When the Minit roster went to Liberty in 1963, her musical director was generally the more grandiose, orchestral-minded and Phil Spector-like H.B. Barnum. Thus she sang up against a string section, a huge horn section, a rhythm section, and a bank of backing singers that included Spector stalwart and Crystals leader Darlene Love, then with the Blossoms.
A recent Thomas compilation in the U.K., A Woman’s Viewpoint: The Essential 1970s Recordings, chronicles her brief stays on a number of labels in her least known-era. The material includes better disco records than a lot of singers ever got to make, as well as her biting work with the somewhat mysterious producer Swamp Dogg (Jerry Williams). She describes him as “interesting — but weird; that’s all I’ll say.”
Williams specialized, unusually, in songs from an angry woman’s perspective — and boy was that not a mode tough for Irma to find. In fact, the ultimate “Irma reads out a no-account guy” track came here: a new version of “Wish Someone Would Care” preceded by a mind-blowing, five-minute monologue for the ages that would bring the perpetrator in question to tears, if he were actually paying attention.
“I’d first come up with that monologue at the Baltimore Theater, in Baltimore, Maryland. I was on a bill with James Brown and James had to go to Washington for a show and was a little late getting back, and they told me to stretch — when I only had three songs to do! So I stretched “Wish Someone Would Care” with that monologue, and it went over so well, that the band said I should do it every show.
“When James got back, he told me I had to cut that out, and I said nobody tells me how to do my show; if you want, you can just pay me for the whole week now and I’ll go home. Well, that resolved that, since he wasn’t going to let me go home….I did it at the Apollo Theater; I’d been doing it for years before I recorded it with Swamp Dogg.”
The Irma who knows what she wants to sing and is quite ready to say no to what doesn’t fit her was, of course, not lionized for being an “outlaw” like, say, Waylon Jennings, but rather was labeled “difficult” and to be avoided, like so many of the smartest and most independent women performers then (and sometimes now).
“I’ve always been a decision-maker,” Irma sets down. “I’ve always been self-motivated. And I’ve been an independent little cuss. That’s why my mama only had one; if she had another one like me she probably would have shot herself. I am my biggest critic, too — don’t get me wrong — but I’ve always been able to do what’s necessary to get the job done. And without going to jail!”
Unsigned and refugeed to Los Angeles by an earlier hurricane disaster (Camille), Thomas had a hiatus in the late 1970s when she gave up music entirely. Eventually she returned home to New Orleans and started singing again in the club her husband opened. She then met Rounder’s Scott Billington, who was signing a series nearly forgotten New Orleans R&B hands.
They have not, they both report independently, had a serious disagreement in all these years, because Billington took the time to know Thomas’ work and thus had a feel for what material really suited and pleased her. He understands the New Orleans R&B style embedded deeply in her phrasing and in her band’s rhythms, but also that something else about her that’s not much heard in R&B.
“She’s a rare kind of vocalist” he suggests, smartly. “Her vocal isn’t just an ornament on a track or a tool to deliver a hook in a song. She’s a storyteller — and a very convincing storyteller. She really has to feel the story in order to sing the song. If I send her material, her comments are usually either ‘I can relate to that; let’s do it,’ or ‘I don’t think I can sing this.’ She wants it to be something that totally rings true with her.”
No wonder one of the most memorable of Thomas’ albums in her 21 years at Rounder was 2000’s My Heart’s In Memphis: The Songs Of Dan Penn — it’s a perfect match of storytelling soul songwriter and singer. Sing It!, a fun one-off trio record with admirers Tracy Nelson and Marcia Ball from 1998, was another standout. Irma displayed her personally cherished but rarely heard gospel side on 1994’s Walk Around Heaven.
Today, 47 years since she was first found singing in public, Thomas finds teens and twentysomethings turning up at her shows for the chance to see classic soul in a revival similar to that of the interest in blues artists such as Son House or Mississippi John Hurt (“Make Me A Pallet”, indeed) back when she was on the charts. She likes it. She knows they’re coming to hear music that shows, in her words, “some humanity in it. Some substance.”
Maybe time’s been on her side after all.
ND senior editor Barry Mazor has been loving to hear and waiting to speak with Irma Thomas for a long time.
