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After her disparaging comments about Beyonce and President Obama jumped from the Internet to mainstream media on Thursday, Etta James has come forward to say it was all just a joke.
An audio tape of James slamming Beyonce for singing her signature song at the first Inaugural Ball, and ridiculing Barack Obama for allowing it to happen, were not meant to be taken seriously, according to James.
"I'm a comedian besides a singer," she explained in a telephone interview with California's Press Enterprise from her home on Thursday morning. "I wasn't doing it to be hateful."
From "The View" to "Access Hollywood" to CNN, the sound of James disowning the president and threatening to "whip Beyonce's a**" blanketed television news outlets after TMZ.com first posted the comments from James' Jan. 28 show at Seattle's Paramount Theatre.
Before performing the song "At Last," which has been Etta's signature song since it became a hit for her in 1961, she told the crowd: "You guys know your president, right? You know the one with the big ears?" began her rant. "Wait a minute, he ain't my president. He might be yours; he ain't my president. But I tell you that woman he had singing for him, singing my song - she's going to get her a** whipped."
"The great Beyonce," James went on. "Like I said, she ain't mine...I can't stand Beyonce. She has no business up there, singing up there on a big ol' president day, gonna be singing my song that I've been singing forever."
James made similar anti-Beyonce remarks during a gig in Coquitlam, British Columbia on Jan. 31. She told the Press Enterprise that her comments were intended to be taken as, "She's up here singing my song, now what am I gonna do?"
The negative comments seemed to have come out of nowhere, as James had nothing but admiration for Beyonce a year ago when it was first reported that she would play her in the film "Cadillac Records."
"It's a privilege and an honor to have somebody like that girl," James told the New York Post in February of 2008. "I don't think she looks like me, but that's all right."
The 71-year-old singer is very protective of her signature song, and said she simply wanted the opportunity to sing it at the inaugural ball, where Beyonce performed: "She got up there and sang it and didn't give me a chance to sing 'At Last.'"
James isn't the first veteran R&B diva to put Beyonce on blast. One year ago this week at the 2008 Grammys, the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, took issue with Beyonce for introducing Tina Turner as "the queen."
Meanwhile, a not-so-favorable review of Etta James' Seattle concert by the Seattle Times was co-signed by a number of readers who had attended the show, according to the paper's arts critic Misha Berson.
One e-mail posted on the paper's Web site read: "We expect bawdy. We expect belting. But we got neither. Her gestures and mouthing seemed pathetic. Her voice barely registered over the sound of the band. (Possibly from the poor acoustics at the Paramount.) Overall she appeared stoned and in no condition to try to perform. We left early and missed the last song that the reviewer loved. But I went home and watched old videos of her and remembered the Etta James that I knew and loved."
