Irma Thomas’ Life Is Now a Brighter Blue : The singer finds that after more than 30 years of intermittent success in the music business, time was on her side after all. She’ll perform this weekend at the Pacific Amphitheatre.

If hard times and disappointment are the credentials necessary to sing the blues, Irma Thomas has a purse full of them. Already twice married and the mother of three children when her musical career began at 17, she was paid $1 for her first gig and recalls having to hand that back to the bandleader for gas money.

That was fairly typical of the financial farings of R&B; performers in the late ‘50s, when artists rarely saw royalty checks and show promoters often disappeared with the cash box.

When a front tooth was knocked out by a falling microphone at one wild fraternity gig, it was years before Thomas could afford a porcelain cap for it. (She finished the gig, by the way.) Still, with a string of regional and national hits and tours through the segregated South, New Orleanian Thomas was able to support her children.

At the same time, she created a legacy of remarkable vocal performances, with a control and range of emotion matched only by few R&B; singers. One, “Wish Someone Would Care,” went to No. 17 on the national charts in 1964.

But more often her records went unheard, while covers of them by the Rolling Stones (“Time Is on My Side”) and others hit the charts. One low point in the early ‘70s found “the Soul Queen of New Orleans” without gigs and selling auto parts at a Los Angeles Montgomery Ward.

In talking with Thomas these days, however, the 49-year-old singer speaks with such vibrancy and good humor that one might think her life had been one long cakewalk.

Reached by phone last Thursday at her home in New Orleans, Thomas said: “After growing older and hopefully wiser, you start to think, ‘What good does it do to sit there and brood and waste that energy being bitter when no one gives a damn anyhoo?’ It’s not going to change the past, so take that energy and pull it into the future. The hell with it.”

It also helped the singer’s attitude that her career is on something of a roll. Since returning to New Orleans in the mid-’70s she has become one of the star attractions of the city’s burgeoning Jazz and Heritage Festival and maintains a busy performance pace in the city. She has two splendid, critically lauded albums out on Rounder Records, “The New Rules” and “The Way I Feel.” Earlier this year she was featured in a PBS “Lonesome Pine Special.”

Saturday she makes a rare West Coast appearance at the Benson & Hedges Blues concert at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa, and she will perform in a series of similar shows on the East Coast and in the South. (She performs Saturday at 3:30 p.m. with Dr. John. The other featured artists are B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Joe Cocker.)

“In the last five years my career has taken an upturn, which is certainly a reason to be happy,” she said, “I mean, you sing in this business for 30-some years and you begin to wonder if you’ll ever get the recognition you think you deserve. Now I have been getting some.

“I don’t feel so bad now about not having had a major hit record in over 20 years because I’m working steadily. I think just being visible is very important to an artist, more-so than having a major record because you can have a hit this year and be totally out of sight and mind the next year, whereas I have been visible the last few years. Just knowing that some people are hearing me and enjoying it is a degree of success in itself.”

Unlike some performers whose passion wanes after so many years of work, Thomas feels that she’s just entering her prime.

“I think I’m getting more. Having lived the years I’ve lived and gone through what I have, I can relate even more to the songs than when I first did them. When I did ‘(You Can Have My Husband but Please) Don’t Mess With My Man’ (her first record in 1958), what does a 17-year-old kid with three kids know anything about that? I mean she’s just singing because she’s singing. But as you get older you can really put something into those same words because you’ve lived it. You’ve had an opportunity to find out what that’s all about, so of course you can do it much better.”

She’s having trouble lately, though, finding songs she can get that feeling for.

“We’re trying to record another album soon, but we haven’t had much luck finding decent material. Most people who are writing are either doing their own material or they’re sending it to people who have a track record of hits. So instead of their best stuff, they’re sending me their rejects.

“When I select a song, it’s because I like it, and I know I’m going to have to live with it for whatever the duration of my career might be. You definitely have to feel it. Oftentimes there are songs that are lyrically pretty good, but I don’t feel them, so I don’t do them.”

One option she and Rounder might take would be to record a live album. Whatever comes out, Thomas feels that its chances will be better now with the current increased interest in R&B; music, reflected by her fellow New Orleanian Aaron Neville’s picking up a Grammy earlier this year.

But it’s still the exception for R&B; singers to get recognition, she said, noting of Neville: “Look what he had to do to get it done. He’s been around 35, 40 years, but he had to do a duet with Linda Ronstadt to even be noticed. . . . But at least they know he exists, and he deserves every single minute of it. Because his career was already out here when I started.”

Ronstadt, Thomas has heard, recently recorded a version of her 1965 song “Wait, Wait, Wait.” Not to detract from Ronstadt’s fine voice, but Thomas’ could take it to the mat in the first round. But then, she also had it all over Mick Jagger, who had the hit with “Time Is on My Side” in 1965.

Thomas is only bemused. “I just take it as a compliment. At least they’re listening to me. I know Linda Ronstadt had to listen to the song by me in order to get ‘Wait, Wait, Wait’ because I’m the only one who ever sang it.”

Her gigs today can range from performances before a virtual sea of people at the Jazz and Heritage Fest (which now draws more than 300,000 people each year) to singing in the Lion’s Den, the small neighborhood bar she owns with her husband of 13 years, Emile Jackson.

“I don’t have any problem going from one to the other. Every show is a show to me, whether it’s 40,000 or 40. They’re all people who paid the price to hear it, and I give them all the same that I would do if there was a million people out there. I don’t cheat on doing a little bit more or a little bit less. I give it every bit,” she said.

Thomas also keeps busy performing a number of charity gigs every year, giving something back to the city that supports her.

She believes that there’s no place in the world even remotely like New Orleans.

“It’s difficult to put your finger on what’s special about it,” she said, “other than the fact that I find people here are a lot more cordial as a whole. It’s always been said that here they’ll invite you in their homes for a drink and food before they’ll take you out. They try to make people feel at home here.

“When I lived in L.A. I found that even a lot of people that migrated there tried to be what they’re not. They even changed their whole air about them.

“There was a girlfriend of mine who was born and raised here in Louisiana, and she moved to the West Coast. I went out to visit her, and she told me she was going to take me out to eat some prawns. And I was wondering, ‘Well, what the hell are prawns?’ Then they brought me shrimp.

“I said, ‘Why the hell didn’t you call them shrimp ? You’ve been calling them shrimp all your life. How come all of a sudden now they’re prawns ?’ She thought I was nuts . I just think you should be who you are no matter where you live.”

Irma Thomas, Dr. John, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Cocker and B.B. King will play Saturday, beginning at 3:30 p.m. at the Pacific Amphitheatre, 100 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $21.45 to $27.50. Information: (714) 634-1300.