Vickie Jones was a talented singer who is perhaps most famous for being arrested for impersonating Aretha Franklin. During the day, Jones sang with her church choir, and at night she sang under her assumed name in seedy bars for money, because she was a single mother with four children to support. And she was good at it. Jones was a fan of Aretha Franklin, and covered some of Franklin’s hit songs in her nightclub act. One night, James Brown impersonator Lavell Hardy heard Jones sing and was impressed by how much she sounded like Aretha.
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Hardy later approached Jones and told her that he was slated to tour with the actual Aretha Franklin in Florida, and that he wanted to book Jones as an opening act in the shows. Jones initially refused Hardy’s offer, not because she didn’t believe him, but rather because she quite literally didn’t have enough money for bus fair to get to Florida. However, after Hardy explained that Jones would be paid $1,000 (about $8,000 today) for a stretch of six nights of performing with the Queen of Soul, she took out a loan with a local money lender for the price of a bus ticket.
When Jones arrived in Florida without a penny to her name, however, Hardy explained he’d been lying and that she wouldn’t be opening for Franklin at all, but would be pretending to be her. An irate Jones told Hardy that she’d do no such thing… The problem was she was now stuck in Florida without money to get home. At this point, beyond dangling the promise of a lot of money if she went along with it, Hardy also allegedly told her that he’d kill her and toss her body in the ocean if she refused to comply with his request.
Driving a hard bargain, Jones accepted his offer, and Hardy subsequently went about approaching a number of small Florida club owners claiming to represent Franklin. These owners were understandably unconvinced that the very young Hardy represented THE Aretha Franklin, with some going so far to laugh in his face.
However, some were convinced to pay for an Aretha Franklin show, and Hardy made plenty of money- which he did not share with Jones. Neither did he allow her out of his sight unless she was locked in her hotel room. Read about the travails of the Aretha Franklin clone Vickie Jones at Today I Found Out.
Source: neatorama