Let’s see, Irma Thomas. Lots of stuff to ask her. The music biz kicked her around but good in her early days, but she forged on to become known as the Soul Queen of New Orleans. At 19, she’d already been married twice and had four children; now, at 68, she has nine great-grandchildren.
So where to start this interview? How about … her funeral.
The Crescent City is big on funerals. We’ve all seen images of raggedy brass bands parading next to the casket while people on the periphery dance, celebrate the fallen and just dig the music. Those folks are called the “second line,” and such processions have come to be known as second line funerals.
So I wondered: Does the Soul Queen of New Orleans want a second line funeral?
“Not really,” Irma Thomas says. “If I tell my kids I don’t want it, they’ll make sure it doesn’t happen. I’m not a big second line person.”
After our conversation concludes about 45 minutes later, I’m pretty sure that if Irma Thomas doesn’t want a second line funeral, Irma Thomas won’t have a second line funeral. She’s assertive to the point of being brash; chatty and opinionated, but brimming with charm. Thomas answers questions openly and eagerly, sometimes loudly and sometimes at great length. And my query about her funeral plans does not put her off in the least.
Thomas’ singing voice is reflective of her personality: a full-bodied contralto with a gospel-infused forcefulness and passion. After a fitful recording career that lasted three decades and found her bouncing from label to label, rarely yielding satisfactory commercial results, in 1991 she landed on Rounder, a respected indie specializing in a variety of quintessentially American genres. Thomas has released 10 solo albums on Rounder and appeared on several compilations. None of those discs spun out hits, but they have stabilized her career and earned her a number of Grammy nominations. She won her first in 2007: Best Contemporary Blues Album for After the Rain. Last year’s follow-up, the highly praised Simply Grand, paired her with a roll call of renowned pianists: Dr. John, Ellis Marsalis, Randy Newman, John Medeski. It too earned a Grammy bid.
All told, not a bad career. But for a break here and there, though, it could’ve gone differently. Born Irma Lee, she grew up singing in church and by age 19 had released a single, “(You Can Have My Husband) But Don’t Mess with My Man,” that made its way to No. 22 on the Billboard R&B chart. That in itself was quite an accomplishment. Admittedly “green behind the ears,” the singer suffered from poor management early on. Thomas remembers her first gig: Her manager set it up so she played for the door. It rained. They split $4. “We put it in the car to get home,” she says.
Thomas is not shy about saying that racism played a major role in her being underpaid — “anyone three shades darker than a brown paper bag had it hard” — but she harbors no ongoing bitterness. The singer has a that’s-just-the-way-it-was attitude about the ’60s. Probably her biggest problem, Thomas reflects, is that she had no one to give her solid guidance, to walk her through a business fraught with landmines.
The assertiveness so fundamental to her personality now was missing back then. “I was in survival mode,” she says. “I had to feed my kids and keep a roof over my head. I was making enough money to get by and I wasn’t going to ask too many questions, wasn’t going to rattle cages.”
In 1964, Thomas’ single “I Wish Someone Would Care” crossed over to the pop chart and scaled to No. 17. And still she got shafted. “I was making $125 a night and I found out later it could’ve been in the thousands,” she says. “But when you’d been making $4, a hundred-and-twenty-five seemed pretty good. I was making a pretty good living by my standards.”
Her dalliance with stardom was fleeting, but somewhere along the way she decided no one was going to push her around anymore. While on a package tour headlined by James Brown, Thomas was asked to stretch her show because the mercurial Mr. Star Time was late returning from a TV appearance. “When [Brown] got back, his people told him Irma did well, told him I kept the crowd,” Thomas recounts. “He didn’t like that. He wanted to cut my show, wanted me to cut ‘I Wish Someone Would Care,’ my hit song, out of a three-song set. I told him he could cut me out of the show, pay me for the week and I’d go home, but I was not going to cut my set.”
What did the notoriously irascible and sexist Mr. Brown do? “He turned around and walked away,” Thomas says. “He knew I wasn’t gonna give in. I wasn’t his woman, so he couldn’t lay hands on me.”
These days, in between watching one of her great-grandchildren after school, Irma Thomas gigs about three weekends out of the month. And she gets paid what she’s worth. Her husband of 34 years, Emile Jackson, is her manager. “We have learned what my value is,” she says. “I had a rude awakening [about taxes] from Uncle Sam some years ago, so we had to plan my future. We put money into savings, incorporated myself, put myself on a salary, paid into Social Security, set up a retirement fund. If I don’t want to work I don’t have to and can still live the life I’m accustomed to.”
Thankfully for fans of New Orleans soul, she still feels like a kid and loves performing. For her Tampa Bay Blues Fest appearance, she’ll be accompanied by a full band — with horns. “I can’t see it being R&B without a band and horns,” she says.
And then Irma Thomas is off. I wouldn’t be surprised if her next call was to her kids — telling them in no uncertain terms that she most certainly does not want a second line funeral.
This article appears in Mar 18-24, 2009.
