Irma Thomas headlines the Sunday (March 22) portion of the Tampa Bay Blues Fest. Here’s my feature/interview with the Soul Queen of New Orleans Look for it in Wednesday’s CL print edition. (By the way, Irma Thomas is awesome.)

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.”

This article appears in Mar 11-17, 2009.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...