Canned sadness
Shut away for half a century, a soul legend’s shelved recordings make it into the light and on to vinyl. For collectors only, says Jim Irvin.
BETWEEN 1961 and ’65, Irma Thomas – once dubbed, probably by a press agent, the Soul Queen of New Orleans – cut superb singles: It’s Too Soon To Know, Cry On, It’s Raining, and many others for the local Minit label under the auspices of Allen Toussaint, who wrote lively arrangements in the spirit of contemporary girl groups like The Shirelles. When Minit was sold to Imperial, Irma was upset enough to write a song called Wish Someone Would Care. Ironically, it became her first US pop hit, and the title song of her debut album. The Imperial sides actually kept up the high standard, with writers and producers like Van McCoy, Jerry Ragovoy and Bobby Womack. Time Is On My Side, It’s Starting To Get To Me Now, Breakaway, and Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand) – by Jeannie Seely and Randy Newman – were all superb and showed Irma to be a singer of acuity and variety.
She may have not been having hits here, but British soul fans were paying attention; she even had a UK fan club. Norman Jopling, reporting for Record Mirror in 1966, around her first UK visit, summed up her appeal. “She isn’t a rasping bluesy songstress. She just sings beautiful melodic songs in a clear, clean voice with a maximum of soul.”
But as soul grew grittier, Irma’s lighter style was not so sure-fire. By 1970, it looked like her career was on the slipway. Then up stepped Jerry Wexler at Atlantic, who sent her to Jackson, Mississippi to record with Wardell Quezergue, producer of Jean Knight’s Mr Big Stuff. That produced a lone 45 in 1971, Full Time Woman, an aching country-flavoured ballad which, although it flopped, Wexler later mentioned in an interview as one of his favourite recordings. Irma sings it well, but the song is underwhelming, effectively hookless, relying on its solemn atmosphere. Next, Atlantic sent her to Detroit to record with Joe Hinton where she cut a further five originals and three covers in May 1972. These and other unreleased tracks were subsequently mislaid until soul historian David Nathan unearthed them in 2004. Now they make their vinyl debut on Full Time Woman – The Lost
Cotillion Album (Real Gone Music) ★★★.
I’d love to tell you they coalesce into a masterpiece, but I can’t. The material just isn’t good enough. A song from the Hinton session called Shadow Of The Sun has one of the weirdest orchestral intros I’ve ever heard – possibly the work of the great Arif Mardin who’s thought to have arranged the strings for these sessions – and one of the most ‘who cares?’ hooklines, making it both underwritten and overwrought. Bobbie Gentry’s Fancy – the memoir of a high-class hooker – lacks the original’s chilling nonchalance. Irma attacks it while her drummer goes off on his own trip. Together they turn in a misfire. Sweet standard Time After Time doesn’t work recast as a deepsoul shouter. On proto-disco tune Adam And Eve, Irma sounds uninspired and throws away its one good line: “This time I’ll ignore the snake.”
“The problem with so many of those sessions was that they simply didn’t give me time to learn the material,” Irma told Nathan. “Joe [Hinton] told Atlantic I didn’t have ‘it’ any more and they let me go. A few years later, I ran into Joe in Oakland, where I was performing regularly, and I told him, ‘Hey, for someone who doesn’t have ‘it’ any more, I’m doin’ all right!”
Inappropriate, underrehearsed material and heavy-handed production meant the Soul Queen of New Orleans couldn’t shine. This is the soundtrack to a missed opportunity.
“By 1970, it looked like Irma’s career was on the slipway.”