Naomi Shelton isn’t the sort of woman to let a knee replacement slow her down. As the Alabama-born gospel and soul singer who returns to Scotland to play at Fife Jazz Festival this weekend says, “I can’t move around onstage the way I once could but nothing’s going to stop me singing. I’ve been to France and Spain and Holland, as well as the UK, in the past few years. I’d never been to these places before. I didn’t realise that the people over there would come out to hear me sing.”

People have been turning out to hear Shelton sing since she made her public debut, aged six, in Mount Coney Baptist Church in Midway, Alabama. Her family lived on a farm just outside of the small town, population around five hundred, and she and her older sisters, Hattie Mae and Annie Ruth, spent all their free time perfecting their harmonies. Their role models were mostly male groups including the Swan Silvertones and the Dixie Hummingbirds but the aim was the same whatever the gender: get it right and sing like you mean it.

As the Davis Sisters the trio performed throughout Naomi’s childhood, travelling from church to church, starring at Baptist conferences and becoming local celebrities through their appearances on radio. Singing was all that Naomi ever wanted to do, although she had to work as a house cleaner and a maid to guarantee an income even while she was singing with all the bands who passed through New York and accompanied her as the house singer in the Night Cap, a Brooklyn magnet for soul music fans in the 1960s.

“I left Alabama for New York as soon as I graduated from high school in 1958,” she says. “I thought New York was the place to be heard but not long after I arrived here my mother got sick and I had to go home to look after her. Then when my mother got better I went to Miami, where my daughter was born, but I couldn’t earn enough money to send home to my mother, who was looking after my daughter, so I came back to New York and it was hard. I’d work two shifts as a house cleaner during the day and then go out to sing at night.”

By this time Naomi Davis had become Naomi Shelton. She made her married name her stage name and although she released a few singles over the years, she remained an under-the-radar attraction for years, singing soul music during the week and gospel music in church on a Sunday. Then, at the age of sixty-six, she came to the attention of Daptone Records. Daptone had scored a big success with the revivalist soul of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, whose bass player, Gabriel Roth, happened to be Daptone’s founder and a big fan not only of the classic soul music that Shelton was singing on club gigs but also gospel music as recorded by the Staple Singers and the Impressions.

Roth had met Shelton and her musical director, Cliff Driver, some years before and had had her in mind for his label since that encounter but his first two attempts at recording Shelton and her stage sisters, the Gospel Queens singing message songs didn’t achieve quite the results he’d expected. Undaunted, he persisted and at the third attempt he produced Shelton’s first full-length album, What Have You Done, My Brother? An international career was born.

“I never gave up,” says Shelton. “I claimed from the age of six that I was going to be a singer. So I stayed out there all these years. When the first two attempts with Daptone didn’t feel right, I did think about giving up gospel music and concentrating on soul music but I kept my faith. And I felt in my spirit that something had to give.”

What Have You Done, My Brother’s message songs included A Change Is Gonna Come, a civil rights song written and made famous by Sam Cooke, a hero of Shelton’s alongside James Brown and Otis Redding. In making the transition from gospel singer to pop star Cooke attracted considerable negativity from the gospel audience, as did Aretha Franklin under the same circumstances, but for Shelton, who followed up What Have You Done, My Brother with the equally well received Cold World, the two genres go hand in hand.

“I sing the same way whether I’m singing on a concert or in a church,” she says. “If you’re singing with your heart, you’re singing about love. It can be your love for the Lord or your love for anyone. Songs were always about the words for me and it doesn’t matter if you’re singing a soul-pop song or a gospel classic, you’ve got to reach people.”

Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens play Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline on Saturday, February 13 and Byre Theatre, St Andrews on Sunday, February 14. For further information on Fife Jazz Festival log onto www.fifejazzfestival.com