tagged w/ Jerry Wexler
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Los Angeles Times...
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Public viewing scheduled for Etta James
January 25, 2012
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A public viewing will be held Friday in Inglewood for R&B great Etta James, who died last week at the age of 73, a family representative said.
The viewing will be from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. in the Manchester Chapel at Inglewood Cemetery Mortuary, 3801 W. Manchester Blvd.
The Rev. Al Sharpton will lead a private memorial service for the singer Saturday.
—Phil Willon
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/arts/music/etta-james-singer-dies-at-73.html
The New York Times...
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Etta James, Powerful Voice Behind ‘At Last,’ Dies at 73
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PHOTO:
Etta James in the studio in Chicago with the Chess Records founder Phil Chess, left, and the producer Ralph Bass in 1960.
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By PETER KEEPNEWS
Published: January 20, 2012
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Etta James, whose powerful, versatile and emotionally direct voice could enliven the raunchiest blues as well as the subtlest love songs, most indelibly in her signature hit, “At Last,” died Friday morning in Riverside, Calif. She was 73.
Her manager, Lupe De Leon, said that the cause was complications of leukemia. Ms. James, who died at Riverside Community Hospital, had been undergoing treatment for some time for a number of conditions, including leukemia and dementia. She also lived in Riverside.
Ms. James was not easy to pigeonhole. She is most often referred to as a rhythm and blues singer, and that is how she made her name in the 1950s with records like “Good Rockin’ Daddy.” She is in both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame.
She was also comfortable, and convincing, singing pop standards, as she did in 1961 with “At Last,” which was written in 1941 and originally recorded by Glenn Miller’s orchestra. And among her four Grammy Awards (including a lifetime-achievement honor in 2003) was one for best jazz vocal performance, which she won in 1995 for the album “Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday.”
Regardless of how she was categorized, she was admired. Expressing a common sentiment, Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote in 1990 that she had “one of the great voices in American popular music, with a huge range, a multiplicity of tones and vast reserves of volume.”
For all her accomplishments, Ms. James had an up-and-down career, partly because of changing audience tastes but largely because of drug problems. She developed a heroin habit in the 1960s; after she overcame it in the 1970s, she began using cocaine. She candidly described her struggles with addiction and her many trips to rehab in her autobiography, “Rage to Survive,” written with David Ritz (1995).
Etta James was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles on Jan. 25, 1938. Her mother, Dorothy Hawkins, was 14 at the time; her father was long gone, and Ms. James never knew for sure who he was, although she recalled her mother telling her that he was the celebrated pool player Rudolf Wanderone, better known as Minnesota Fats. She was reared by foster parents and moved to San Francisco with her mother when she was 12.
She began singing at the St. Paul Baptist Church in Los Angeles at 5 and turned to secular music as a teenager, forming a vocal group with two friends. She was 15 when she made her first record, “Roll With Me Henry,” which set her own lyrics to the tune of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters’ recent hit “Work With Me Annie.” When some disc jockeys complained that the title was too suggestive, the name was changed to “The Wallflower,” although the record itself was not.
“The Wallflower” rose to No. 2 on the rhythm-and-blues charts in 1954. As was often the case in those days with records by black performers, a toned-down version was soon recorded by a white singer and found a wider audience: Georgia Gibbs’s version, with the title and lyric changed to “Dance With Me, Henry,” was a No. 1 pop hit in 1955. (Its success was not entirely bad news for Ms. James. She shared the songwriting royalties with Mr. Ballard and the bandleader and talent scout Johnny Otis, who had arranged for her recording session. (Mr. Otis died on Tuesday.)
In 1960 Ms. James was signed by Chess Records, the Chicago label that was home to Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and other leading lights of black music. She quickly had a string of hits, including “All I Could Do Was Cry,” “Trust in Me” and “At Last,” which established her as Chess’s first major female star.
She remained with Chess well into the 1970s, reappearing on the charts after a long absence in 1967 with the funky and high-spirited “Tell Mama.” In the late ’70s and early ’80s she was an opening act for the Rolling Stones.
