Perhaps the most potent of all was her first single on Liberty, a top-20 in that Beatles spring of 1964, which coupled the powerful, longing soul ballad “Wish Someone Would Care” (no doubt the best-known of the songs she’s written herself) with one of the great infectious pop confections ever, her original version of Jackie De Shannon’s “Breakaway”. With its ever-building, propulsive handclaps and gongs paired with a young girl’s rising vocal enthusiasm for being joyously trapped in the right situation, it’s a feel-good-instantly masterpiece on a par with say, Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered”.
People may know the number today more for the cover by Brit comedienne Tracy Ullman in the ’80s — but then it is a peculiarity of Irma Thomas’s musical history that at least three of her most potent records are best-known today via cover versions that followed in their wake. There was the Allen Toussaint-penned “Ruler Of My Heart”, which you may know as Otis Redding’s “Pain in My Heart”; and, oh yes, her unforgettable full-throttle first version of a tune called “Time Is On My Side”. Yeah; that one.
She can laugh about it now, just about: “Yeah, I’ve been listened to by some big people!”
With Otis, she knew it was coming; he’d seen her sing “Ruler Of My Heart” and asked to do it. “I’d said OK. He was a real nice guy, like a big teddy bear, really, kind-hearted — which is why he was so missed by so many people when he got killed. But when he came out with it as ‘Pain In My Heart’ and claimed he wrote it, he had to go through a little court thing with that, and ‘Naomi Neville’ has the credit for that now — which is really Allen Toussaint. So that got resolved.”
And then came “Time Is On My Side”. To cut to the chase, anyone who has heard the Rolling Stones’ first real U.S. hit is in for a bit of a shock when they encounter the Irma Thomas version it was clearly based on. As good a simple rock record as the Stones’ take was, it simply pales by comparison in most every way to hers — not least, Mick Jagger’s attempt to simulate Irma’s patented sassy read-out of a misbehaving man on the break. With supreme irony not lost on Thomas one bit, time was not on her side.
“I went to England on a tour,” she recalls, “and by the time I got my luggage unpacked as I got back, the Rolling Stones had recorded it, and it became a hit for them. Anyone that came out of England and that general vicinity then and made a record — and I don’t care how good or bad they sounded — they made money. That did away with the possibilities for a lot of careers for a lot of artists Stateside.
“It reached a point where when I sang ‘Time Is On My Side’ they’d say I was doing the Rolling Stones’ song. I got tired of correcting people and stopped singing it. But now I do it, and say ‘Eat your heart out, Mick Jagger, because I know I look a lot better than you do now, even if you’re laughing all the way to the bank!’ He was just a youngster like me trying to get his stuff together, get a career going — but it was their time.”
Timing is not a sufficient answer in itself to the long-debated mystery of why Irma’s career never quite reached the heights of say, the comparable Gladys Knight. Thomas says it had to do with her own initial naivete, and the degree of backing she got — or, more to the point, didn’t get — from record companies, bookers and agents. Such context can make her song “Wish Someone Would Care” sound like it was addressing much of her career, rather than contemplating early personal jolts and losses as it actually was.
“I didn’t have anyone guiding me,” she recalls. “I was taken to the William Morris Agency and shown around — a 23-year-old kid who doesn’t know an agency from a hole in the ground. I’m being walked through this building and meeting all these people, and nobody tells me, ‘That’s the place that gets you the bookings that gets you the jobs.’ The record company made an assumption that wasn’t there — that I knew something — when I was greener than grass.”
A considerable part of the story of Irma’s sound plays out in the musical relationships she did have, mainly with a series of very different producers. The first key one was Toussaint, at Minit in New Orleans.
“He taught you how songs could be sung different ways,” she says of Toussaint. “Naive about things as I was then, when I’d learned something, I’d learned it exactly the way I would hear it. He taught us how you could do something different with the song and not ruin it. Today, when I learn a song from somebody else, my band says that I then ‘Irma-tize’ it!
“Allen wrote songs specifically for the artist. If he wrote a song for Bettye LaVette or Betty Harris or one of those, I might do the demo, but he wouldn’t let me record that one, because it was written for them. And my songs were for me only, too.”
Even with the budgetary restrictions at little Minit Records, every one of the classic Toussaint-produced sides, including “Ruler Of My Heart” and “It’s Raining”, has its own distinct rhythm, production style and tones, all precisely right for the individual song at hand — and each one shows off a side of Irma’s talents.
