplished recording artist accompanied by lush orchestral arrangements. An offering of mostly standards yielded the stunning version of a tune that would become her signature song, At Last. Some 50 plus years later, it is still moving but this is a jukebox, so I chose the Willie Dixon penned classic made famous a few years earlier by Muddy Waters, I Just Want to Make Love to You. Etta’s impassioned cover is considered by many to be the preeminent version of the song. It was of course considered too risqué for American audiences, but was her biggest chart success in the U.K. Many Americans didn’t get hip to this version of the song until it was used in a diet soft drink commercial on television in 1996.



The Second Time Around is an often overlooked gem.  As the name of the record implies, it is Etta’s second Chess Album. This long out of print record uses much of the same formula as Etta’s first Chess release. This album also reveals a more aggressive vocal approach which Etta would use to great effect throughout the rest of her career. The song Seven Day Fool shows Etta stretching out a bit. This 1961 release has many hidden nuggets that are not as familiar to James’ fans compared to other recordings in her catalogue.



Etta James Rocks the House is a 1964 Chess Records release that was recorded in a segregated nightclub in Nashville a few months earlier. The audience feels like part of the performance. The entire recording has an “off the board” feel to it. This album is a radical departure from the previous Chess release on our jukebox. The Jimmy Reed tune Baby What You Want Me to Do remained a staple of Etta’s live act for the duration of her career and for good reason. Like everything else Etta sang she made it her own.



Leonard Chess encouraged Etta James to record at the Fame Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama for her 1968 album, Tell Mama. This Cadet Records Release (since re-issued on MCA/Chess) has that crisp southern fried soul feel from top to bottom. It yielded the title track that has an absolutely irresistible groove and a back beat you could drive an eighteen wheeler through on a slick road in a fog bank. Classic southern soul horn arrangements augment this tune and the rest of this great album. Other highlights include a take on an Otis Redding tune, Security and a song that wasn’t particularly well received in 1968 but became very closely associated with Etta, I’d Rather Go Blind.  It is a crowd pleaser and has made its way into most of her “best of...” compilations.

1992 ‘s The Right Time found famed Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler coming out of retirement in Florida to record this album. As he mentions in the liner notes, he had Etta James on his mind. He brought Etta together again with some of the Southern Soul studio cats that Etta had worked with on her Tell Mama album as well as Steve Cropper who Wexler was familiar through the Stax association with Atlantic in the mid sixties. Other greats on this album include Muscle Shoals bassists Willie Weeks and David Hood and Ray Charles alum, alto man Hank Crawford. The uber talented Lucky Peterson plays guitar and Hammond B3 on this great album. I could have gone in a lot of directions here, but I chose Etta scorching version of the Z.Z. Hill classic Down Home Blues.

A little over a year later Etta entered a studio and went in a completly different direction with the album that is fairly self explanatory Mystery Lady: The Songs of Billie Holiday. I don’t know anyone with the balls big enough to take on this material and make it work but Etta. It became the first of three jazz albums Etta would record over the next few years. Those titles are 1994’s Time after Time and 2001's Blue Gardenia. When covering the jazz idiom, Etta’s delivery has more to do with Sarah Vaughan than Holiday.  From Mystery Lady I chose the George and Ira Gershwin tune Embraceable You. Etta’s laid back approach to jazz singing flies in stark contrast to her blues and soul vocal attack which makes both that much more powerful.

Life, Love & the Blues features Etta and her Roots Band. This 1999 release has Etta doing some down home blues and soul. The tune I Want to Ta Ta You Baby is a song written by the man Etta credits as one of her biggest influences, Johnny “Guitar” Watson. The song, like Etta, has elements of blues, jazz and soul all wrapped into a suggestive lyric with an unconventional arrangement. Kudos to Etta’s long time musical director/guitarist Josh Sklair, as well as Bobby Murray who lends his tasteful guitar to this tune. Keyboard player David Mathews and Etta’s sons Sammeto James on bass and Donto James on drums make up the core of this great band.

Burnin’ Down the House is a 2002 release. I saw Etta and the Roots Band lay this recording down at the House of Blues in October of 2001. It was one of the first times I had been to a large gathering in the post 9/11 era. I remember the heightened security at the nightclub. If blues is a healer, Etta applied the soothing balm. For an evening anyway, she let us almost forget what ailed us. Her Al Green medley of Love and Happiness and Take Me to the River that included the jazz standard My Funny Valentine, let Etta and her band flex their prodigious chops. Since she Ettagised this Memphis classic on 1993’s The Right Time, it had become the Roots Band's grand finale in concert, as it was on this night. The final album sequence doesn’t reflect this for some reason.

The Dreamer was recorded with the idea in mind that it would be the diva’s last album. It is a fitting swan song as Etta covers many familiar bases and, as always, puts her own stamp on material by other great singers.  Among the tunes covered are Otis Redding’s Champagne and Wine, Ray Charles In the Evening and Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s Too Tired and That’s the Chance You Got to Take. I chose Little Milton’s Let Me Down Easy. Late in Etta’s career, maturity and intelligent choices replaced the raw power she once had at her command. The subtlety she brings to these recordings reminds me of what Billie Holiday was able to bring to her sessions late in her career.