After decades of touring, recording for various labels and drifting in and out of the public eye, Ms. James found herself in the news in 2009 after Beyoncé Knowles recorded a version of “At Last” closely modeled on hers. (Ms. Knowles played Ms. James in the 2008 movie “Cadillac Records,” a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of Chess.) Ms. Knowles also performed “At Last” at an inaugural ball for President Obama in Washington.
When the movie was released, Ms. James had kind words for Ms. Knowles’s portrayal. But in February 2009, referring specifically to the Washington performance, she told an audience, “I can’t stand Beyoncé,” and threatened to “whip” the younger singer for singing “At Last.” She later said she had been joking, but she did add that she wished she had been invited to sing the song herself for the new president.
Ms. James’s survivors include her husband of 42 years, Artis Mills; two sons, Donto and Sametto James; and four grandchildren.
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Though her life had its share of troubles to the end — her husband and sons were locked in a long-running battle over control of her estate, which was resolved in her husband’s favor only weeks before her death — Ms. James said she wanted her music to transcend unhappiness rather than reflect it.
“A lot of people think the blues is depressing,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1992, “but that’s not the blues I’m singing. 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.”
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http://collegecandy.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/etta-james.jpg?w=600&h=337
.Los Angeles Times...
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Public viewing scheduled for Etta James
January... more
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Jerry Wexler was a World War II hero and one of the most successful and influential music producers of his time. From the time he became a partner at Atlantic Records in 1953 he helped cultivate the musical careers of such artists as Ray Charles, the Drifters, Aretha Franklink, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan and George Michael. An inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Wexler enjoyed close to 30 years of success in the industry he helped mold.Jerry Wexler was a World War II hero and one of the most successful and influential... more
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Jerry Wexler, the influential Atlantic Records producer who coined the term "rhythm and blues" before helping shape that music into one of the most powerful musical forces of the 1950s and '60s, died this morning at his home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 91.
Wexler had suffered in recent years from congenital heart disease, said David Ritz, who co-authored Wexler's 1994 autobiography "Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music."
As Atlantic co-founder Ahmet Ertegun's partner during that label's vital years from the '50s to the '70s, Wexler co-piloted one of the most successful and influential independent record companies in history.
"Wexler's efforts at Atlantic helped bring black music to the masses, and in so doing built a significant and lasting bridge between the races," according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which inducted Wexler as a non-performer in 1987.
In the early 1960s, Wexler signed a gospel singer whose career had been languishing at another record label and unleashed her vocal talent, helping turn Aretha Franklin into "the Queen of Soul." He also produced numerous hits for Wilson Pickett, Ray Charles and the Drifters and later, with rock performers including Dire Straits and Bob Dylan, whose 1979 album "Slow Train Coming," produced by Wexler, earned Dylan his first Grammy award.
"He was one of the last of these record guys who grew up in the rough-and-tumble music business -- independents who had to bang it out, press them and get them out on the street because other people were stealing songs left and right," Ritz said today. "It was really a free-for-all.
"If you weren't Louis Armstrong or the Mills Brothers, the major labels didn't want to deal with you," Ritz added. "They didn't want to deal with R&B because they didn't understand it. Jerry had the street toughness to survive in that environment, but he also had such wonderful taste, and a deep, deep appreciation for the artistry of Ray Charles and Solomon Burke and on and on and on."
In addition to producing hundreds of recordings for Atlantic, Wexler was known for his endless passion for promoting those records.
"He loved the music and he lived the music," soul singer Burke said Friday. "He lived the rhythm and blues. . . . His greatest job was being the ears of Atlantic Records' R&B division; he had great ears and he could hear things other people couldn't hear.
"But he also was a great promoter who worked 24 hours a day to promote a record," Burke said. "If he wanted a record to happen, it would happen. . . . If he made a record at 1 o'clock in the morning, at 2:30 in the morning he was on the phone waking up a deejay to tell him about it, and he'd have that record waiting at the station when the morning deejay got there at 6:30."
Jerry Wexler, the influential Atlantic Records producer who coined the term... more
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