Soul survivor

With a new album and a boost from Black Mirror, Irma Thomas, the 84-year-old 'Soul Queen of New Orleans', is hitting new heights

- GARTH CARTWRIGHT

Irma Thomas greets me at the door of the ranch house she shares with her husband and manager, Emile Jackson. For a singer celebrated as the "Soul Queen of New Orleans", I'm surprised her home isn't more, well, palatial. Graceland this isn't.

Although Thomas, 84, has enjoyed hit records, Grammy awards, critical praise and the loyal devotion of her home city, she has never experienced sustained stardom. Instead, she has her health, a 50-year marriage and a stunning new album, Audience With the Queen, created with Galactic, the esteemed New Orleans electro-funkers.

Thomas is one of the last of the best, an African American soul singer who overcame discrimination and a brutal music industry to achieve enduring greatness. She scored her first hit aged 18 in 1959 but never enjoyed the huge success of her contemporaries Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight. No matter: everyone from the Rolling Stones to Beverley Knight has sung her songs (and praises). Bonnie Raitt, now a close friend, says of Thomas: "She's a legend.

She's as good today as she was the day she came out of the church singing." I mention this to Thomas and she cocks an eyebrow and says: "I guess it's nice people say such things while I'm still here." Irma, I'm learning, isn't one for blandishments. That said, when I tell her Audience With marks a stunning return, she says: "I'm finally getting my flowers. About time too." Born Irma Lee in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, in 1941, she and her family shifted to New Orleans when she was an infant.