Life’s Ups and Downs Add Something to a Song

Life’s Ups and Downs Add Something to a Song
May 12, 2009
JON PARELES
The New York Times

Etta James is still mad that she didn’t get to perform her signature song, her 1961 hit “At Last,” at the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball for President Obama’s first dance. Beyoncé Knowles did, after playing Ms. James in the movie “Cadillac Records.” Why Ms. James wasn’t booked for one of the other inaugural balls, where the Obamas also danced to “At Last,” remains a mystery.

“That’s my song,” Ms. James insisted on Monday, the first of three nights at B. B. King Blues Club & Grill. “I’ve been singing it for 51 years.”

She’s entitled to it, even if Glenn Miller and Nat King Cole recorded it years before she did. On Monday she made it hers yet again: improvising with sultry swoops at the beginning, taut, jazzy hesitations and turns, glimmers of melting tenderness and declarations of crowing pride and relief.

Ms. James, 71, has lived through a long career of ups and downs, from R&B and soul hits in the 1950s and ’60s, through drug addiction in the 1970s, through rehab, rediscovery, Grammy Awards and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Now she sits when she sings, but her voice still plunges into songs with soulful drama.

Onstage she’s ever forthright: raunchy or plaintive, insolent or exalted, underlining her tone with well-timed gestures. Singing “Come to Mama” over a slow funk vamp, she writhed suggestively on her barstool and caressed herself as she promised, “I’ve got your favorite toy.”

Few of her songs had the happy ending of “At Last.” Whether she was singing from her own repertory, as in “Damn Your Eyes,” or borrowing songs like “Piece of My Heart” (from Janis Joplin) and “Sugar on the Floor” (from Kiki Dee), she sang about being a woman alone or left behind yet caught up in love, strong in both her anger and her longing.

On Monday she would declaim opening lines bluntly, then let shifting emotions alter her voice, growing breathy or flinty, flirtatious or bitter. Her band, rooted in Memphis soul and including her son Donto James on drums, was attuned to all her dynamics, from jazz finesse to gospelly crescendos.

She sang “A Lover Is Forever,” accompanied only by two guitarists, taking her time with phrases that swelled with longing and accusation, then tapered down to lonely reflections. In “I’d Rather Go Blind,” she sounded tearful as she sang about seeing her man with another woman, then continued, “I was thinking about your sweet kiss and your yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah,” pausing to remind the crowd, “Y’all know what I’m talking about.”

It was the essence of blues and soul that had been lived in, with lust and heartache, pain and tenacity and spunk, all in a single voice.