This is the song that gave The Rolling Stones their first big US hit and helped make Irma Thomas the Soul Queen of New Orleans.

Fifteen years ago I had the privilege of interviewing Irma Thomas – the unrivaled Soul Queen of New Orleans. We met in Nashville and talked at the Grand Ol’ Opry.

The temple of country music might seem an odd place to encounter a soul queen but she was there to perform at a 40th birthday celebration of her label, Rounder Records.

She talked about her faith, and how her house had been destroyed in Katrina but she had been away from New Orleans on the day the hurricane hit – performing at her first gig for two months.
Divine intervention, she called it.

Perhaps it was; years earlier she had moved to Los Angeles after Hurricane Camille devastated the Crescent City in 1969, going back home seven years later.

I suppose her best known song will always be the one The Rolling Stones made famous, and it’s something of a mystery why she never enjoyed the same success as contemporaries like Aretha Franklin and Etta James, Gladys Knight and Dionne Warwick.

Irma had a tough start to life: she gave birth to her first child at the age of 13 and had had four children and been married twice before she was out of her teens. She was still only 19 when she released her saucy debut single, You Can Have My Husband (But Don’t Mess with My Man), in the spring of 1960.

Moving to the Minit label, with a song called Girl Needs Boy she embarked on a collaboration with songwriter and producer Allen Toussaint that would continue throughout her period with the label.

Their partnership produced great songs like It’s Raining (memorably revived by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch in Down by Law) and Ruler of My Heart, reworked by Otis Redding as Pain In My Heart.

Moving again when Imperial Records acquired Minit in 1963, she had her first Top 20 hit with the starkly intimate Wish Someone Would Care, followed by Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand) – co-written by a young Randy Newman.

But it was the B-side, penned by Jerry Ragovoy, that caught the ear of the Stones who had their first US Top 10 hit just months later with their virtual note-for-note version of Time Is On My Side.

After the James Brown-produced It’s A Man’s-Woman’s World, she signed with Chess Records, traveling to the legendary Muscle Shoals studio Fame to cut 1967’s Cheater Man and A Woman Will Do Wrong, and had a minor hit with a cover of Redding’s Good To Me.

Her New Orleans club, The Lion’s Den, where she used to regularly headline, went out of business because of Katrina and she once again moved away – this time only 60 miles from the city – while having her house rebuilt on the exact same spot as before.

As recently as last May, at the age of 83, Irma Thomas appeared onstage with The Rolling Stones at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival where she and Mick Jagger sang a duet of the song that did so much for both their careers.