Etta James might not have come from the Mississippi Delta – she grew up Los Angeles and came of age in San Francisco – but she was a bona fide blues belter.

Growing up myself 30 years later, older people often told me that popular music – “pop music” – didn’t really exist before The Beatles. Which, if true, would mean there was nothing before 1963.

It took me a long time to find out that was rubbish.

The myth endured partly, I imagine, because in the eyes of those young Beatles fans, older “black” music – blues and jazz and R&B – didn’t really count as pop; and old country-and-western was for Americans and squares.

All nonsense, as I would eventually discover.

In the 1950s there was Elvis, of course. And Fats Domino. There was Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis. And so many more that there isn’t room here to write them all down, or for my brain to remember them.

Then you could go all the way back, as I eventually would do, to the 1920s: to the birth of the Jazz Age with artists like Louis Armstrong; blues legends like Lead Belly and Mississippi John Hurt; and the first family of folk, The Carter Family.

A decade later jazz superstars like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald rose to fame alongside – but, in the segregated South, never actually alongside – country legends like Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, while Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra crooned their own smooth way to the top.

By the 1950s, while blues and country joined forces to create rockabilly and, thanks in part to Elvis, created rock’n’roll, in black neighbourhoods gospel and doo-wop was evolved into rhythm and blues – and, a decade later, into soul (and, as years went by, to disco and hip-hop).

Which is how, with apologies for the long-winded history lesson, by 1961 we had glorious music like this wonderful number fusing blues and jazz by Etta James, oozing soul in every line.