Thelma Jones

Thelma Jones began her career as a gospel singer before shifting into R&B with the first recording of “The House That Jack Built.” Aretha Franklin delivered the definitive take on the number years afterward, eclipsing Jones’s earlier effort. “Salty Tears” emerged as her strongest track, an affecting tearjerker that never found the audience it warranted. She issued the album Thelma Jones on Columbia in 1978, although her reading of Smokey Robinson’s “I Second That Emotion” failed to register, much like the 1987 Barry single “Never Leave Me.”