Etta James - Top Ten

Released - 1963

Genre - Blues

Producer - Leonard Chess

Selected Personnel - Etta James (Vocals)

Standout Track - At Last

It's a bit of an anomalous entry, this one, really, in that Etta James's Top Ten is an album I didn't even know I owned until yesterday, and that I immediately included on my "Greatest Albums" list before I'd even listened to it all the way through as an album. I'll explain. Etta James, one of the most iconic and timeless stars of soul, blues and R&B music, has been firmly enshrined as one of my favourite artists for the majority of my life. I remember her unforgettably sassy, raunchy cover of Willie Dixon's "I Just Want To Make Love To You" (first recorded by blues legend Muddy Waters) when it was used in a Pepsi ad in the mid-90s. The surprisingly (for the early 60s) upfront sexiness pretty much went over my head as a six or seven-year-old and I remember just thinking it sounded cool, and it became one of the first songs that I enjoyed enough and that made a big enough impression on me for me to really remember it and let it lodge itself in my memory. Of course, I was too young to start taking an active interest in musical artists off the back of one song, but even as I was growing up I continued to be surrounded by Etta James's music as she has been responsible for so many songs that have become unavoidable due to their classic status.

By the time I was able to start developing proper musical tastes and interests of my own, Etta James, the woman behind that song that had made me sit up and pay attention as a very young child, was high on my list, and I availed myself of a number of greatest hits compilations and extensive retrospective anthologies, but never once bothered to listen to an Etta James studio album. My reasons for this, essentially, are that the business of making music was very different before the mid-60s and certainly didn't have the same focus on studio albums as began to develop in that decade. While jazz musicians started making interesting albums in the 50s that they had creative control over, like Miles Davis's wonderful Kind Of Blue, it wasn't really until the rise of folk and rock in the mid-60s that more mainstream popular music began to focus more on albums as well. Before that, within the world of pop, soul and R&B music, everything was very much controlled and created by record companies, who would assign songs and session musicians to particular artists, orchestrate the sessions for recording the songs and market the resultant recordings as singles. Albums were rarely much more than a collection of recent singles from that particular artist, and the pop music of the late 50s and early 60s has just always struck me as an era that's equally well represented through greatest hits compilations and retrospective best-of's as through studio albums, which simply didn't have the same level of care and creativity put into them as became typical in the 60s.

But, while researching Etta James's studio discography in an idle moment I happened to notice that, among the greatest hits I owned across the compilations I'd become familiar with, I happened to have all the songs that made up a 1963 album of hers entitled Top Ten. On looking further I found that that album consisted of a number of my very favourites of hers, and it was immediately a shoe-in for talking about here - an album containing some of my very favourite songs by one of my favourite singers, what's not to love? That said, its inclusion here does have to come with caveats, in that it's still not, strictly speaking, a true studio album in that it consists mostly of Etta's best-selling singles from the previous two years along with three new songs in the form of "Pushover," "Stop The Wedding" and "Would It Make Any Difference To You." The inclusion of new material just about scrapes it a "studio album" status, although it doesn't quite fit in with my rules. Still, the now established notion of what a studio album even is is one that wasn't really fully understood by the music industry at large until the mid-60s, so the fact that this comes close is good enough for me, and quite apart from anything else, it lets me talk briefly about an artist I've loved my whole life but assumed I wouldn't ever get round to talking about on this blog as I never thought I'd end up listening to one of her actual albums.

Essentially, what this album does is provide a concise overview of just how astoundingly good Etta James's music was even in the first two years of her solo career. Her voice is equally at home in the smooth, breathy registers of ballads like "A Sunday Kind Of Love" as it is making hoarse, passionate cries of protest on more upbeat songs like "Stop The Wedding." The music, too, is impressively diverse for an early 60s popstar, who are so often manipulated and sculpted by record executives into repeating a particular formula until it exhausts itself. There are high-tempo R&B numbers like "Something's Got A Hold On Me" alongside more lushly orchestrated jazzy ballads like "Trust In Me." Somehow, despite her being one of a vast number of young soul singers in the early 60s, Etta's music has always struck me as being far more individual and far more noteworthy than any number of similar artists at the time, and her relationship with label chief Leonard Chess seems to bear that out. For one thing, although Chess was convinced James would become a success making popular, mass-appeal ballads and encouraged her to record more songs of that genre, he never succeeded (if indeed he ever attempted) to totally convince her to leave behind her blues and R&B roots entirely, and there is always that earthier, rawer energy to her music alongside the lush sentimentality of the ballads. Not only that, but on pretty much every album she released there was at least one or two songs co-written by Etta herself, which suggests a greater degree of creative control over her musical style and identity than many similar artists were allowed at the time.

