LAURA NYRO / IRMA THOMAS

Sweet Dream Fade / Blue In The Heart

 

Laura Nyro was an astonishing talent. She was born into a musical family in The Bronx, NY in 1947; her father, Louis Nigro (pronounced Nigh-gro), was a jazz trumpeter, and music was her coping mechanism during a difficult childhood. By the time she was 8 she had taught herself to play piano and was composing her own songs, and during high school she would sing with a group of Puerto Rican friends, harmonising on street corners and in subway stations. She was involved in the peace movement and other women’s movements which shaped her social consciousness for song-writing and her feminist beliefs.

By the time Laura left high school, she had changed her surname to Nyro (pronounced Neer-oh) and her father, who was still performing, steered his daughter towards record company executive Artie Mogull (he was the first to sign Bob Dylan who coincidentally was one of Nyro’s early influences along with Nina Simone, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan) and partner Paul Barry, who negotiated a management and recording contract which she later managed to sue to have annulled having signed whilst still a minor. The pair offered her the musical freedom to write and create successfully and within a year had released her debut album More Than A New Discovery in January 1967 on Verve Folkways, produced by Milt Okun. Bob Shelton’s sleeve-notes included Nyro quoting her style as ‘polished soul’. She goes on to say ‘anybody can sing soul if they’ve got it, I think some classical music is soul. Soul is honesty, for one thing’.
“Wedding Bell Blues” and “Stoney End” were released as a 7” single in September 1966 before the album was completed. It was a minor hit on the US west coast, but cover versions of the songs became huge successes respectively for The Fifth Dimension and Barbara Streisand. Also, “And When I Die” from the album was a big hit for Peter, Paul & Mary.

David Geffen became her new manager and they established a publishing company, Tuna Fish Music, and future proceeds from her recordings would be split between them. In 1969 Verve reissued her debut album as The First Songs and later that year when they sold Tuna Fish to CBS it made them both multi-millionaires. She almost became the lead singer of Blood, Sweat & Tears but Geffen talked her out of it and arranged a new recording contract with Clive Davis. Her next 8 albums were released on Columbia; the first two Eli & The Thirteenth Confession and New York Tendaberry received wide critical acclaim and spawned more hits when covered by other artists, most notably, “Stoned Soul Picnic”, again, for The Fifth Dimension.

Despite her many live performances, she was shy, uncomfortable with attempts to be marketed as a celebrity, shunned the limelight, and turned down many requests to appear on prestigious shows such as The Tonight Show, The Late Show with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live.
“Sweet Dream Fade” features a host of accomplished jazz musicians (Randy Brecker/trumpet, Michael Brecker/saxophone, Bernard Purdie/drums, John Tropea/guitar, Freddie Washington/bass) as well as Laura on electric piano and vocals. It comes from a posthumous CD album (2001 Rounder Records) aptly entitled Angel In The Dark; a 16-tracker that featured 8 cover versions recorded in the autumn of 1994, plus 8 of her final compositions recorded in August 1995 whilst she was undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, the same illness that killed her mother, also when aged 49.

Laura Nyro was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.

From humble beginnings, Irma Thomas was born in Ponchatoula, Louisiana but eventually became known as The Soul Queen of New Orleans. She sang in a gospel quartet in a Baptist church choir and had her first audition at Specialty Records aged 13. The following year she became pregnant, was forced to marry by her father, and despite a second child the marriage only lasted two years. By the age of 19, she had married Andrew Thomas and had a further two children and although this was also a short-lived affair she kept his name.

She worked as a waitress in a club in New Orleans where bandleader Tommy Ridgley was resident. She would occasionally sing with him and he helped get her first record deal with local Ron label and her first single “Don’t Mess With My Man” was released late 1959. The bluesy ballad on the flip “Set Me Free” was more typical of what was to come, and it reached #22 on the Billboard R&B chart. She moved to the Minit label and under the wing of producer/songwriter Allen Toussaint had a string of local hits. The label was acquired by Imperial and still the hits kept coming, most notably with the beautiful ballad “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is”, co-written by Randy Newman and country star Jeannie Seely, and coupled with the Jerry Ragovoy-penned “Time Is On My Side”, a huge Top Ten success for the Rolling Stones – all they did was copy Thomas’s version. Her self-penned “Wish Someone Would Care” was autobiographical and written when she was at her lowest point, and it was coupled with the uptempo “Break-A-Way” reaching #17 on Billboard’s pop chart and was the biggest hit of her career. I would like to think the success was due to the gut-wrenching ballad but I think it was for the quirky flip, which was a later hit for Tracey Ullman.

By 1967 the hits had dried up and her contract with Imperial wasn’t renewed and she moved to Chess, but they relocated her to Rick Hall’s Fame Studio in Muscle Shoals, where she first came across the songwriting of Dan Penn. Some fine ballads ensued but it didn’t go to plan as she felt Chess were too controlling, so she went back to New Orleans. Many of the clubs she worked at were destroyed by Hurricane Camille so it was California next, but despite recording many tracks with Atlantic/Cotillion, only one single was released due to lack of proper marketing. In the mid-seventies she finally returned to the Crescent City and continued as a live performer, remarried, and bought her own club, The Lion’s Den.

Her comeback as a recording artist came in 1986 with Rounder Records thanks to producer Scott Billington. Nine albums were released over the next twenty years, including three gospel albums, something she’d always wanted to do as she could be found most Sundays singing in the choir of her beloved First African Baptist Church. The first of these was the Billington-produced Walk Around Heaven: New Orleans Gospel Soul. described as being in the black classical tradition of Mahalia Jackson and Bessie Griffin.

She picked up many accolades and Grammy nominations, but one of the most hailed was My Heart’s In Memphis: The Songs Of Dan Penn, including covers of “I’m Your Puppet” and “Zero Willpower”, but most of were written especially for the album. Over the years she had recorded many of his songs, though never really knowing who he was, and Billington decided she would sound best amongst Memphis musicians. The track selected here for release on vinyl for the first time is the gorgeous southern ballad “Blue In The Heart”; Dan Penn’s original demo version, incidentally, is available as a 7” single on sister label Soul4Real (S4R07).

As an interesting footnote, in 2024 Irma appeared on stage at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival with the Rolling Stones, performing a duet of “Time Is On My Side” with Mick Jagger.
Not many artists have recorded in eight consecutive decades, but The Soul Queen Of New Orleans certainly has. The Lion’s Den may have been destroyed in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina, but Irma will be celebrating her Golden Wedding this year. The lyrics of “Wish Someone Would Care” finally came true.

STEVE HOBBS

 

LAURA NYRO – SWEET DREAMS FADE

IRMA THOMAS – BLUE IN THE HEART