Etta James was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles on January 25, 1938. Her mother, Dorothy Hawkins, was fourteen, and her father was never identified. She grew up in Watts and in a series of foster homes and relatives' houses, and at the age of five she began vocal training with James Earle Hines, the choir director at St. Paul Baptist Church in South Los Angeles, where she became a soloist and sang on local radio. After the death in 1950 of the foster mother she knew as Mama Lu, her mother took her to San Francisco's Fillmore district. There, listening to doo-wop, she formed a girl group called the Creolettes.

As a teenager she met the bandleader Johnny Otis, who took the group under his wing, steered them to Modern Records, renamed them the Peaches and gave her the stage name Etta James by rearranging Jamesetta. In 1954 she recorded "Roll with Me Henry," an answer to Hank Ballard's "Work with Me, Annie," retitled "The Wallflower" for release. It came out in early 1955 and reached No. 1 on the R&B chart that February. Georgia Gibbs then covered it as "Dance with Me, Henry" and took her version to No. 1 on the Hot 100, which angered James. She followed with "Good Rockin' Daddy" (No. 6 R&B), struggled to repeat the success, and when her Modern contract came up in 1960 she signed with Chess Records.

At Chess, Leonard Chess pictured a classic ballad stylist who could cross over to the pop charts, and he put strings around her. "All I Could Do Was Cry" reached No. 2 on the R&B chart and No. 33 on the Hot 100 in 1960. Her debut album, At Last! (Argo, November 1960), was produced by Leonard and Phil Chess with arrangements by Riley Hampton, and it mixed jazz standards such as "Stormy Weather" and "A Sunday Kind of Love" with Willie Dixon's blues "I Just Want to Make Love to You" and R&B. Its title song, written by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon, had been a No. 2 hit for Glenn Miller's orchestra in 1942; James's version reached No. 2 on the R&B chart and No. 47 on the Hot 100, and it became the record she is best known for. The Second Time Around (1961) continued with standards including "Dream," "One for My Baby" and "Don't Get Around Much Anymore." In 1962 she turned toward gospel with "Something's Got a Hold on Me," and in September 1963 she cut the live album Etta James Rocks the House at the New Era Club in Nashville. By the mid-1960s she was addicted to heroin, she was arrested in 1966 for writing bad checks, and her career stalled after 1965.

She returned in 1967 with sessions at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, produced by Rick Hall. "Tell Mama" reached No. 10 on the R&B chart and No. 23 on the Hot 100, and its B-side, "I'd Rather Go Blind," became one of the most recorded blues ballads of the era. The Tell Mama album followed on Cadet in 1968. After Leonard Chess died in 1969 she kept recording for the label, moving toward rock and funk on her 1973 self-titled album, which drew a Grammy nomination, and she made Deep in the Night for Warner Bros. in 1978 with Jerry Wexler producing and a session band that included Cornell Dupree, Richard Tee, Plas Johnson, Chuck Rainey, Jeff Porcaro and Larry Carlton. That year she also opened shows for the Rolling Stones. She released little new studio work in the 1980s while she fought addiction and alcoholism, and her autobiography Rage to Survive (written with David Ritz, published by Villard in 1995) is frank about that period.

The recovery came in stages. She sang "When the Saints Go Marching In" at the opening ceremony of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. In May 1986 she and the saxophonist and singer Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson were recorded live at Marla's Memory Lane Supper Club in Los Angeles with a band led by the saxophonist Red Holloway and featuring the organist Jack McDuff and the guitarist Shuggie Otis. Fantasy issued the material in two volumes as Blues in the Night, and the album was nominated for the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Female. She signed with Island, made Seven Year Itch (1988) and Stickin' to My Guns (1990) at FAME Studios, recorded The Right Time for Elektra in 1992, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.

The jazz period of her catalogue began when she signed with Private Music and recorded with the producer John Snyder. Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday (March 15, 1994) was a tribute to Billie Holiday with the pianist and arranger Cedar Walton, Red Holloway on saxophones, bassist Tony Dumas, drummer Ralph Penland and guitarist Josh Sklair. It reached No. 2 on Billboard's Top Jazz Albums chart and won her first Grammy, for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, at the 37th ceremony in 1995. Time After Time (1995), also arranged by Walton, brought in the tenor saxophonists Eddie Harris and Herman Riley and the bassist John Clayton and reached No. 5 on the Top Jazz Albums chart. A Christmas album of standards (1998) and Heart of a Woman (1999), a set of love songs dedicated to Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae, followed. Heart of a Woman was nominated for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. Blue Gardenia (2001), thirteen standards arranged mostly by Walton, with Holloway on tenor saxophone and her mother singing on the title track, reached No. 1 on the Top Jazz Albums chart, her first No. 1 on any Billboard album chart.

She never left the blues. Let's Roll won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album in 2004, and Blues to the Bone won Best Traditional Blues Album in 2005, with her sons Donto and Sametto and the guitarist Josh Sklair in her band and in the producer's chair. She was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2001, received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003 and was ranked No. 22 on Rolling Stone's 2008 list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. Beyoncé portrayed her in the 2008 film Cadillac Records. Her last television appearance came in April 2009 on Dancing with the Stars. She had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2008 and with leukemia in 2011, and her final album, The Dreamer, was released on November 8, 2011. Etta James passed away at Riverside Community Hospital in Riverside, California, on January 20, 2012, five days before her seventy-fourth birthday.

Her core is blues, R&B and soul, and her place among the jazz and crossover artists rests on one clearly documented chapter of her career rather than the whole of it. That chapter has three parts: the standards on her first Chess albums, the 1986 live date with Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson and Red Holloway, and the Private Music records of 1994 to 2001, which brought a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, two more jazz vocal nominations (1987 and 2000) and a No. 1 album on the Billboard jazz chart. She was also a regular at jazz festivals, with appearances at Montreux in 1977, 1989, 1990 and 1993 and nine at Monterey. Only two of the subgenre tags above apply to her, and neither describes her main body of work.

Her voice was a contralto that deepened and coarsened over the decades, moving from the doo-wop and R&B marketing of the 1950s, through the string-backed ballads of her early Chess years, to the gospel-driven soul of the 1960s and the weathered blues of her later records. Her 1999 album honored four singers she named as favorites: Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae. One reviewer of the Private Music standards records judged that, with the right arrangements and material, she delivered them with the same force as her blues. Her own influence ran widely: Janis Joplin covered "Tell Mama" in concert, and Diana Ross, Christina Aguilera, Amy Winehouse and Adele are among the singers she is credited with influencing.