Etta James - Miss Pitiful - Non-Album Tracks (1968-1969)

I have to admit that I find Etta James' music hit or miss. She's had lots of really great songs, but plenty of duds too. I mostly like her at the box set level. A problem is that her personal like was messed up for much of her career, including pretty much all of the first half. She had lots of problems with drugs and dealings with shady people who brought her down. On top of that, she often got saddled with subpar production and mediocre songs.

Despite all that, there were times when she was firing on all cylinders and consistently came up with excellent performances. One of those times was in 1968 and 1969. James' career had been on the decline, with only a few minor hits in the previous few years. In my opinion, her turnaround in 1968 was inadvertently due to Aretha Franklin. Franklin was hugely talented, but her career had been foundering, due to a record company that misunderstood her and saddled her with the wrong production and songs (similar to James's problems at the time). But in early 1967, she got a new record company and a new producer who tried a new approach. They paired her up with a soulful backing back in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and basically let her be soulful instead of trying to push a more mainstream sound on her. The result was a bunch of hits that immediately turned Franklin into a big star.

Perhaps not surprisingly, James's record company tried to duplicate Franklin's model for success. They took her to Muscle Shoals and had her work with that exact same group of musicians, who by the way went on to play on tons of other classic records. (They're celebrated as "the Swampers" in the lyrics to Lynyrd Skynrd's song "Sweet Home Alabama.") Exactly like Franklin, James' soulfulness was unleashed. The result was a hit song in 1968, "Tell Mama," and an acclaimed album by the same name. If you don't have that album, I suggest you get it, because it's solid all the way through.

So, finally, we get to this album. It turns out the songs for the "Tell Mama" album weren't the only songs James performed with the Swampers in Alabama. After finishing that album in 1967, she went back there for a number of sessions in 1968 and early 1969. It had the same high level of quality, due to the sympathetic backing and letting her be more soulful. But for whatever reason, these songs weren't put on an album. Instead, her next album, called "Funk" and released in 1969, would come from other sessions recorded elsewhere, and she wouldn't play with the Swampers again.

What I've done is simply gather up all the other songs James played with the Swampers. That makes up 36 minutes of music, which was a typical album length at the time. (The "Tell Mama" album actually is even shorter, only 29 minutes long.) Some of the songs came out as A- and B-sides at the time, and one, "Miss Pitiful" was a minor hit and popular enough to make it on most of her best of collections, so that's why I've titled the album after it. But about half of them remained unreleased until coming out on archival releases decades later.

01 I Got You Babe (Etta James)
02 I Worship the Ground You Walk On (Etta James)
03 Do Right Woman, Do Right Man (Etta James)
04 You Got It (Etta James)
05 Fire (Etta James)
06 Almost Persuaded (Etta James)
07 You Took It (Etta James)
08 I've Gone Too Far (Etta James)
09 Misty (Etta James)
10 Miss Pitiful (Etta James)
11 Slow and Easy (Etta James)
12 Light My Fire (Etta James)
13 The Soul of a Man (Etta James)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15260262/EttaJms_1968-1969_MssPitiful_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo comes from the "Tell Mama" recording sessions at Muscle Shoals in 1967. To make it look more authentic, I added the same "stereo" and record company logos as on the "Tell Mama" album.