Culture  /  Narrative

The Counterfeit Queen of Soul

A strange and bittersweet ballad of kidnapping, stolen identity and unlikely stardom.

One night in early January 1969, Jones appeared at the Pink Garter, a former grocery store turned nightclub in nearby Richmond. “It was 90 percent black in there,” said Fenroy Fox, a.k.a. “the Great Hosea,” who ran the club. “Everything changed after Martin Luther King got killed. Blacks was staying in black places. People were scared.” That night, Hosea’s house band, the Rivernets, fell into “Respect,” and Jones stepped into the spotlight. “What you want,” she sang, “Baby, I got it!” To the whiskey-eyed crowd, she was Aretha.

Also on the bill that night was Lavell Hardy, a 24-year-old New York hairdresser with a six-inch pompadour. A year earlier, Hardy’s record “Don’t Lose Your Groove” had reached Number 42 on the Cash Box singles chart, behind a bizarre Jimi Hendrix parody by Bill Cosby. But Hardy earned $200 a night—20 times more than Jones—impersonating James Brown.

Hardy blew off the roof that night, but he said Jones-as-Aretha was the best performer he’d ever seen. “She’s identical from head to toe,” he gushed. “She’s got the complexion. She’s got the looks. She’s got the height. She’s got the tears. She’s got everything.”

A week later, Hardy followed Jones to a gig at Richmond’s Executive Motor Inn. When he invited her to tour with him across Florida, Jones refused. She’d never been to Florida, and she couldn’t afford the bus fare. Undeterred, Hardy told her he was booking the opening act for the real Aretha Franklin. “He told me I would be paid $1,000 for six shows in Florida,” Jones recalled. Naively, she believed him, and borrowed the one-way bus fare from a local money-lender. (Efforts to reach Hardy for this story were unsuccessful.) Traveling for the first time without her gospel group, Jones watched through the bus window as the fields gave way to palm trees. It was the start of a journey that one reporter would call “a bizarre tale of hijinks, of abduction, of physical threats, and finally of arrest.” When Jones arrived hot and tired in Melbourne, Florida, Hardy dropped the bomb. There was no Aretha, he admitted. Jones would impersonate the “Queen of Soul.”

“No!” she cried.

But Hardy said if she didn’t cooperate, she’d be “in a lot of trouble.”

“You’re down here and broke and you don’t know anybody,” he said.

“He threatened to throw me in the bay,” Jones later recalled. She couldn’t swim and had a fear of drowning.