IrmaThomas2011.JPGMATTHEW HINTON / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE'The Jazz Fest has been a blessing to me,' says Irma Thomas, who will perform at Audubon Zoo Sunday, 'but my closing it out won't be missed. I'll leave that to the Neville Brothers. They can take care of business.'
But on Sunday you won't find her at the Fair Grounds. She'll be at the Audubon Zoo instead.
For nearly 30 years, Irma has put on a Mother's Day Concert at the zoo.
"It started out as a promotional ploy to get families to come to the zoo, and it worked," she said. "I guess they figured, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' I've been doing it ever since."
For her, it has always been a perfect way to spend Mother's Day.
"It's everything from babies in playpens to great-grandmothers in wheelchairs," she said. "It's a great place for families to be together."
And who better to perform than Irma? The New Orleans treasure is a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother herself.
Between her and Emile Jackson -- her manager and husband of 34 years -- they have seven children.
"I have four and Emile has three, but I don't think of his as my stepchildren," she said. "We just have seven kids."
They also have 15 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.
Irma loves being part of a big family. She says her singing career began because she was an only child.
"I was always singing," she said. "That was the way I knew I could get some attention."
When she was in eighth grade, she took first prize in a talent show at Carver Theater on St. Bernard Avenue and won $5 and theater passes. Her lucky break came while she was working as a waitress at the Pimlico Club where Tommy Ridgley's band performed. She liked to sing for the customers, and they started to ask for "the singing waitress."
"I got fired for singing on the job, and the rest is history," she said.
She got hired to sing with the band, cut her first record, and was on her way. She became a popular performer in the New Orleans area and on the Gulf Coast.
But when Hurricane Camille slammed into Mississippi in 1969, many of the clubs where she had performed were washed away. She was a young divorced mother of four children, and she decided to try her luck in California.
"I discovered out there it's who you know, and I ended up getting a job at Montgomery Ward," she said.
She started out in lingerie but switched to automotive, where she met with some resistance from male shoppers.
"There'd be men who'd come in and say, 'I don't want a lady waiting on me,'" she said.
They didn't think she knew anything about automobile parts, but she did, because when she was a performer traveling in the segregated South, there weren't a lot of places to get help on the road. If a vehicle broke down, she would look to see what band members were doing under the hood to fix it.
Her time in California was during the women's liberation era, when women were entering the job market in record numbers. Some men resented that, too.
"But I wasn't trying to take away their jobs. I was trying to feed my family," she said.
Luckily for us, Irma came home to New Orleans in the mid-'70s. She met the man who would become her manager and husband in 1975.
"I had a manager who had done some underhanded things, so Emile became my manager," she said. "I told him, 'What you don't know, we can learn together.'"
They learned it well. Irma has had a remarkable career that just keeps going and going.
When I caught up with her at their home in eastern New Orleans last week, they had just returned from a tour in Australia, which included singing at the Byron Bay Festival, a blues festival that's like a smaller version of the Jazz Fest.
"A lot of folks we talked to had been to the Jazz Fest," she said. "We talked to a man who said he met his wife at our club 20 years ago."
Their club, The Lion's Den, was wiped out by Hurricane Katrina, but Irma doesn't miss it most of the time.
"Just during Jazz Fest," she said.
That was when fans from around the country and around the world would come to the club on Broad Street to see her perform.
Her house also was flooded after Katrina, but she didn't mourn for what she lost to the storm.
"I felt my loss when we were in Austin and I saw that the city was covered with water," she said.
She regrets losing photos of her children and grandchildren when they were babies, but her oldest daughter, who lives in California, was able to replace some of them for family members.
"Anyway, you have them in your head and in your heart," she said.
One of Irma's proudest accomplishments -- besides the Grammy she won in 2007 for "After the Rain" -- was getting her associate degree in business studies at Delgado Community College at 60. She's been such an inspiration to young struggling moms and other nontraditional students that the Irma Thomas WISE (Women in Search of Excellence) Center was named in her honor.
Whether she is halfway around the world or on stage in New Orleans, she loves being a performer.
"I feel comfortable when I'm singing," she said. "What I do with the audience is like what we're doing now, just having a conversation."
One of my favorite Irma stories was told to me by her long-time drummer, the late Wilbert Rawlins Sr., also known as Wilbert Widow. He played with her band, the Professionals, for 27 years, and he's the man who first introduced her as "the Soul Queen of New Orleans."
They were performing at an outdoor venue in Philadelphia when a strong wind came up and kept blowing the hair from Irma's wig into her mouth.
She finally got exasperated and asked the audience, "Are you ready for this?"
"She just whipped that wig off, and the wind caught it, and it ran across the stage like a little stuffed dog," Rawlins said. "There was silence, and then everyone started to clap and cheer. It was rockin' and rollin'. It was fun."
Sunday's concert is sure to be rockin' and rollin' and fun, too. But this Mother's Day will be different for Irma, because it will be the first year she won't be talking to her mom in California.
"She died in March, surrounded by grandbabies and great-grandbabies," she said.
Today, Irma will be thinking about her mother and her children, and she'll be singing in her sweet soulful voice for all the families at the zoo.
"I'll be remembering a happy time in my life," she said. "It's all about being a mom and being able to share my memories with other mothers. That's what makes it special."
Mothers of any age get in free at Audubon Zoo on Mother's Day. The zoo is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. The BRW Motown Show Band will perform from 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m., and Irma Thomas and the Professionals will perform from 2:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. Food will be available for purchase, and you can buy gifts for Mom at the craft tents. The concert is sponsored by Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen.
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