Etta: An antidote to anger

THE FIRE

Etta James’ voice leaves me breathless. But not in the usual way. Hers isn’t a voice that lifts you above the fray, into the clouds on honeyed lyrics. No.

Etta dives straight into the gut and stokes the embers that one has been trying to keep at bay. Embers that have been slowly burning away, distracting one’s capacity for joy. The crackling embers of rage. 

ETTA KNOWS

Etta was born Jamesetta Hawkins in 1938, her mother pregnant at fourteen. Etta never knew her father, he was a figure of rumours. She was raised by adored adoptive parents before her mother returned for her when Etta was 12. Her mother may have come back for her, but an only minimally present mother — sweeping in and out on the glamourous scent of midnight cologne — she perhaps left the lingering weight of abandonment, perhaps later, an understanding. A largely self-parented teenager, Etta navigated a music career, substance abuse and adulthood early. 

A mugshot might mark Etta’s arrests for drugs and bad cheques, yet a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame proves that celebrated glittery talent can exist hand-in-hand with long and twisted roots. Etta’s telling of life reiterates that we are more than one thing. The soul behind her indelible voice comes from lived experiences - both of fame and felony. 

I’d Rather Go Blind is a song about a woman who can’t bear to watch her lover leave her for someone else. It’s nostalgic and heart-breaking with a haunting veil of envy. She sings it with the desperate fury of someone familiar with the injustice of loving and having loved ones leave. Singing live at Montreux in 1975, as a 37-year-old, her face contorts, sweat ripples down her neck as she forcefully ejects the words with a possessed jerkiness, as though she’s a vessel for many angry voices. She plays to the audience. Bends down to them from the stage, meets their eyes, drawing them into a trance. She brings her microphone down to her hip, letting the power of her raw, unamplified voice directly meet its audience. In parts, she is a gravelly, Hendrix guitar vocalised. She will stop and start, using silence, letting her audience catch up to the meaning in her words. She pulls her collar up to ‘blind’ herself, because one can still be playful in anger. Thirty years on, she sings I’d Rather Go Blind again, backed by the band The Roots. She wears a red sparkly jumper. This time she doesn’t lean into the audience or energetically cross back and forth as she sings, rather she is seated on stage. Although age is physically catching up with her, her mind doesn’t appear at all weary. She scats lyrics with wit. The fire is still there in the light reflecting off her sparkly jumper, in the sweat glistening on her brow and in the tears in her eyes. 

Although I’d Rather Go Blind is a story of agony, she also sang with just as much heart about hope. When she sings At Last it’s as though an older couple is dancing in public. Their audience grows. The backing music stops and her voice alone moves them. They circle, roll out to their arm’s length, to the brink of separation, before they roll back into each other. The scene is like the aftermath of a drama, a lifetime together, when a marriage finds that in fact it could climb down off the rocks. 

Etta sings,

Oh and then the spell was cast

And here we are in Heaven

For you are mine

At last....

Her rendition of At Last suggests that enduring love isn’t always blissful with sun rays, but rather those are the ephemeral moments in between anger, forgiveness and mundane life. Which is ok, Etta seems to hint, because sometimes love also needs to be endured. 

Etta passed away in 2012 from leukaemia. A six-decade career that inspired the sound of other musicians we know, alongside a lifetime of battles with lovers, friends, the authorities, dementia and herself. Only someone who knows rage like this, the never-ending rolling hills of it, detailed in her autobiography Rage to Survive, can deliver music raw enough to make one recognise one’s own. During her life she was shamed for her rage, her outbursts — but in a way her anger could be considered a source of her music’s power, its visceral effect.

THE PURGE

Etta makes fury sound beautiful, enough that it fuels that angry fire in the belly, until the maelstrom of waves simply has to boil over. She forces this necessary emotional purge. In John Le Carré’s novel, The Tailor of Panama, a female character describes her own temperamental fury as ‘the tantrums that ran through me like conflicting impulses of hereditary electricity.’ It’s this kind of caged fury, reverberating around nerves, that Etta relieves by poking holes in dignity, so that these currents of energy might ride on the backs of tears out of the body. 

She sings,

Something deep down in my soul said “Cry girl”

Cry Cry

A PHOENIX

In my mind Tell Mama, a soulful album she recorded in the 1960s, transports me to a kitchen table, cupped hands prop up my head, a stiff drink nudges a resting elbow. Someone I trust listens to my grievances, taking a little of their weight. Etta’s songs hug the body like this, an angry hug that squeezes the last self-pitying thought out, provoking a kind of gentle exorcism– it’s this quality of her music that renders one breathless. 

At the end of Etta’s songs there’s a stillness left behind, after the anger has gone, like she’s gifted a pocket of silence that one can rest in for a moment, building resilience. 

When a melancholia won’t shift, the French call it ‘la vague à l’âme’ (my soul is in the waves). No therapy will replace this deep-rooted rage with strength, the way Etta can. 

This is a reflection on Etta James’ music, and how it reaches beyond the ears. Regarding her own life experiences and sentiments, I refer to candid recollections from her autobiography, Rage to Survive, 1995.