Lost and Found!

Once again, thank the stars for the internet and YouTube, for providing vintage footage of the “Soul Queen of New Orleans”, Irma Thomas.

Let me back up.

I’ve been talking up the terrific UK sci-fi anthology Black Mirror by Charlie Brooker around here lately, streaming on Netflix.

The second episode of the first season, “15 Million Merits” features a(n excellent-in-its-own-right) cover of the song above, by one of the actors:

Becoming a bit obsessed with this song, I took to The Google and found it was by Ms. Thomas, who, despite regional success, didn’t ever achieve quite the national recognition enjoyed by contemporaries like Aretha Franklin and Etta James (though I gather to soul, jazz and blues aficionados, she’s quite well known, and a regular festival fixture).

You might know this song of hers, which was covered by another obscure artist a year later:

Having trouble believing that I had never heard of this beautiful singer, I checked my library, only to find: I already HAD two songs by Ms. Thomas, but neither had ever caught my attention the way this song had.

From the fantastic comp One Kiss Can Lead To Another (Girl Group Sounds Lost and Found) :

From some random Blues comp I had:

So, to recap: a song from the ’60’s was used in a 2011 UK-made television series set in the near-future, which was watched by me in the US via on-demand internet streaming in 2014, which sent me to the ‘net to research, which got me ’60’s footage of the singer on Dick Clark.

Neat.