Quotes from Etta James

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.

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.

See, I don't like places where people can't dance - don't like clubs or theatres where a bunch of bourgeois people sit around tip, tip, tipping their fingers.

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

My mother used to play nothing but Billie Holiday.

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

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.

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

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.

Even as a little child, I've always had that comedian kind of attitude.

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.

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.

Jazz took too much discipline. You have to come in at the right place, which is different than me singing the blues, where I can sing, 'Oh, baby ' if there's a pause in the melody. With jazz, you better leave that space open, or put in something real cool.

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.

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.

All the things I used to like - cookies, ice cream, gumbo - I don't like anymore.

That's where it begins and ends for me and these songs were the ones that touched me the deepest. It was like I was laying hold of some part of me that I didn't even know was there until I let it out.

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

A few years ago, I thought, I'll never make it. I started to go to the doctor to help me lose weight.

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?

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.

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

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

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.