"At Last" (Etta James)

Etta James needed a career comeback.  And she was just 22 years old.  She'd had a couple of small R&B hits as a teenager in the mid/late 50s but had struggled to really make a name for herself.
Until she signed with Argo Records, an imprint of Chess, in 1960.
Rather than stick James back in a typical R&B context, label founder Leonard Chess decided she needed the crooner treatment instead, backing her with a full orchestra.  Instinctively, he knew that combining James's Ruth Brown-like swagger with lush strings would be the ticket to her success.
The hit singles and breakthrough album that resulted, 1960's At Last!, include some of my favorite performances ever put to tape.  On that album, James tackles everything from gritty blues to soulful, jazzy ballads, and she does it all seamlessly, sounding much older and wiser than any 22-year-old probably should.
But the apex of the whole disc really is "At Last" (as Chess no doubt knew when he titled the album).
A lot of people don't realize, though, that the song had already been around for almost two decades when James made it her own.  Bandleader Glenn Miller had recorded it with his orchestra for a 1942 cornball musical comedy called Orchestra Wives (you can watch a clip of the band playing the tune here).  I actually remember hearing that version on a Miller compilation album at my grandmother's house, many years before I first heard James's version on the Rain Man soundtrack (1988).  Miller's original is pleasant—a nice, dreamy little foxtrot that's made for strolling to the punchbowl between fast numbers.  (In other words, kind of forgettable.)
But James's interpretation is another thing entirely: the strings swell like a heart ready to burst, while James expertly wrings the emotion out of every syllable, caressing the tender moments and trumpeting every exclamation.  Dramatic without being melodramatic, romantic without being hokey, it's perfect in every possible way.