"AT LAST" (1941)

"At Last," written nearly 70 years ago, recently has been in the news more than most contemporary songs. It received worldwide notoriety when it was selected as the song for the first dance of President and Mrs. Obama at the ten official inaugural balls in January 2009. A month earlier the Tri-Star Pictures film Cadillac Records had been released, and "At Last" featured prominently on its soundtrack. The film is a dramatization of the history of Chess Records, the legendary recording studio of the 1950s and 1960s that made Chicago the home of the blues, R&B and rock-n-roll. The film was so named because of the Chess penchant for giving its black musicians Cadillacs in lieu of paying them royalties for their hit songs. Beyoncé Knowles, who played the role of Chess recording star Etta James in the film, sang "At Last" on the soundtrack and for the first dance at the first inaugural ball. Various renditions of the song were used for the other nine balls.
Critics gave Cadillac Records favorable reviews, and even though the film wasn’t completely historically accurate, it received high praise for its depiction of the musicians and their music. In his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert wrote, "Cadillac Records" is an account of the Chess story that depends more on music than history, which is perhaps as it should be. The film is a fascinating record of the evolution of a black musical style, and the tangled motives of the white men who had an instinct for it. The Chess brothers, Leonard and Phil, walked into neighborhoods that were dicey for white men after midnight, packed firearms, found or were found by the most gifted musicians of the emerging urban music, and recorded them in a studio so small it forced the sound out into the world."
Chess was founded in 1950 by the Polish immigrant brothers Leonard and Phil Chess, who sought out and recorded artists who would become some of the greatest names in blues and R&B, among them Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Chuck Berry and, significantly for this week's song, Etta James. Leonard Chess signed Etta James to the Chess label in 1960 when he was searching for female singing stars to add balance to his male-dominated label. James, in her autobiography Rage to Survive, gives her impression of Leonard Chess: "Leonard was funny. He couldn’t keep a beat. Unlike Jerry Wexler or Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records, he wasn’t a music scholar. Yet he had heart and soul. He related to emotions inside the music." She goes on to say, "Through his bar and liquor business, he’d been exposed to all these great Chicago bluesmen. He saw their popularity among the folks in the neighborhood. He also saw that the big labels were ignoring them. And because he really didn’t know much about music, when he recorded them, he left them alone. He let Memphis Slim and Howlin’ Wolf be their own bad selves. He cut their records without frills. He also hired people like Willie Dixon, who was organized and could write a song or rewrite someone else’s. There was so much raw talent floating around the Chicago ghetto, it was hard to make a musical mistake. And Leonard didn’t make many."
While Leonard Chess may have recorded artists like Howlin’ Wolf without frills, he didn’t follow that policy when he recorded James singing "At Last." He added a background of strings and lush orchestration, hoping for a crossover hit. The recording reached the #2 position on the Black Singles Charts in 1961 (the category has since been renamed the R&B/Hip Hop chart), but also entered the Billboard Top 100 peaking at position #47. When the record became a hit with white audiences, James recalled how Leonard Chess "…went up and down the halls of Chess announcing, "Etta’s crossed over! Etta’s crossed over!" I still didn’t know exactly what that meant, except that maybe more white people were listening to me." James became Chess Records’ first crossover star.
Before the James recording, "At Last" already had a long history, which began when it was introduced in the 1942 film Orchestra Wives and recorded on the RCA Records label by the Glenn Miller Orchestra with singer Ray Eberle. The recording was a big hit for the Miller orchestra, peaking at #14 on the Billboard pop charts in 1942. At the time of the film's release, critics praised the performance of great musical numbers by Miller’s band, but were critical of a plot they judged trivial and fatuous. The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote, "Hep cats and other such fauna who are "sent" by Glenn Miller's honeyed swing will be the most likely recipients of Twentieth Century-Fox's "Orchestra Wives," which was wafted into the Roxy on wings of song and little else yesterday. For once more the Hollywood tailors have draped the shivering shoulders of a popular band with a trifling little story which is as ridiculous as a zoot suit and has no more shape or distinction than one of those forbidden garbs. Mr. Miller and his assorted virtuosos are killers when it comes to making jive, but it takes more than wind and willingness to support a ninety-seven-minute film." The film’s reputation with critics has improved since that initial harsh opinion. Paradoxically, it has come to be seen as one of the more realistic films in its genre and innovative in the way it incorporates the Miller band into the plot. It was to be the last of the two films in which the Glenn Miller Orchestra appeared. A third and fourth film were planned, but Miller’s plane disappeared in 1944 when he was flying across the English Channel from England to France to entertain the troops who just had liberated Paris. No trace of the plane or passengers was found. His loss gave the film a significance that couldn’t have been foretold at the time of its release, and made it a collector’s item. But even at the time of the film’s release, critics liked the film score, which had a few hit songs by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon. Their songs included "I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo" and "Serenade in Blue," but composer Warren particularly favored "At Last" and occasionally would draw the first two bars of the melody when signing his autograph.
However, "At Last" doesn’t need its newfound notoriety to ensure its popularity. It is a perennial top choice for the first dance at wedding receptions, and continues to be recorded frequently in a wide range of genres, including country, easy listening, pop, rock ‘n roll and electronic, in addition to numerous jazz, blues and R&B versions. In 1957 Nat King Cole sang it on his #1 album Love is the Thing. It made another trip to the pop charts in 2002 when Celine Dion’s cover peaked at #16 on the Billboard Hot 100 Adult Contemporary Tracks, and again in 2008 when Beyoncé Knowles’ recording peaked at #67 on the Billboard Hot 100 and at #79 on the Billboard Hot 100 R&B/Hip Hop Songs. But no matter how many recordings other artists make of it, Etta James’ 1961 version of "At Last" likely will remain the song’s definitive recording, and her rendition was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. Therefore, it’s appropriate to give James the last word on "At Last." In a newspaper interview in 2005 when discussing her live performances of the song, she said, "I don't try to keep it fresh. I never really try to find the newness in it. I just remember the beginning of it, how powerful it is and how it’s lasted."
Hear and see Etta James performing "At Last": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADDigK8LwyE