In a career overshadowed by her younger sister Aretha, Erma Franklin, who has died aged 64, encountered more than her share of misfortune. It was not until 1992 that she received real recognition for her greatest recording, Piece Of My Heart, when the jeans company Levi Straus used the 25-year-old song in a European advertising campaign, catapulting it into the UK top 10.
The eldest of three sisters, Erma was born in Shelby, Mississippi. Her father was the Rev CL Franklin, a legendary, travelling gospel preacher, who moved from Tennessee to New York and Michigan. It was in New York that Erma first sang in public, at the age of five. Later, in Detroit, she and her sisters, Aretha and Carolyn, sang together in the New Bethel Baptist church choir, whose powerful harmonies propelled Aretha into the public eye with her first gospel releases in 1956.
Aged 14, Erma started a secular group called the Cleopatrettes, which won a state- wide singing competition and recorded with JVB label (who also recorded her father's sermons). Despite encouragement from future members of the Four Tops, she was urged by her father to continue her education, studying business administration and secretarial science at Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia.
Returning to Detroit in the late 1950s, she met the young entrepreneur Berry Gordy, busy searching for a female star to launch Motown Records. His partner, Billy Davis, took Erma to Chicago's Chess studios, where she wrote an early version of All I Could Do Was Cry, later a hit for Etta James.
The increasing success of secularised black American gospel in the mainstream pop field led to Aretha Franklin winning a contract with Columbia in 1960, after which Erma was signed to its subsidiary, Epic. She released her first album, Her Name Is Erma, in 1962, but - like Aretha - she failed to find immediate success. After her contract lapsed, she spent five years as featured vocalist for the R&B singer Lloyd Price, then fell back on her academic background and became an administrator with IBM computers.
In 1967, as Aretha's career broke through, Erma was tempted back to the studio by the influential New York producer, composer and arranger Bert Berns, whose work with the Drifters, Garnett Mimms, and Freddy Scott had shaped an intense "uptown" form of soul music.
Berns, and co-writer Jerry Ragovoy, gave Erma a new composition, Piece Of My Heart, initially arranged, according to Franklin, as a calypso. After she had insisted on delivering it in her own strident style, the song and its follow-up, Open Up Your Soul, were released on Berns's Shout! label.
As Erma was on the verge of recording an album, however, Berns died, the label collapsed, and she was left once again in limbo, while the white rock singer Janis Joplin enjoyed worldwide success with her cover of Piece Of My Heart. On hearing Joplin's characteristically histrionic version, Erma said she "never even recognised the song", and thus felt no resentment.
In the late 1960s, Erma moved to RCA, where her album Soul Sister was released in 1969, along with a hit single Gotta Find Me A Lover (24 Hours A Day). That same year, she first visited Britain, when she sang at the Royal Albert Hall with Wilson Pickett. She toured the UK again in 1973. But career frustrations continued when a planned album, to be produced by Aretha, had to be scrapped after the death of sax player King Curtis.
Erma's relationship with her sister remained strong, however, and the two continued to perform together during the 1980s and 90s. For more than 30 years, Erma also worked for a private childcare charity and family reunification agency in Michigan. She leaves a son and daughter.
Erma Vernice Franklin, singer, born January 1 1938; died September 7 2002
