Irma Thomas remembers stillness falling over the Fair Grounds on May 7, 2006 as people turned to listen to her rehearse “Bridge Over Troubled Water” with Paul Simon. Construction workers, who were assembling stages for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, paused to listen, she told Verite News.
“They didn’t hammer, they didn’t do anything,” Thomas said. She remembered their voices ringing out across the fields that were submerged only a handful of months before, after Hurricane Katrina.
“That was very special,” Thomas said over the phone from her home this month as she reflected on her last 50 years performing at the New Orleans Jazz Heritage Festival.
Over the last five decades, Thomas has performed with Stevie Wonder and Bonnie Raitt, earned the title of “Soul Queen of New Orleans” and received an honorary doctorate from Tulane University. She has garnered four Grammy nominations in that time, including a 2007 win for Best Contemporary Blues Album.
Over the past month, she’s been recording a new gospel album, and preparing for a packed schedule of events leading up to the 50th anniversary of her first performance at Jazz Fest, where she will appear first at the Gospel Tent on April 27 and on the main stage on May 5.
“Well, somebody’s counting,” she said when asked to reflect on her decades of experience performing at the festival. “My first major [Jazz Fest performance] was 1974. I guess that is 50 years.”
Thomas said that singing has been integral to her life since her early childhood in Greensburg, Louisiana where she sang at school and in church. “I’ve been singing as long as I can remember I had a voice,” she said. Once, she was fired from a waitressing job where she was working in New Orleans for singing at work, she said. But her prospects improved when she got a record deal and her first single, “Don’t Mess With My Man,” in 1959 at 18 years old.
After touring England, performing in other European cities and gracing the Apollo Theater stage in New York early in her career, she returned to New Orleans in 1973 and held her first performance at Jazz Fest the following year. The event made a strong impression on her.
Thomas recalled standing behind a group of women shortly before she took the stage. They didn’t recognize her, she said, but felt free to talk about her work. “They were saying ‘Oh, she’s not going to show up’,”she remembered “‘She’s somewhere having a baby’…. I just let them talk.”
But when she got up on stage and saw their faces, “the expression…was priceless,” she said, laughing while retelling the story to Verite.
Little did they know that she would go on to become a hallmark of one of America’s great musical cities, to draw fans from across the world, and become as integral to the story of New Orleans as Ellis Marsalis, Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson.
Shortly after her 2006 Jazz Fest performance, which was a reuniting force for New Orleans in the year after Katrina, Thomas won her first Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album for “After the Rain” in 2007. She’s been nominated one other time since then.
Her work has been included in countless popular movies and in hit television shows like “Big Little Lies” and “Dead to Me.” The spare lyrics and haunting melody of Thomas’ “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand),” featured in the speculative horror show “Black Mirror,” introduced her music to a whole new generation of fans.
Thomas’ Jazz Fest audiences over the years
In addition to those new to her work, Thomas has fans that have followed her work for decades and look forward to seeing her at Jazz Fest every year. And her personable nature and genuine connection with them has endured over time.
Gary Stevens has been a fan for 30 years. He first traveled to New Orleans from Maine for Jazz Fest in 1990 to see Thomas and has been coming every year since. But his love of her music started long before he made the trip to New Orleans for the first time. He remembers hearing her hit, “It’s Raining,” on an Allen Toussaint compilation. He now plays her music on his WMPG radio show in Maine, comparing her to contemporaries Etta James and Gladys Knight.
“She’s a star. … But she’s also a people person, a family person,” said Stevens, who has a t-shirt with fifteen years of Thomas’ signatures on it, and has seen her perform on Jazz Fest main stage and in the Gospel Tent. He also remembers going to see her perform at her club, The Lion’s Den, on Gravier Street, where she gave out red beans and rice to her patrons.
Thomas’ renown has also seen her crowned as an honorary member of the popular all-women Mardi Gras Krewe of Muses due to the “immense citywide, but also national and beyond, love for her,” Muses founder Staci Rosenberg said.
“Ms. Irma is an incredible, groundbreaking, powerful singer, but she is an amazing human,” Rosenberg said. Rosenberg’s favorite song is Thomas’ “Time Is On My Side.”
“I have felt the most emotion watching Irma Thomas performing that song,” she said. “It really resonates to me.”
The lifelong love of fans is mutual, and Thomas’ care for them is a part of how she approaches her work—as she stands before her crowds smiling, inviting them to call out their requests to her.
“I allow my audience to yell out what they want to hear,” Thomas said. “I want my audience to leave there happy.”
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