It took Sheila Ferguson only a minute to tell the Three Degrees she was quitting the act. It was another decade before she got over what she calls the pain of listening to their music.

"They were toothpaste songs, weren't they?" she muses. "You had to smile when you sang them."

In the decade of disco, though, they didn't half shift vinyl. When Will I See You Again? sold no fewer than 28 million copies, and went to number one in almost every country civilised enough to have a hit parade. And Sheila and the other Two Degrees famously smiled and sang for Prince Charles on his 30th birthday. "But whenever I hear that music now, it all sounds so bubble-gummy," she says. "Especially when you compare it with the gutsiness of pure soul."

It is this latter variety of music that Sheila is currently to be found performing, in a singing, dancing celebration called Soul Train, which arrives in Bradford next month.

Soul music, she says, represents her roots - and she has spent much of the 14 years since leaving the Three Degrees discovering exactly where those lie.

"My great great great grandmother was a house slave who was impregnated by a Scottish laird," she reveals. "When their child was four or five, they stowed away on a Liverpudlian slave ship and founded my mother's side of the family in America."

The discovery of this branch of her family tree, coupled with her own recollections of growing up in Philadelphia, prompted her to write a book, Soul Food - Classic Cuisine of the American South, which has become a standard work in the US.

"The history became more important than the recipes," she says. "I spoke to my family and discovered that I had ancestors who were preachers and who bootlegged whiskey in the civil war and hid horses from the Yankees when the northern rebels came.

"I said, 'Why didn't you tell me all this before?' They said, 'You never asked'."

Sheila's recipes - she cooks them somewhat incongruously at her homes in Britain and the south of France - have yet to catch on over here. "After salmonella and nouvelle cuisine, a fattening book about real calories and real butter was not timely," she says. Nevertheless, writing down the details of the food her ancestors ate became an obsession.

"I wanted to record for posterity the fact that African-Americans did give something to American cuisine. You had Jewish pastrami, Italian pasta, but you didn't have black nothin'. That got on my nerves and I wanted to fix it."

She was fascinated to discover that the seeds of watermelons, primary ingredient the southern diet, were first carried to America in the pockets of slaves. And that the slaves were chosen not for their bones and teeth but for their knowledge of cultivating rice, the first staple of the southern economy.

"Everyone talks of the slaves as if they were one nationality. The fact is, they all spoke different languages - so when they were thrown together on the plantations, they couldn't communicate with anything except food, music and religion. There you have the roots of soul food and soul music."

Sheila discovered the music before the food. As a teenager she followed her idol Marvin Gaye to the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, and queued for his autograph. At 16 she had her own manager and began singing with school friends who would eventually form the Three Degrees.

The girls took to the road years before they began making records, playing the clubs of Las Vegas, Miami and Puerto Rico. Eventually, they gravitated to Europe.

"We paid our dues," says Sheila. "The discipline I learned then - the craft of holding an audience - is why I'm still around today."

She still sings When Will I see You Again? - it's in her current show. Less memorable Three Degrees tunes like Take Good Care of Yourself, are not.

"I loved our music at the time, but time moves on," she says.

"Now I'm able to stretch myself and sing grittier songs. I never thought I'd hear myself singing a James Brown tune."

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.