Etta's history before she became a musical icon is a fascinating one, too, and helps to further suggest that spirit of creative independence that shines through even on her most popular and commercial songs. Having never known her father and rarely seeing her mother, she was raised by a series of different foster parents and started being given musical training from the age of five (hence why a voice so masterfully mature, diverse and majestic could emerge from such a young woman) and ended up becoming a sort of local attraction, being beaten and intimidated by her music tutor so that she would give public performances. From this she developed a lifelong fear of being ordered to sing on demand, and this seems a fascinating glimpse into why she chose to pursue music as a career - she had enough negative memories of performance to give her a lifelong complex about it, but still took enough joy and pleasure in singing itself to make it into the thing that defined her, as long as she was permitted to do it entirely on her terms. Within this context, the striking individuality and independence of her music becomes not just a curious indicator of her talent, but a fascinating insight into the mentality and the creative drive that fuelled all her work.

The songs collected together on Top Ten represent some of the very pinnacles of her recording career, culled from her early run of albums for the Chess label. The immortal "Something's Got A Hold On Me" starts with a slow, gospel vocal intro before picking up pace into a frenzied, impassioned celebration of love complete with gospel-styled call and response and an unforgettable melody. It's sadly now probably best known due to the fact that its intro was sampled and repurposed as the chorus of Flo Rida's "Good Feeling" a couple of years ago but, as fun as that song is, Etta's bluesy original is a far superior song. "At Last" is perhaps the most immortal and iconic song she ever recorded, a masterfully beautiful and romantic song with soft, chiming piano and swirling, swooning strings providing the perfect backing to Etta's soulful evocation of long-awaited love. "Fool That I Am" and "A Sunday Kind Of Love" are two more near-perfect ballads, evoking a kind of lazy sensuality that infuses most of the album's first half.

The second half contains all the new material, with main single "Pushover" an upbeat R&B number with squawking saxes and a fun, bouncy vocal turn from Etta. "All I Could Do Is Cry" takes a classic blues template and adorns it with woodwinds, choral vocals to turn it into a lovely pop ballad, while its theme (feeling miserable at the wedding of a loved one) also inspires the following "Stop The Wedding," another new single. With its opening spoken vocal from the priest, it's gloriously contrived and hilariously heavy-handed, but again shows Etta completely dominating and owning the tune, escalating her vocal into a series of declamatory outbursts towards its conclusion. The closing two tracks are slightly less iconic but still great examples of her vocal prowess.

Altogether, I do feel very much that I'm bending the rules here by including this album, as a collection of previously released singles plus a couple of new tracks hardly feels like an actual coherent, creative piece of work worthy of great analysis, but it's just nice to be able to say a few words in favour of a beloved artist whose studio discography happens to have passed me by. If nothing else, though, it's remarkable to think that, of the career-wide anthologies I'm already familiar with, so many of the very best songs happened to all come from this intense period of creativity in the early 60s, undoubtedly her peak of significance and achievement. Discovering this album has also made me feel that, one day, I ought to put more time and effort into listening to the full studio output of 50s and 60s artists I love who I'm mostly familiar with through greatest hits compilations (Nat King Cole and the Inkspots are two of my very favourite artists from this era, but again I've always had a nagging feeling that their greatest hits are the best way to listen to them given that their music was developed and marketed chiefly as singles anyway). One of these days perhaps I'll give them a more thorough exploration, but for now there are so many artists who have worked consciously on making albums that are full representations of their own creativity that most 50s and 60s artists are on the back burner for me. Perhaps one day this blog will be stuffed full of Etta James and Nat King Cole studio albums, but for now I'll continue to content myself with listening to their classic singles, and this semi-album serves as a nice way to salute her musical achievements and encourage a few more people to look into her work if they're not already familiar with it.

Track Listing:

1. Something's Got A Hold On Me (Etta James; Leroy Kirkland & Pearl Woods)

2. My Dearest Darling (Eddie Bocage & Paul Gayten)

3. At Last (Mack Gordon & Harvey Warren)

4. Fool That I Am (Floyd Hunt)

5. A Sunday Kind Of Love (Barbara Belle; Anita Leonard; Louis Prima & Stan Rhodes)

6. Pushover (Billy Davis & Tony Clarke)

7. All I Could Do Is Cry (Billy Davis)

8. Stop The Wedding (Freddy Johnson; Leroy Kirkland & Pearl Woods)

9. Trust In Me (Milton Ager; Jean Schwartz & Ned Wever)

10. Would It Make Any Difference To You (Bob Forshee)