Born on January 25, 1938, in Los Angeles, California, Etta James' early childhood was tumultuous because her mother, Dorothy Hawkins, repeatedly kept passing off the responsibility of raising James to other people in her life. Hawkins was only 14 years old when she had James and was subjected to forced sterilization afterward. Hawkins would be out of James' life for months at a time and was so absent from her life that James referred to her as the Mystery Lady and described her as a crazy nightmare in her book.
Even when her mother would reappear and take James, she'd inevitably end up abandoning her daughter once again to go out. When she wasn't back in the mornings, James would "start crying, hungry and afraid that Dorothy would never come back, that no one would ever find me in this god-awful furnished room," James writes in "Rage to Survive."
Because of her mother's repeated abandonment, James told NPR that she went to therapy later in her life for all the negative feelings she developed as a result. She also attributed some of these feelings as the reason she start singing: "And so she did the best for me, because if she had tried to take me with her, she was just a child. What would she have done with me? Would I have been singing today? Would I have been anything, you know?"
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