Etta James Quotes

I sing the songs that people need to hear.

This is an album of songs that I've always loved, tunes that I heard. For the first time in 53 years of recording, I really had control over an entire album, start to finish.

I want a Sunday kind of love
A love to last past Saturday night
And I'd like to know it's more than love at first sight

I was a sloppy kid, wanted to be just wild.

I'm not a braggart, but when I was a little girl people used to come from all over Hollywood to hear me sing.

They said that Etta James is still vulgar. I said, Oh, how dare them say I'm still vulgar. I'm vulgar because I dance in the chair. What would they want me to do? Want me to just be still or something like that? I've got to do something.

It's the same thing now. When I go onstage the young people scream and holler as much as the older generation.

You can't fake this music. You might be a great singer or a great musician but, in the need, that's got nothing to do with it. It's how you connect to the songs and to the history behind them.

And as I started reaching deeper I realized that most of the blues of that day was done by men. Women just didn't have the nerve.

To me, country music is like the blues, but it's something very hip and - I don't want to say commercial - but it's very worldly and good listening.

The two things you can't fake are good food and good music

The music was thunder and joy. Lightning bolts of happiness and praise, foot-stomping, dance-shouting, good-feeling singing from the soul.

I really turned into, you know, the real street kid. I was kind of like a runaway, but I had a mother, you know what I mean, and I had a place to stay.

Now I can stand up on the stage again like I used to after five years of sitting down while I sang.

People always say 'Etta, you know what your problem is? You're neither fish nor fowl. There is no place to rack you.' When I would go in a record shop, you might find one or two records by me in different stacks.

What happens is, when I perform, I'm somewhere else. I go back in time and get in touch with who I really am. I forget my troubles, my worries.

Country music has the great stories.

I've gone through so much in my life. I should have been dead a long time ago, but I am still here, and I'm the happiest I've ever been.

My mother always wanted me to be a jazz singer, but I always wanted to be raunchy,

Johnny Guitar ... just one of my favorite singers of all time. I met him when we were both on the road with Johnny Otis in the '50s when I was a teenager. We traveled the country in a car together. I would hear him sing every night.

I wanna show that gospel, country, blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll are all just really one thing. Those are the American music and that is the American culture.

When I'm performing for the people, I am me, then. I am that little girl who, when she was five years old, used to sing at church. Or I'm that 15-year-old young lady who wanted to be grown and wanted to sing and couldn't wait to be smokin' a cigarette, you know?

My mother was a jazz fanatic and she wanted me to play the piano so I could play jazz tunes. I wish I had learned but I was too busy getting into trouble!

A lot of people think the blues is depressing but that's not the blues I'm singing. When I'm singing blues, I singing life. People can't stand to listen to the blues, they've got to be phonies.

Most of the songs I sing have that blues feeling in it. They have that sorry feeling. And I don't know what I'm sorry about. I don't.

I am so happy that I am alive and can walk.

I took back my life.

It feels so good to be happy.

I figured I could do 'It's A Man's Man's Man's World', because I believe it's the truth.

I'm not a bourgeois person, never will be.

But even so, I still get nervous before I go onstage.

My mother always told me, even if a song has been done a thousand times, you can still bring something of your own to it.

It's not about battling the original artists when I record these songs, it's about paying tribute to them.

When I look out at the people and they look at me and they're smiling, then I know that I'm loved. That is the time when I have no worries, no problems.

Long as I was riding in a big Cadillac and dressed nice and had plenty of food, that's all I cared about.

I don't care who's playing. Even if it's my favorite artist, I'm probably not gonna go and see him.