REST IN PEACE ETTA JAMES

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ETTA James, whose powerful, versatile and emotionally direct voice could enliven the raunchiest blues as well as the most subtle love songs, most indelibly in her signature hit At Last, has died, aged 73.

Her manager said the cause was complications of leukaemia.

James was not easy to pigeonhole. She is most often referred to as a rhythm and blues singer, and that is how she made her name in the 1950s with records such as Good Rockin' Daddy.

She was also convincing singing pop standards, as she did in 1961 with At Last. And among her four Grammy awards was one for best jazz vocal performance, which she won in 1995 for the album Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday.

Regardless of how she was categorised, she was admired. Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote in 1990 that she had ''one of the great voices in American popular music, with a huge range, a multiplicity of tones and vast reserves of volume''.

For all her accomplishments, James had an up-and-down career, partly because of changing audience tastes but largely because of drug problems. She developed a heroin habit in the 1960s; after she overcame it in the 1970s, she began using cocaine.

Etta James was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles in 1938. Her mother, Dorothy Hawkins, was 14 at the time; her father was long gone, and James never knew for sure who he was, although she recalled her mother telling her that he was the celebrated pool player Rudolf Wanderone, better known as Minnesota Fats.

She was 15 when she made her first record, Roll With Me Henry. When some disc jockeys complained that the title was too suggestive, the name was changed to The Wallflower. The song rose to No. 2 on the R&B charts in 1954.

In 1960 James was signed by Chess Records, home to Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and other leading lights of black music. She quickly had a string of hits, including All I Could Do Was Cry, Trust in Me and At Last.

She remained with Chess well into the 1970s, reappearing on the charts after a long absence in 1967 with the funky and high-spirited Tell Mama. In the late '70s and early '80s she opened for the Rolling Stones in concert.

After decades of drifting in and out of the public eye, James found herself in the news in 2009 after Beyonce Knowles recorded a version of At Last.

James' is survived by her husband of 42 years, Artis Mills; two sons, Donto and Sametto James; and four grandchildren. Though her life had its troubles to the end, James said she wanted her music to transcend unhappiness rather than reflect it.

''A lot of people think the blues is depressing,'' she said in 1992, ''but that's not the blues I'm singing. When I'm singing blues, I'm singing life. People that can't stand to listen to the blues, they've got to be phonies.''