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Blues singer’s late-’60s
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Review by Gary C.W. Chun
Star-Bulletin
"Tell Mama: The Complete Muscle Shoals Sessions" JAMESETTA HAWKINS' raw, gritty singing was a precursor to Janis Joplin herself, and her troubled private life also matched Janis', mainly due to an addiction to heroin. (At 63, she's since cleaned up and is still singing.)
Etta James (MCA/Chess)But the renamed Etta James, who had a string of R&B hits between the 1950s and '60s on the Modern label and Chicago-based Chess blues label, hit a dry spell in the early '60s.
All that changed when in 1967 -- taking a cue from Atlantic Records' Jerry Wexler, who had a budding talent in Aretha Franklin -- label head Leonard Chess had James follow Franklin's footsteps into Alabama's FAME Studios, located in rural Muscle Shoals, hoping that a bit of that nationwide chart success would rub off on her.
It's interesting to note that, of the 10 bonus tracks that beef up this reissue of James' greatest Chess album, two of them are takes of one of Aretha's early signature songs, "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man," produced by the man who oversaw the Franklin sessions, Rick Hall. The previously unreleased alternate take is the superior of the two; there are no superfluous flute and backing vocal tracks as on the other, and while James doesn't match Franklin's lighter tone, she certainly makes the song her own.
The same can be said for two songs she covered in '68. She and the studio band take Sonny Bono's "I Got You Babe" at a loping, soulful pace, revamping Sonny and Cher's original pop version, and even more revelatory, tear up the relatively dew-eyed meekness of the standard "Misty" with a brash, jazzy, even churchy live-in-the-studio performance that's as fun to listen to as it must have been for them to play.
James also turns in a fine country-inflected performance, complete with choral vocal harmonies, on "Almost Persuaded," partly penned by Hall's then-business partner Billy Sherrill, who went on to Nashville and established himself as one of country music's greatest producers.
The album marked a turning point in James' career and one of the prime recordings that the Muscle Shoals studio musicians became justly famous for.
Mixing original mono and stereo master recordings, the album, besides containing the classic title song and her trademark "I'd Rather Go Blind," is filled with the chemistry of a confident and assured studio band clicking with an exuberant 29-year-old singer.
This is more rhythm-and-soul that the rhythm-and-blues James was known for. She covers several songs written by soul men Don Covay ("Watch Dog" and a bluesy "I'm Gonna Take What He's Got") and Otis Redding (her rendition of "Security" does Otis right).
Her remake of the Jimmy Hughes hit "Steal Away" and "Don't Lose Your Good Thing" combines the prime Muscle Shoals sound of warm, punctuating horns with steady rhythm work by masters David Hood and Roger Dawkins.
Jerry Wexler described James, when she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, as "the greatest of all modern blues singers ... the undisputed Earth Mother." The songs she recorded back in Alabama in 1967-68 are ample proof.
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