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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>She will be missed.... her music resonates in my
heart.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Debi R-S</FONT></DIV>
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style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=thansen@moscow.com href="mailto:thansen@moscow.com">Tom Hansen</A>
</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A title=vision2020@moscow.com
href="mailto:vision2020@moscow.com">Moscow Vision 2020</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Friday, January 20, 2012 8:57
PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> [Vision2020] Legendary blues
singer Etta James dead at 73</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN>Courtesy of today's (January 20, 2012)
Spokesman-Review.</SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN><BR></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN>------------------------------</SPAN></DIV><SPAN
class=Apple-style-span
style="FONT-SIZE: 14px; LINE-HEIGHT: 21px; FONT-FAMILY: Arial, sans-serif; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469)">
<H1
style="BORDER-TOP-WIDTH: 0px; CLEAR: both; PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; OVERFLOW-Y: visible! important; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; BORDER-LEFT-WIDTH: 0px; FONT-SIZE: 28px; OVERFLOW-X: visible! important; BORDER-BOTTOM-WIDTH: 0px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px; VERTICAL-ALIGN: baseline; LINE-HEIGHT: 1.2; PADDING-TOP: 0px; FONT-FAMILY: Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent; BORDER-RIGHT-WIDTH: 0px; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial">Legendary
blues singer Etta James dead at 73</H1></SPAN>
<DIV>LOS ANGELES — Etta James, the feisty R&B singer whose raw, passionate
vocals anchored many hits and made the yearning ballad “At Last” an enduring
anthem for weddings, commercials and even President Obama, died today. She was
73.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>James had been suffering from dementia, kidney problems, and battling
leukemia. In December 2011, her physician announced that her leukemia was
terminal, and asked for prayers for the singer. During her illness, her
husband Artis Mills and her two sons fought bitterly over control of her $1
million estate, though a deal was later struck keeping Mills as the
conservator and capping the singer’s expenses at $350,000.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>James died at Riverside Community Hospital, with her husband and sons at
her side, De Leon said.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>“It’s a tremendous loss for her fans around the world,” he said. “She’ll
be missed. A great American singer. Her music defied category.”</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Boldness was as much a trademark of James, a member of the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame, as her platinum-dyed mane.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>She scored her first hit when she was just a teenager with the suggestive
“Roll With Me, Henry,” which had to be changed to “The Wallflower” in order to
get airplay. Over the years, she’d notch many more, carving a niche for
herself with her husky, soulful voice and her sassy attitude, which permeated
her songs.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>But it was her jazz-inflected rendition of “At Last” that would come to
define her and make her legendary. The song, which starts with sumptuous
strings before James begins to sing, was a remake of a 1941 standard. James
made it her own, and her version became the new standard.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Over the decades, countless brides have used it as their song down the
aisle, and it has been featured in car commercials and films like “American
Pie,” But perhaps most famously, U.S. President Barack Obama and the first
lady danced to a version of “At Last” at his inauguration ball.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>But the tender, sweet song belied the turmoil that James — born Jamesette
Hawkins in Los Angeles — would endure for much of her life. Her mother — whom
she described in her 1995 autobiography “Rage to Survive” as a scam artist, a
substance abuser and unstable — was a fleeting presence in her life during her
youth.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>She never knew her father, although she had been told that he was the
famous billiards player Minnesota Fats. When she was older, she met him and
asked about the rumor. He wouldn’t confirm or deny it: as James recalled, he
simply told her: “I don’t remember everything. I wish I did, but I
don’t.”</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Her mother would come in and out of her life, so she was raised by Lula
and Jesse Rogers, who owned the rooming house her mother once lived in. The
pair brought up James in the Christian faith, and even as a young girl, her
voice stood out in the church choir. James would soon get solos and became so
well known, she said that Hollywood stars would come to see her perform.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>But she wouldn’t stay a gospel singer for long. Rhythm and blues soon
lured her away from the church, and she found herself drawn to the grittiness
of the music.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>“My mother always wanted me to be a jazz singer, but I always wanted to
be raunchy,” she recalled in her book.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>She was doing just that when bandleader Johnny Otis found her singing on
San Francisco street corners with a couple of girlfriends in the early
1950s.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>“At the time, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters had a hit with ‘Work With
Me, Annie,’ and we decided to do an answer. We didn’t think we would get in
show business, we were just running around making up answers to songs,” James
told The Associated Press in 1987.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>And so, they replied to Ballard with the song “Roll With Me,
Henry.”</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>When Otis heard it, he told James to get her mother’s permission to
accompany him to Los Angeles to make a recording. Instead, the 15-year-old
went home and forged her mother’s name on a note claiming she was 18.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>“At that time, you weren’t allowed to say ‘roll’ because it was
considered vulgar. So when Georgia Gibbs did her version, she renamed it
‘Dance With Me, Henry’ and it went to No. 1 on the pop charts,” the singer
recalled. The Gibbs song was one of several in the early rock era where white
singers got hits by covering songs by black artists, often with sanitized
lyrics.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>After her 1955 debut, James toured with Otis’ revue, sometimes earning
only $10 a night. Things changed for the better in 1959, when she signed with
Chicago’s legendary Chess label and began cranking out the hits and going on
tours with performers such as Bobby Vinton, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Gene
Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis and the Everly Brothers.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>“We would travel on four buses to all the big auditoriums. And we had a
lot of fun,” she recalled in 1987.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>She also had a lot of success. James went on to record a string of hits
in the late 1950s and ‘60s including “Trust In Me,” “Something’s Got a Hold On
Me,” “Sunday Kind of Love,” “All I Could Do Was Cry,” and of course, “At
Last.”</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Chess Records, whose founder, Leonard Chess, called James their first
soul singer, she wrote.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>“He went up and down the halls of Chess announcing, ‘Etta’s crossed over!
