Irma Thomas: Soul Queen of New Orleans and Time Is on My Side

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
I want you to imagine something for a second. Put yourself in this scenario.
You're a young, fiercely talented singer, right?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:07)
Okay, I'm picturing it.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:08)
And you've just gone into the studio, and you've poured your absolute heart and soul into a record. And you know it's good. It has this incredible, undeniable energy.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:18)
Yeah, that special spark.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:19)
Exactly. But then, just a few months later, you have to sit back and watch, as a relatively little known British rock word takes that exact same song.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:28)
Oh, wow.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:28)
Yeah, they cover it and they turn it into their very first American top 10 hit. They just skyrocket to global superstardom, while your original version kind of gets eclipsed in the mainstream memory.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:41)
That is quite the pill to swallow.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:42)
Right. Now imagine waiting 60 years, I mean six full decades to finally step onto a stage and perform that song with them.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:50)
It honestly sounds like the inciting incident of a Hollywood screenplay, but it's entirely real. That is the true story of the song, Time Is on My Side. Yeah. The British rock band of course being the Rolling Stones. Yeah.
The brilliant singer being the one and only Irma Thomas.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:04)
That unbelievable full circle moment is basically the mission for our deep dive today. We are going to explore the incredible life, the career, and the sheer unbreakable endurance of Irma Thomas, all based on the biographical sources we have.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:20)
It's such a rich story. We're going to look at how a woman who experienced the early highs of the R&B charts, and then the absolute devastation of losing her home and her business, somehow managed to earn the undisputed lifelong title of the Soul Queen of New Orleans.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:36)
Yeah, and as we go through this, we're really exploring a broader theme for you listening, like what happens when an artist career doesn't fit the traditional mold of global pop domination, but instead becomes the immortal heartbeat of a single city? Okay, let's unpack this because her early life moves at a pace that is almost hard to comprehend.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:54)
It really does. To understand her trajectory, you have to look at the environment that shaped her. She was born Irma Lee in 1941 in a town called Ponchatoula, Louisiana.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:03)
Which is just north of New Orleans, right?

**SPEAKER_2** (2:04)
Exactly. And the family was deeply working class. Her father worked as a steel chipper, and her mother was a maid.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:11)
Right.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:12)
And like many vocalists who go on to define American soul and R&B, her initial training ground was the church. She grew up singing in a Baptist choir, developing a vocal style deeply rooted in that gospel tradition.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:25)
She clearly knew she had a voice early on too, because the sources note she actually walked in and auditioned for Specialty Records when she was just 13 years old.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:34)
I mean, think about that.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:35)
It's wild. But I keep looking at the timeline of her teenage years, and it is staggering. By the time she was 19 years old, she had already been married twice.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:43)
Wow.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:43)
Yeah. She had four children. She kept the last name of her second ex-husband, which is how she became Irma Thomas.
And she was working as a waitress in New Orleans just to support her family.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:53)
That is literally an entire lifetime of adult responsibility compressed into a period when, well, most people are just figuring out who they are.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:02)
Exactly. I mean, sometimes we use the phrase hustle culture today to describe someone working two jobs or trying to balance a startup, four kids and a service job.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:11)
Right. The modern grind.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:13)
Yeah. But we have to strip away that modern context. This wasn't someone trying to optimize their career path. This was a young Black woman in the Jim Crow South in the late 1950s, carrying the weight of a massive family on a waitress' salary.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:26)
All while simultaneously trying to break into the local music scene.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:30)
Yes. And that relentless drive actually paid off when she started sitting in and singing with a local band leader named Tommy Ridgley.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:37)
And Ridgley is a crucial figure here because he recognized that her talent wasn't just raw, it was developed. He helped her secure her very first record deal with a local New Orleans label called Ron Records.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:49)
And the result was pretty immediate, wasn't it?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:51)
Oh, absolutely. Her debut single Don't Mess with My Man, which was released in late 1959, shot up to number 22 on the National Billboard R&B chart.