Boyd Matson | Wild Chronicles

Etta James: Take It to the Limit

Years ago music legend Johnny Otis told me about the day he discovered one of the great R & B singers, Etta James.  She was 14 or 15 years old and had been singing in a little know girl’s group with two friends when she went to audition for Otis.  He said she was so shy that she insisted on going into another room to sing for him, so that he wouldn’t be able to watch her and she couldn’t see him while she was singing.  Today that would sound like a takeoff on the beginning of a new season of the NBC show, “The Voice.”

Etta James died a few days ago, the day after Johnny Otis passed away.  They both left a tremendous musical legacy. In the early eighties when I was doing the “On the Record” segment for the today show I was fortunate to get to spend some time with them for profile pieces on the show.  For one of the stories I filmed a performance by James in a women’s prison where she had served time for what, as best as I can remember, was a conviction for writting bad checks.  As James told me in a later interview, which is in this video piece, her real problem was an addiction to drugs, particularly heroin.

Whatever troubles she faced in her life, it seemed as if was able to channel all that emotion into her singing which made her vocals all the more powerful.  This video from the early 80′s was part of a series on women in rock, and is a reminder that all these years later she set a standard for vocalistists that few since have matched.