Etta’s crossed over!’ I still didn’t know exactly what that meant, except that
maybe more white people were listening to me. The Chess brothers kept saying
how I was their first soul singer, that I was taking their label out of the
old Delta blues, out of rock and into the modern era. Soul was the new
direction,” she said in her autobiography. “But in my mind, I was singing old
style, not new.”</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>In 1967, she cut one of the most highly regarded soul albums of all time,
“Tell Mama,” an earthy fusion of rock and gospel music featuring blistering
horn arrangements, funky rhythms and a churchy chorus. A song from the album,
“Security,” was a top 40 single in 1968.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Her professional success, however, was balanced against personal demons —
drug addiction.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>“I was trying to be cool,” she told the AP in 1995, explaining what had
led her to try heroin.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>“I hung out in Harlem and saw Miles Davis and all the jazz cats,” she
said. “At one time, my heavy role models were all druggies. Billie Holiday
sang so groovy. Is that because she’s on drugs? It was in my mind as a young
person. I probably thought I was a young Billie Holiday, doing whatever came
with that.”</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>She was addicted to the drug for years, beginning in 1960, and it led to
a harrowing existence that included time behind bars and sapped her singing
abilities and her money, almost destroying her career. It would take her at
least two decades to beat her drug problem — her husband even went to prison
for years, taking full responsibility for drugs during an arrest, even though
James was culpable.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>“My management was suffering. My career was in the toilet. People tried
to help, but I was hell-bent on getting high,” she wrote of her drug habit in
1980.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>After she hit rock bottom, she finally quit the habit and managed herself
for a while, calling up small clubs and asking them, “Have you ever heard of
Etta James?” in order to get gigs. Eventually, she got regular bookings — even
drawing Elizabeth Taylor into an audience. In 1984, she was asked to sing the
national anthem at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, and her career got the
resurgent boost it needed, though she fought addiction again when she got
hooked on painkillers in the late 1980s.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Drug addiction wasn’t her only problem. She struggled with her weight,
and often performed from a wheelchair as she got older and heavier. In the
early 2000s, she had weight-loss surgery and shed some 200 pounds.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>James performed well into her senior years, and it was “At Last” that
kept bringing her the biggest ovations. The song was a perennial that never
aged, and on Jan. 20, 2009, as crowds celebrated that — at last — an
African-American had become president of the United States, the song played as
the first couple danced.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>But it was superstar Beyonce who sang the song to the Obamas, not the
legendary singer. Beyonce had portrayed James in “Cadillac Records,” a
big-screen retelling of Chess Records’ heyday, and had started to claim “At
Last” as her own.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>An audio clip surfaced of James at a concert shortly after the
inauguration, saying she “can’t stand Beyonce” and the singer had “no business
singing my song.” But she told the New York Daily News later that she was
joking, even though she had been hurt that she did not get the chance to
participate in the inauguration.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>James did get her accolades over the years. She was inducted into the
Rock Hall in 1993, captured a Grammy in 2003 for best contemporary blues album
for “Let’s Roll;” one in 2004 for best traditional blues album for “Blues to
the Bone;” and one for best jazz vocal performance for 1994’s “Mystery Lady:
Songs of Billie Holiday.” She was also awarded a special Grammy in 2003 for
lifetime achievement and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>But her health went into decline, and by 2011, she was being cared for at
home by a personal doctor. A struggle between her sons and her husband
developed as she became more ill, as he sought to control her estate. Her
sons, Donto James and Sametto James, had power of attorney over her
affairs.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Her doctor, Elaine James, who was not related to the singer, said the
legend needed help with basic tasks, such as feeding, dressing and
hygiene.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>---------------</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>In this Sept. 22, 1974, photo, Muhammad Ali plays a few notes
on the piano as singer Etta James looks on.
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV><IMG id=03AAC0D7-CC04-4281-A828-5D7D75F2096F height=407 alt=image.jpeg
src="cid:FD62FB1ABA7E47BEA35F433DDD6EACF8@OwnerPC" width=620
apple-original-height="407" apple-original-width="620"><BR>
<DIV><BR></DIV><SPAN class=Apple-style-span
style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469)">------------------------------</SPAN>
<DIV><SPAN><BR></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV>"At Last"<BR><SPAN></SPAN><SPAN><A
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsSS9VcMidA">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsSS9VcMidA</A></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN><BR></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN>"Something's Got a Hold On Me"</SPAN></DIV><SPAN
class=Apple-style-span
style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469)"><A
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzibSiJv8hc">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzibSiJv8hc</A></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=Apple-style-span
style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469)"><BR></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=Apple-style-span
style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469)">"A
Sunday Kind of Love"</SPAN></DIV><SPAN class=Apple-style-span
style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469)"><A
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAoCWpCJsuc">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAoCWpCJsuc</A></SPAN>
<DIV><SPAN class=Apple-style-span
style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469)"><BR></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV><SPAN>Rest well, Etta.</SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN></SPAN><BR><SPAN>Seeya later,
Moscow.</SPAN><BR><SPAN></SPAN><BR><SPAN>Tom Hansen</SPAN><BR><SPAN>Post
Falls, Idaho</SPAN><BR><SPAN></SPAN><BR><SPAN>"If not us,
who?</SPAN><BR><SPAN>If not now, when?"</SPAN><BR><SPAN></SPAN><BR><SPAN>-
Unknown</SPAN><BR><SPAN></SPAN><BR><SPAN></SPAN><BR></DIV></DIV>
<P>
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