An Old School Kind of Love: Leela James Tributes Etta James

An Old School Kind of Love: Leela James Tributes Etta James

by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

Part of Etta James’ legacy, besides her singular voice, was her transgressive spirit.  James did much on her own terms, even until her death, and it is that spirit that vocalist Leela James’ taps into for her latest recording Loving You More (In the Spirit of Etta James). 

Like her 2009 “cover” recording Let’s Do It Again, Loving You More (Shanichie)is less a collection of remakes and more an example of James’ own original (and yes transgressive) interpretation of the music of an iconic figure such as Etta James.  The best indication of James’ intent is the opening track, in which the hard driving Rhythm & Blues of “Something’s Got a Hold on Me,” one of Etta James’ signature tunes, is featured as modern jump-beat replete with hand-claps.  Minus the brass instruments, Leela James’ version almost feels like it belongs in a Second Line. 

“Something Gotta Hold on Me” is one of the tracks on Loving You More, that will forever be linked to Etta James in the popular imagination.  The younger James might have been forgiven if she simply played it straight on some of these tunes—with her own unique vocal style—but to her credit, she apparently thinks more of Etta James’ legacy, and trusted that her own artistry would stand on its own.

With the help of producers Drew Ramsey and Shannon Sanders (Heather Headley’s “In My Mind”), James sounds assured and original on tracks like “I’d Rather Go Blind” and “At Last,” (she’s joined by Sanders on both.)  The two songs where staples on two of Etta James’ most popular early albums—her debut At Last (1961) and her “comeback” Tell Mama (1967)—and both feature piano lines reminiscent of classic Doo-Wop.  The songs are a nice gesture to Etta James’ early development as lead singer of The Peaches (“Roll with Me Henry), working with band leader Johnny Otis.

On the equally well known Etta James ballad, “A Sunday Kind of Love,” James is every bit as laid back, as her version recalls some of the recent work of Meshell Ndegeocello on recordings like Devil Halo (2009) and Weather (2011).  Etta James would likely find Leela James’ version unrecognizable, but in many ways that is the point.  The largesse of the late James’ vocal gifts has inspired artists (musical and otherwise), far beyond the Chess Records studios where she built her reputation. 

One of the strengths of Loving You More, is that Leela James was not simply content to delve into the most recognizable Etta James, and spends as much time on the later decades of James’ career, when she, like so many of her generation, were re-branded as two-fisted Blues singers.  It was a period when much of the nuance of James’ voice had been lost, but it still possessed its power.  It’s also a period where James earned nearly a dozen Grammy nominations and won the award on three occasions in three different categories.

Audiences were re-introduced to James with the release of her live recording Seven Year Itch (1989), from which Leela James offers a version of Etta James’ “Damn Your Eyes.”  In the spirit of the era that it was recorded, Leela James performs the song in a style that immediately recalls mid-1980s synth-R&B like Cherrelle and Alexander O’Neal’s “Saturday Love,” while the background vocals feature the refrain “damn, damn, damn” in a pop culture reference to Good Times.

Leela James draws from Etta James’ own collection of covers—1998’s Life, Love and the Blues—performing “I Want to Ta-Ta You Baby,” a song originally recorded by the late Johnny Guitar Watson for his classic Ain’t That a Bitch (1976).  Leela James version is closer to the Watson original than James’ cover.  Ain’t That a Bitch also features Watson’s “Superman Lover,” which became a favored hip-hop sample in the 1990s.  Leela James makes those connections to Hip-hop with her version of James’ “It Hurts Me So Much” (1961), featuring a sample of Dr. Dre’s “Still Dre,” as the song serves as a homage to the city of Los Angeles, of which both of the James women and Dr. Dre are some of the city’s native children.

Leela James’ willingness to re-imagine the music of Etta James through many musical and historical contexts, speaks to the ways that the older James’ music was a constant inspiration for the younger James, regardless of what kinds of musical styles might have been catching her fancy at any given time.  Fittingly, one of the highlights of the recording is the Leela James original, “An Old School Kind of Love,” which is a simple reminder of the place that Etta James will always have in the hearts of her fans.

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Mark Anthony Neal is a Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University.  He is the author of several books, including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities. Follow him on twitter @NewBlackMan.

Leela James: "Something's Got a Hold on Me" (tribute to Etta James)

Shanachie Records 

Music Video by Leela James performing "Something's Got A Hold On Me" from the album Loving You More...In the Spirit of Etta James.

Christina Says Good-bye to Ms. Etta

Remembering Etta James

Remembering Etta James

by Henry A. Giroux | Truthout

My encounter with the music of Etta James constituted something of a rite of passage. I was a white, working-class kid who went to Catholic Youth Organization dances on Friday nights with small dreams, hoping to escape the boredom and sometimes explosive violence in my working-class neighborhood and find an outlet for the erupting and confusing desires that dominated the lives of young boys. The music was generally tame, and almost entirely white. Instead of Little Richard we got Pat Boone; instead of Little Anthony and the Imperials, we got the Beach Boys. When things got risky, we might have heard Carl Perkins or Elvis Presley.

