--- title: "Gloria Jones turns 81: the Ohio-born Queen of Northern Soul who sang Tainted Love first" url: https://badiyaa.com/gloria-jones-81-queen-of-northern-soul-tainted-love/ published: 2026-10-20T22:37:00+01:00 modified: 2026-10-20T18:45:02+01:00 section: Entertainment publisher: Badiyaa --- # Gloria Jones turns 81: the Ohio-born Queen of Northern Soul who sang Tainted Love first The Cincinnati-born singer cut the first Tainted Love in 1964, 17 years before Soft Cell's cover hit No. 1 in the UK, and co-wrote Motown songs for the Supremes. Gloria Jones turned 81 on Monday, October 19, and the milestone has sent listeners back to a career that runs from a Los Angeles gospel group to Motown’s writing rooms to the all-night dance floors of northern England. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1945, she is the singer who cut the very first “Tainted Love,” and a songwriter whose name sits in the credits of records by the Supremes, Gladys Knight & the Pips and a Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye duet. British soul fans call her “The Queen of Northern Soul.” She earned the title with a record that flopped in her own country. ## From Cincinnati to the COGIC Singers Her family left Ohio for Los Angeles when she was seven. At 14, still in school, she was singing gospel with Billy Preston and Frankie Kahrl in the COGIC Singers, who stayed together roughly four years and made one album, It’s a Blessing. Songwriter and producer Ed Cobb signed her in her late teens to his Greengrass Productions and gave her a first hit, “Heartbeat,” before handing her another of his songs. ## The B-side that crossed the Atlantic Jones recorded “Tainted Love” in 1964, with Glen Campbell on lead guitar and Lincoln Mayorga writing the arrangement. It came out in May 1965 on the Champion label as the flip of “My Bad Boy’s Comin’ Home.” The single missed the charts in both the US and the UK. The song might have stayed a collector’s footnote. Then, in 1973, British DJ Richard Searling picked up a copy on a trip to America and started playing it at Va Va’s in Bolton and later at Wigan Casino, clubs where the Northern soul crowd danced all night to fast, horn-heavy American records that had sold poorly at home. Jones herself played one of the Wigan all-nighters that same year. When she went back to Wigan in March 2024 to mark the song’s 60th anniversary, she summed up what it had meant to those dancers: “The people went crazy for it – it was their dance club national anthem for decades.” ## A timeline of one song - **1964:** Jones records Cobb’s composition in Los Angeles. - **1965:** It is released as a B-side and fails to chart on either side of the Atlantic. - **1973:** Searling’s imported copy turns it into a Northern soul staple. - **1976:** Jones re-records it for her album Vixen, produced by Marc Bolan; this version also misses the charts. - **1981:** Soft Cell’s synth-pop cover reaches No. 1 in the UK. - **1982:** The same cover climbs to No. 8 in the US during a 43-week run on the Hot 100. Count it out and the distance between Jones’s session and the song’s first No. 1 is 17 years (1981 minus 1964), long enough for the original singer to build an entire second career in between. Soft Cell’s single sold 1.05 million copies in the UK in 1981 alone, while her own recording has since been certified Silver there for 200,000 units. ## The Motown writing years That second career ran through Motown. Jones met the songwriter Pam Sawyer while she was in the Los Angeles cast of the musical Hair, and Sawyer invited her to write for the label. Because Jones was also signed as a performer, company practice required a pseudonym, so some of her co-writes carry the name LaVerne Ware. The Jones and Sawyer partnership supplied the Supremes with “Have I Lost You” and “I Ain’t That Easy to Lose” in 1971, and wrote “My Mistake (Was to Love You),” released in 1974 by Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye. Her best-known composition, written with Sawyer and producer Clay McMurray, is “If I Were Your Woman” for Gladys Knight & the Pips, which picked up a Grammy nomination in 1971. The duo also wrote for the Jackson 5, the Four Tops and the Commodores. She left Motown at the end of 1973, after her own album Share My Love, and spent 1973 to 1977 as a backing vocalist and clavinet player in T. Rex. She and the band’s frontman, Bolan, had a son, Rolan, in September 1975. Bolan was killed in a car crash in London in September 1977; Jones, who was driving, was badly hurt. ## After T. Rex Back in Los Angeles she released Windstorm in 1978, dedicating it to Bolan, followed by Reunited, again with Cobb producing. In 1984 she rejoined Preston and other members of the COGIC Singers for a reunion album, and she has worked as a music supervisor for films. She appears as herself in the 2013 documentary 20 Feet from Stardom. In 2010 she and Rolan opened the Marc Bolan School of Music & Film in Makeni, Sierra Leone. On that 2024 return to Wigan she ended with thanks to the town that adopted her record: “I love Wigan and the Wigan people, thank you from the bottom of my heart for having the heart to come out and dance.” ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Gloria Jones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Jones) - [Wikipedia: Tainted Love](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tainted_Love) *Image: Harald Bischoff, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*