Happy Birthday to the soul queen of New Orleans, Irma Thomas.
Today, the Grammy Award-winning jazz, soul singer, and Louisiana native celebrates her 80th birthday.
She sat down with Scoot to share the significance of this milestone birthday.
Scoot: You and Mick Jagger, and Rod Stewart, I mean Paul McCarthy all well into their 70s and still performing. Did you ever think you would still be doing this today?
Thomas: Well first of all I didn’t think I’d live to see eighty.
I feel very blessed that I have and when I can I still performing and I do perform every Sunday. Not so much a performance it's part of my spiritual being, I sing at my church choir every Sunday. But I’m still a viable entertainer. In fact, I just had a vinyl released last month.
Irma Thomas got her love of gospel, R&B, and soul-blues singing as a young teenager when she would sing with a Baptist church choir.
Scoot: Singing in a choir like this must bring you back to your very earliest years of singing when you were a young girl.
Thomas: As far as singing in a church I’ve always sung in the church. I never stopped singing in a church. Whenever I was home and I wasn’t on the road, I participated in the church choir because I have always been a member of the choir and as a young child we didn’t choir back then but we were participants in the service one way or another, so that is just part of who I am.
She would quickly move on to auditioning for Specialty Records at age 13 and later landed a record deal with the Ron label. Her first single ‘Don’t mess with my heart’ was released in 1959 and hit number 22 on the Billboard R&B chart.
Her career would take her to create memorable work with such artists as Dr.
John, Allen Toussaint, and Tommy Ridgley.