The Sunday Conversation: Cyndi Lauper

For some, the best part of the 2010 Primetime Emmys today is the post-show party scene, where Cyndi Lauper, 57, will likely be the evening’s biggest draw as the headliner for the “Entertainment Tonight” bash. The New York-based singer, who’s married to actor David Thornton and mother of Declyn, 12, is currently on the West Coast leg of a tour for her new album, “Memphis Blues,” which will take her to “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” on Monday night.

Congratulations on how well “Memphis Blues” is doing.

Yeah, it’s a trip — No. 1 on the [Top] Blues [Album Billboard] charts for eight weeks in a row. I don’t think I’ve ever been No. 1 at anything for that long.

Why do you think you’ve done so much better with the blues than with pop/rock and dance music in recent years?

I don’t know. I just felt like at this point, in the country, everybody has the blues. It’s perfect timing: Why don’t you figure out something we could sing directly to the people because things aren’t going so good? There’s an element of the blues that helps you get through it. It was written by oppressed people who kept writing music that was uplifting.

And you grew up listening to Billie Holiday.

I studied with the Lennie Tristano school of jazz. It was very avant-garde. His singer, Betty Scott, was the one that I worked with. I used to do Janis Joplin covers, and I felt like my singing was shallow, and I didn’t have enough information. Joplin created her style by listening to all those other people, like Big Maybelle and Tina Turner, at the beginning of her career, and Etta James, Big Mama Thornton.

I never thought I’d be singing Joplin covers. I had my mind set on being Merry Clayton. I was going to be a great background singer until I realized that counting to eight was really tough — because you have to dance when you’re a background singer — and counting to eight, singing at the time of four is really tough for me.

Your original goal was to be a background singer? Oops.

I kept falling. There was a manager who wouldn’t manage us who said, “You know the girl in the back who sings really good but she keeps falling in those shoes? Move her up front. If you make her the lead singer, I’ll manage your group.” So that’s what happened.

Do you think you could have started out as a blues singer when you were young, or do you think you needed to have some life mileage first?

Honestly, I was singing the blues, but I didn’t have a foundation. And everything I’ve sung since then is based on the foundation I’ve learned. I wouldn’t have invented the stylings I did had I not studied.

All the music on the radio, all the wonderful exciting music was made by African American people. My mother was playing Louis Armstrong in the house right alongside Puccini, like “Madame Butterfly,” which I always felt like, “Ma, c’mon. Nothing ever works out for these women.” And then when I went into [the ‘80s retro-rockabilly band] Blue Angel, I heard Big Maybelle and Little Miss Shapiro and Big Mama Thornton. And I was in my one-room apartment standing around singing with Big Maybelle at the top of my lungs all the time.

Who else influenced you?

I remember in ‘87, I met Grover Washington, and he knew the old songs that I was studying. You couldn’t really play the old songs with anybody because nobody knew the old songs — what they thought of as old songs were from the ‘60s, but they didn’t know songs from the ‘30s. And I used to jam with Grover. I really loved Grover. Grover came once on my birthday; I was in Cincinnati and I was homesick. I was onstage and then he came on and we jammed and jammed and jammed. And I realized that that was my birthday present.

When you were on “Celebrity Apprentice,” you played to benefit your True Colors Fund. What is that and what inspired you to become a champion of gay rights?

I lived through the civil rights movement, and it was just the same thing — another group of people being singled out. So how long are you going to sit there and shut up? I think that people should be aware that if you can single out any group of people in our country, that you can be next. I earned enough money to start the wegiveadamn.org campaign. It’s a viral campaign where people tell their stories explaining what they’re going through so people understand what exactly is happening to the LGBT community.

I read that when you were 17 and trying to find yourself, you took off for Canada and spent two weeks in the woods with your dog, Sparkle.

I was 18. I was camping and writing and drawing, doing tree studies and getting bit by black flies. It was a great experience. I took a Thoreau book with me. The thing that really got me about Thoreau was he was a little sexist, and that kind of [ticked] me off, so I wasn’t into reading it anymore. I wanted to live my life like a man, with the same freedom and being able to learn and have a career and earn money and live my own way and figure out what way that was.

calendar@latimes.com