The CLog
It’s a damn shame that many people were introduced to Etta James in the years before her death last week through Beyonce’s portrayal of her in the 2008 biopic “Cadillac Records.”
That's what writer and activist Kenyon Farrow had to say in his tribute to the great R&B pioneer on the political website Colorlines.com. When James and Johnny Otis died last week within days of each other, popular music lost two cornerstones of modern blues, R&B, soul, funk and rock & roll. Though James and Otis both were born and raised in California, their impact on Southern-derived music is immeasurable, as they not only drew from earlier Southern styles but helped spread the gospel, so to speak, of gritty Southern R&B well into the 1970s.
Coincidentally, the two not only were connected in death — Otis died on Tuesday, at 90, and James Friday, at 73 — but their earlier years were linked as well. It was Otis who discovered the teenaged James when she fronted a late-'50s all-girl doo-wop group, the Creolettes, later renamed the Peaches. Both also were unsung pioneers who never got the level of attention of their more famous contemporaries.
James, in particular, helped define the brash vocal sound of '60s and '70s soul, and had a massive impact on British Invasion rock bands like the Small Faces and the Rolling Stones. She may not have been Southern-born or raised, but it’s impossible to listen to performances like her scorching 1964 live set Etta James Rocks the House and not hear the debt she owes to performers like Otis Redding or the debt singers from Aretha Franklin to Janis Joplin owe to her. Johnny Otis, sometimes referred to as the father of R&B, was a Greek-American bandleader who not only discovered James but produced groundbreaking records such as "Hound Dog," by James' precursor Big Mama Thornton, and brought the R&B/pop singer Jackie Wilson, a big influence on Michael Jackson, to the world’s ears.
All of this is a roundabout way of introducing a different kind of music tribute. On Tuesday, Colorlines ran what it called a "political obituary" of James, written by Farrow, the former executive director of Queers for Economic Justice. After reading the glut of James obits from mainstream media outlets — with their emphasis on her overplayed ballad “At Last” and Beyoncé’s ill-cast portrayal of James in Cadillac Records — it was nice to see a piece that puts the singer into real-life context.
It’s long been my opinion that popular music is always — and has always been — inextricably connected to the politics and culture of its times, and Farrow succinctly weaves the political with the musical in his assessment of James, whose multifaceted personality — drug addict to Muslim activist, soul pioneer to country crooner — defined who she was and, by extension, who we, the sum total of American culture, are.
Here’s more from Farrow’s piece:
No one understood the awkwardness of [the Cadillac Records] casting choice better than James herself, who told The New York Post’s Page Six in 2007, when she learned the film was already in production, that “[Beyonce] is going to have a hill to climb, because Etta James ain’t been no angel!… I wasn’t as bourgie as she is, she’s bourgeois. She knows how to be a lady, she’s like a model. I wasn’t like that … I smoked in the bathroom in school, I was kinda arrogant.”….
While James was touring the country, getting high and running the streets with gangsters, street walkers, gays, and drag queens (and likely some folks we’d now call transgender), she also became friends with Muhammad Ali (they met when he was still Cassius Clay) and Malcolm X, both of whom she says she spent a lot of time with. At one point she joined the Nation of Islam, and gained her “X.” But James in many ways was exactly the kind of convert the Nation of Islam sought—black people from urban areas involved in various forms of street culture. “My religious practices might have been erratic, and my wildness surely overwhelmed my piety, but for ten years I called myself a Muslim,” said James.
Listen to an early collaboration between James' group the Peaches and Johnny Otis, who co-wrote the song with James and Hank Ballard:
Watch the early-‘60s James rock the house in a way Beyoncé could never understand. Or, as James said herself, "She knows how to be a lady, she’s like a model. I wasn’t like that … I smoked in the bathroom in school, I was kinda arrogant."
