Solomon Burke: Solomon in all his glory

The greatest male soul singers are Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and Solomon Burke. But, unlike the others, Burke is very much alive, as Nick Hasted discovered when they met

The King of Rock and Soul is holding imperious court in his London hotel room. Solomon Burke has held that crown unchallenged for many years now, as the rivals and pretenders who helped him define soul music in the 1960s – from his contemporary Sam Cooke to his protégé, Otis Redding – have all faded with time, dead or creatively spent. Only Burke remains vital, as he proves in recalling a life which is astonishing.

Burke has rarely doubted his place in history, not since his grandmother founded a church in his name following a vision, 12 years before he was born, in Philadelphia in 1940. Burke remains the Bishop of Solomon's Temple: The House of God for All People (or The Church of Let It All Hang Out, as he once dubbed it), and has also run chains of undertakers, limousine services and hot dog stands. He was his community's "Wonder Boy Preacher" at seven, had his first gospel hit at 14, and was the mainstay of the legendary Atlantic Records throughout the early 1960s, recording soul hits like "Cry To Me" and "Everybody Needs Somebody To Love". He has played at a Ku Klux Klan rally and at the Harlem Apollo, been bitterly destitute and casually rich, and fathered 21 children (his ninth great-grandchild has just been born).

Now, at 62, after years when only the soul faithful spoke his name, a new album of songs written for him by fans such as Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits and Brian Wilson, aptly titled Don't Give Up On Me, has restored his fortunes once more.

Sixty years spent consuming chicken wings with the same gusto as other aspects of his life makes the 300lb Burke an immobile presence these days, with standing and walking a strain. But the energy he brings to the room is still boundless, the sense of divine purpose he carries undercut impish satire. "Always a pleasure," he winks, as we shake hands. "How's the family?" he continues with apparently genuine concern, before offering round the Southern banquet that room service has delivered.

But he is no mere eccentric, and his comeback is more than nostalgic. The serious, present purpose his humour sugar-coats was shown at a recent show at London's Barbican, when he turned his current single "None of Us Are Free" into a booming condemnation of war in Iraq. As Burke explains, when he sings, he intends more than entertainment. "Something takes over sometimes," he tells me, "and I know this is when God is moving with me. It just happens – words will suddenly come to me that are not in the song but are a message coming through, for somebody in that audience who needs to hear that line. My poor record company, they're going, 'Oh my God! He's on a "Fast Train", but where's he going? He's on the wrong track!' "

It was his grandmother who drummed that sense of destiny into him, in the dirt-poor Black Bottom of 1940s South Philadelphia. She was the local minister, and Burke lived with her, where he was told he was a prophet and given predictions of future glory, when he wasn't visiting his mother, with her Ray Charles and BB King records, up the street. The two worlds came together on Thanksgiving Day, 1954, when his grandmother gave him a guitar as an early Christmas present. "The next day, she was dead," Burke says quietly, his eyes welling up. "Three days after that, I had a record contract. And the next day, my first record was on the radio." It's one of many heavily symbolic but apparently true tales with which Solomon signposts his life.

The music career that followed began with gospel records, as his grandmother might have wished. But he soon moved into more secular, sexual concerns, with some of the earliest soul hits. It was a transition other Christian singers of his generation, from Sam Cooke to Jerry Lee Lewis, found frightening, often being ostracised from their church communities. But Burke never saw a contradiction. "I started with songs like 'To Thee'," he recalls, "but pretty soon I was singing 'Why Do Me This Way?' God is God. And God is in everything good. I love beautiful women, and I'm not going to tell anyone different. Sam Cooke was packing out churches at the same time as me, but when he was singing sacred songs, the young girls were thinking, 'Lord, Jesus, if I could just get with that Sam Cooke. Brother Sam, come over and pray for me one time!' All of that was in the room, it's what life is about. You can't separate it."

Burke satisfied all his appetites on his 1950s tours, which often went through the Deep South. His stories of that violently segregated place, in the first days of a Civil Rights movement his songs would sometimes seem to soundtrack, are all without rancour. The Ku Klux Klan rally he was mistakenly booked at ("when the torches came on, I thought, "Is this a candlelight service?") was just one more pay-day, the way he tells it now. He even misses the secret black world that integration destroyed: "No longer did we go to Big Mama's Hamburger Stand, because around the corner were the golden arches of McDonald's. It wasn't integration. It was, we're in. You're out."

By 1957, he had problems of his own. Questioning his label's royalty statements, he was punished for his temerity by being blacklisted from the record industry. The dark days that followed almost broke him. "I was taken to the pits of Hell," he remembers. "For a year and a half, I was a bum, living on the street and in abandoned cars, walking around in a pair of leather shoes with a rubber band around the soles. I wore my tuxedo pants out till I couldn't wear 'em any more. I said" – his voice whispering now – " 'Lord, I'm standing on the street begging for nickels and dimes, and I once was a star. Is this part of the ministry?' I felt like this was it. I was lost in the wilderness in my own life and time."

Typically, he was rescued by a sign. Stooping to pick up coins tossed by a passerby, he instead felt compelled to throw them away, and was soon revived, as the first of Atlantic Records' great soul stars. He would have problems there, too, chiselled out of royalties on his biggest hits, he felt, by the label's famously sharp president, Jerry Wexler. At odds with the record industry, more low times followed after the 1960s. Only with his new record's latest resurrection of his fortunes – and the prospect of another album next year, with his mother's old hero, Ray Charles – are his grandmother's plans back on track.

"It's all part of the prophecy," he decides. "I've had 48 years of music. And now I'm singing to fans of three generations. And I'm thinking, "Oh my God, I need a hamburger!'"

'Don't Give Up on Me' and 'None of Us Are Free' (both Fat Possum) are out now. Burke is on 'Jools Hollands' Hootenanny' on BBC2 on 31 Dec