Born to the Blues : Maurice Miller and the other members of Valley-based Sweet Grease are weekly crowd-pleasers at Re$iduals.

Maurice Miller was born to the blues. He grew up in Alton, Ill., up the road and across the Mississippi from St. Louis, the son of a pool-shooting gambler. He took to music early, first as a singer, then as a drummer. Nicknamed “Daddio” by age 11, Maurice had a band and his own blues radio show at 16.

At 17, in 1948, he was playing drums on the road with blues legends Memphis Slim, Chuck Willis and Big Joe Turner. Ten years later, he was in Hollywood, playing clubs and recording sessions with Los Angeles’ top jazz musicians.

Today, at 61, after career highlights that include staff gigs with the Lighthouse All-Stars in Hermosa Beach, with Nancy Wilson, Lena Horne, Ike & Tina Turner and the Association, Miller has given up the drums for blues singing.

As the lead singer for the San Fernando Valley-based blues group Sweet Grease, Miller enjoys the rarity of a blues band engagement that has been running at the same club--Re$iduals in Studio City--weekly for almost four years.

“The band’s personality is the reason they’ve lasted with us so long,” said Re$iduals club owner Craig Tennis, a transplanted New Yorker with a background in TV writing and production.

“People who come week after week to hear the same sets and the same songs by Sweet Grease are disappointed when we have another band,” said Tennis, whose regulars include staffers from nearby Universal and Warner Bros. studios.

The members of Sweet Grease--who play piano, bass, drums and guitar--are major league musicians, like Miller, with extensive recording and show dates on their resumes.

Drummer Denny Seiwell played 1960s club dates with New York jazz legends Zoot Sims and Al Cohn, recorded with James Brown and Janis Joplin, and toured with Paul McCartney and Wings before joining Sweet Grease.

Pianist Dwayne Smith, a blind native of St. Louis who plays and sings with the fiery, raunchy passion of a gospel preacher gone astray, studied piano and music theory at Washington University in St. Louis, then joined Ike & Tina Turner in the ‘70s. In Los Angeles, Smith worked with Wilson Pickett, B. B. King, Bill Wyman, Barbra Streisand and the Association before joining Sweet Grease for the Saturday night gigs at Re$iduals.

Bass player Jimmy Hoff, from Philadelphia, is the group’s youngest and newest member at 33. He played clubs in Atlantic City and worked with Ben E. King, the Coasters, Neil Sedaka, Buddy Greco and Billy Eckstine before coming to Los Angeles and joining Sweet Grease.

Guitarist Miles Joseph played with the Temptations, Albert King and Al Green as a teen-ager in Detroit and landed lead guitar spots with REO Speedwagon, Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin before joining Sweet Grease. His work with Franklin (such as the White House inaugural ball for President-elect Clinton this month), sometimes causes him to miss a Saturday at Re$iduals.

“It’s one of the best blues bands in L. A.,” said Joseph, who played with the group free for almost a year before he was put on the payroll. “Dwayne is an absolute monster.

“These guys are all seasoned cats who can really play the hell out of their instruments. We have a lot of individuality to bring to the collective unit, and we listen to each other.”

In blues bands--often high-decibel outfits of shout-level vocals, screaming guitars and wailing harps--below-the-pain threshold volume and players who listen to one another are unusual.

Gary Stansbury, who books blues groups for the L. A. club The Mint, has high praise for Sweet Grease. “I’m particularly impressed with the lead guitarist, Miles,” he said. “And the lead singer, Maurice, has a texture to his voice and a stage presence that makes the group quite special.”

A sensuous vocalist, consummate showman and master of the double-entendre, Miller is the only black member of a group whose music is black right down to the roots. It’s ironic for Miller to find himself singing the blues again after giving up singing almost a lifetime ago.

“I can’t name all the groups I’ve been with: rock ‘n’ roll, blues, jazz, swing. But I have so much fun up there on stage at Re$iduals. I think that’s why the place is always crowded when we’re there, because it looks like we’re having the fun we are.”

Miller’s career has had enough dramatic chapters to provide plots for several movies. A teen-ager in the 1950s, he experienced the grim reality of Southern racism as a member of a black band in the South, where driving from one club date to another was an experience in terror.

“We’d drive through towns in Mississippi and Alabama as late at night as possible,” Miller said. “We’d have our hearts in our throats until we reached the black section where we were headed.

“One night, we were on a road that went right past a burning cross at a Ku Klux Klan rally in a field in South Carolina.”

Miller’s early trials were a mirror opposite of those of Joseph, a white player in a world of black music who faced discrimination in the soul clubs he played in Detroit as an 18-year-old.

“Working the chitlins circuit as the only white player in a black band,” Joseph said, “I had guys pull straight razors on me. I had to play really aggressively, just to stay alive.”

WHERE AND WHEN

* Location: Sweet Grease at Re$iduals, 11042 Ventura Blvd., Studio City.

* Hours: From 9 p.m. Saturdays.

* Price: No cover, no minimum.

* Call: (818) 761-8301.