Soul survivor Gloria Scott: ‘Tina would say, “Why does Gloria always talk back to Ike?”’

You can understand why Gloria Scott thought her music had been forgotten. In truth, it hadn’t attracted a lot of attention in the first place. Her career intersected with some of the biggest artists of 1960s and 1970s soul – Ike & Tina Turner, Sly Stone, Barry White, Stevie Wonder, the Supremes – but her own handful of records failed to make an impression.

In the mid-1990s, she was living in Guam, in the western Pacific, singing in hotels, when a tourist said he knew her name: her flop 1974 single, (A Case of) Too Much Love Makin’, had covered it on her 1993 album So Natural. Copies of the original seven-inch were selling for eye-watering sums: the last time someone bought one on Discogs, they paid £1,300. Scott, meanwhile, no longer even owned a copy of her solitary album, What Am I Gonna Do. Then she was contacted by the promoters of Germany’s Baltic Soul Weekender asking if she wanted to perform, accompanied by an orchestra. “The audience knew every song on the album, they were singing louder than I was, and I just stopped and listened,” she says with a smile of disbelief, speaking via Zoom from her home in Florida.