Etta James, Grammy-winning blues singer with pop appeal, dies

‘Miss Peaches’

She was born Jamesetta Hawkins on Jan. 25, 1938, in Los Angeles. For years, she insisted her father was pool shark Rudolf Wanderone, known as “Minnesota Fats,” a habitue of L.A.’s Central Avenue jazz clubs. Her paternity was never resolved, even after she confronted the billiards player in his Nashville apartment in 1987.

She was raised by her mother’s landlady, a woman named Mama Lu, who took her to a local Baptist church, where she fell in love with singing. When Mama Lu died in 1950, Ms. James went to live with relatives in San Francisco but was largely unsupervised.

“I went from being this nice little church girl to living in a rooming house,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I just turned incorrigible, drinkin’ wine, smokin’ weed and running the streets.”

Though weaned on church music, she said she began to like the blues “and the feeling it gave me. It gave me a naughty-girl feeling.” She recalled her mother’s fury when she came home one day and found her daughter listening to a 78 rpm of Guitar Slim’s “The Things That I Used to Do.” Her mother preferred Holiday and insulted her daughter’s taste. Ms. James claimed her mother never saw her perform until the late 1980s.

Ms. James hung out in gangs and began singing on the street in a cappella groups. One of them, the Peaches, provided her with her lifelong nickname, “Miss Peaches.”

In the early 1950s, she met bandleader and promoter Johnny Otis, who rechristened her by a simple flip of her first name. He guided her early career, leading to her first rhythm-and-blues hit,“Roll With Me, Henry” (1955). The tune, which she wrote, was a suggestive musical reply to Hank Ballard and the Midnighters’ “Work With Me, Annie.”

The song was released on Modern Records as “The Wallflower” to cloak the sexual theme. Singer Georgia Gibbs sang a sanitized version called “Dance With Me, Henry” that was a pop-chart success, and Ms. James said she was incensed about receiving no credit.

Ms. James toured with Little Richard and Bo Diddley and was a frequent performer on the black theater circuit. In 1960, she joined a major label for blues artists, Chicago-based Chess Records, and by the end of the decade began earning favorable comparisons with Aretha Franklin.

Label owner Leonard Chess reportedly thought Ms. James had a mass appeal that eluded many on his roster of primarily male, Delta blues musicians. He took special interest in guiding her career, which led to such broadly popular albums as “At Last!” The title song, written in 1941 by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon, had been a big-band standard.

Besides the title song, the album contained many songs with which she would remain associated: “Trust in Me,” “All I Could Do Was Cry ” and “I Just Want to Make Love to You. ”

Ms. James and Chess were portrayed as lovers in the 2008 movie “Cadillac Records,” a fictionalized account of the record label’s history, but Ms. James said their relationship was strictly business. Contemporary singer Beyonce Knowles played Ms. James in the movie.

Ms. James’s latter albums included “Time After Time” (1995), “Heart of a Woman” (1999) and “Blue Gardenia” (2001). She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 and the Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame in 2001.

In 1969, she married Artis Mills. Besides her husband, survivors include two sons from previous relationships, Donto James of Moreno Valley, Calif., and Sametto James of Riverside; and several grandchildren.

Ms. James sang at the opening ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles and remained a concert performer through recent years. She described herself as “statuesque”; she had once stood at 5-foot-11 and weighed well over 200 pounds. After a series of health reversals toward the end of her life, she was forced to use a wheelchair onstage.

Nevertheless, she still gave audiences some of the randy onstage writhing they had come to expect during her most vibrant days — sucking her thumb, cupping her breasts and growling her voice.

She frequently was caustic about where many modern singers had taken the rhythm-and-blues music she pioneered, naming Paula Abdul and Janet Jackson, for example, as hotshot dancers with little to recommend them vocally.

“A lot of people think the blues is depressing, but that’s not the blues I’m singing,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1992. “When I’m singing blues, I’m singing life. People that can’t stand to listen to the blues, they’ve got to be phonies.”

Staff writer Terence McArdle contributed to this report.