Of course, the CYO was in a solidly white, working class neighborhood that listened to white singers who often stole the music of African American performers and stripped it of any passion, desire, sexuality, or integrity. The nuns patrolled those dances like vultures waiting for their prey to finally die. I can still hear them as they intervened between us as we danced telling us to leave room for the Blessed Virgin Mary. The refrain was repeated over and over again about not letting our bodies touch, and so it went.

As a basketball player at Hope High School, I also had an opportunity to go to parties on weekends with some of my black teammates. The first party I went to was in a basement apartment filled with smoke with bodies twisting, packed together, eyes lowered, dancing, flirting; young people were laughing, kissing and touching each other sweetly, with respect and great warmth, and in the background was Etta James singing “Trust in Me.” That beautiful, husky voice filled the room with sensuality, conflated bodies and desire, and for the first time I found myself dancing without moving my feet. In a moment, sensuality was liberated from the repressive policing that had marked my CYO days. Etta's music opened a door to new discoveries, friendships, and social relations and certainly a new understanding of what it meant to cross racial barriers free of the hostility that informed my neighborhood. More was at work here than the reclaiming of the body and desire. There was also the reclaiming of a deeper sense of solidarity and social justice. I never looked back after that, and Etta James became for me the musical equivalent of my literary hero James Baldwin.

Being underage, on weekends my high school friends and I could not go to a bar, so we often ended up on the third-floor flat that my parents rented and would drink a few bottles of beer, fire up the 45 rpm record player and listen to Etta. Etta was one of us. She was gritty, from a broken home, lived amid poverty, took drugs, and was hard as nails. Her music never sought to escape from her past, and in spite of the pathos, there was always a sense that with music came an affirmation of desire, struggle and hope. In that neighborhood, the body was all we had and more often than not it was the object of disciplinary repression whether in the schools or in the streets. Etta’s music recast the body as a source of joy, creativity and resistance. With Etta in the background, we talked about politics, women, school, how to beat the horses, sports and our future. After a couple of hours of listening to Etta, we would escape into the night, our heads filled with a musical sensibility and aesthetic that was rarely matched in the house parties we attended.

I never stopped listening to Etta James, not only because her music reminded me of some of the most memorable moments of my youth, but because she flaunted her cultural capital without apologies, combined passion and desire and lived on the edge merging her body and music into a constant reminder of what it meant to ground one's life in real struggles, disappointments, and hopes. She knew how to affirm rather than compromise both her music and the pathos and hope it embodied. She was a tough and talented lady.

Etta James was also a crossover artist, a border crosser, who helped break down the racist musical barriers that prevailed in the fifties and sixties. She also helped break down the racial barriers in my youth among black, brown and white working-class kids who viewed living in their bodies as an asset rather than a liability. She was a model for courage, for connecting the body to the mind, and her music was always about a world that seemed far more real than the Disnified bleach put out by racist radio stations.

Later in my life, I heard her sing at the Newport Jazz Festival, as well as in Toronto around 2006. When she sang "Fool That I Am," the sound was beautiful, moving and sensual as it was when I had heard it in my youth. Not everyone recognized her talent and President Obama made the dreadful and revealing mistake of having Beyoncé sing Etta’s signature song, “At Last,” at his inauguration. Etta later admitted she was hurt by the gesture. For me, this was not only an insult but also a sad commentary on how a hyper-consuming, talent flattening society had contributed to erasing a musical giant, or even worse, how Etta’s working-class legacy for middle-class politicians had become too dangerous to associate with.

Etta never bought the whitewash, the cleansing of history, life and memory, and it was reflected in every note she sang. No wonder she was rebuked by a president who later turned risk-free civility into a form of cowardice. She was more than a musical icon, she was a pioneer who pushed the boundaries of music and talent into the murky and complicated mix of a society struggling with racism, inequality, and injustice, and she found a space in which to remind us what it could mean to be moved to listen, dance and revel in our desires. In this age of electronic noise, talentless posturing and pure spectacle, Etta James stands out as a musical giant and a reminder of what music could be when it was rooted in passion, desire and possibility rather than in the corporate playbook version that has all but killed the kind of sound she produced.

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

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Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. His most recent books include: Youth in a Suspect Society (Palgrave, 2009); Politics After Hope: Obama and the Crisis of Youth, Race, and Democracy (Paradigm, 2010); Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror (Paradigm, 2010); The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (co-authored with Grace Pollock, Rowman and Littlefield, 2010); Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (Peter Lang, 2011); Henry Giroux on Critical Pedagogy (Continuum, 2011). His newest books:   Education and the Crisis of Public Values (Peter Lang) and Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (Paradigm Publishers) will be published in 2012). Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board of Directors. His website is www.henryagiroux.com.

Etta James: "Something Got a Hold on Me" (1962)

Etta James (1938-2012)