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When Etta James arrived at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in July 1967 to record a new album, she was, according to her take-no-prisoners memoir Rage to Survive, “cranky and pregnant and ready to blow the doors off the studio”. Her 1960 debut album At Last! had been well received and she’d had several successful records since, but now her career was in something of a slump. Leonard Chess, the boss of her label, decided to take her to Muscle Shoals, where Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett had recorded hits in Rick Hall’s Fame Studios.
James brought along a song she had written a few months earlier with a friend who was incarcerated. Ellington Jordan had contacted her about a melody he’d come up with. She visited him in jail and he played it for her on a piano in the dayroom. She recalled the tune as “haunting as an old dream”. They finished the song together and she recorded it at her first session at Muscle Shoals, with the studio’s legendary house band, the Swampers, whom she admiringly described as “a bunch of bad white boys who could play sure-enough R&B with as much authenticity as Little Richard or James Brown”.
Let us know your memories of ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’ in the comments section below
The paperback edition of ‘The Life of a Song: The stories behind 100 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Chambers
Music credits: Universal; Blue Horizon; TufAmerica; The Island Def Jam; Sony; J&R Adventures; Daptone; Dua Lipa/Warner
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