[Image: Five multicolor hand drawn illustration of musical legends: Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Etta James as they sing.]
Five of my favorite ladies - Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Etta James. Graphite drawings over watercolor, digitally composited with a little use of the eraser tool in Photoshop. Other than those little circles, unedited.
Prints are available of all but Bessie at www.society6.com/kerosene. Get ‘em while you can! After Bessie is posted, I’ll leave the singles up for a week, before making the set of five together the only option.
—At Last has become arguably the most popular song in the U.S. for weddings, Valentine’s Day, or other kinds of bourgeois events calling for cheap sentimentality—despite the fact that James’s powerhouse vocals and phrasing actively work against the sentimentality of the song’s arrangement, as it does in most of her work covering jazz standards during that period.
But her vocals weren’t the only place James was working decidedly against a safe “jazz singer” image. She worked in her personal life and her styling to embody the kind of black urban street culture in which she was immersing herself:
“I [was] serious about turning little churchgoing Jamesetta into a tough bitch called Etta James…. I wanted to look like a great big high-yellow ho’. I wanted to be nasty.”
James ascribes the blonde-yellow hair and black eyebrows that she adopted early in her career to being closely associated with street-based sex workers and drag queens at the time. That’s who she was emulating.
From Kenyon Farrow’s insightful Political Obituary of Etta James, Colorlines, 1/24/12 (via racialicious)
RESPECT.
(via garconniere)
(via garconniere)