Ruth Brown’s Birthday Blues : Awards: The singer, who turns 65 the day she enters the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has mixed feelings about the tribute’s timing. ‘Feels like it’s been a little long in coming.’

Call it a birthday to remember.

Veteran singer Ruth Brown will turn 65 on Tuesday, the day she’s due to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during a dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles.

To make the honor even more gratifying, Brown--who’ll be honored along with such other acts as Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Doors and Sly & the Family Stone--is still a productive artist.

The singer, who begins a two-week run at the Cinegrill tonight, won a Tony Award for best female musical star for her 1990 appearance on Broadway in “Black and Blue” and she won her first Grammy (for female jazz vocalist) the following year. Next month, PBS will broadcast a two-hour documentary on “Black and Blue” directed by Robert Altman.

Never one to waste her time with platitudes (“I’ve got a bad habit of talking too much, of telling what’s on my heart”) Brown has mixed feelings about the timing of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tribute.

“Feels like it’s been a little long in coming,” she said during an interview in her Hollywood Hills home. “I’ve watched it year after year, and I read the procedures and the lists of people being inducted. Whatever the criteria was--that you had to have so many hit records in a certain amount of years, that you had become well-known or been a role model--it seemed like I had it.

“And the most important criteria, to me, was that you continued to be a part of the music,” Brown observed. “I thought that was my ace in the hole. Because I never turned the music loose, no matter what the circumstance--not even in those years when I had to work as a domestic just to survive.”

It clearly bothers Brown that recognition from the music world has not arrived until several years after the Broadway theater embraced her with its highest honor.

Brown’s battered knees--a physical problem tracing back to a late-’40s automobile accident--were hurting her badly as she moved toward the stage to accept the Tony.

“I was worried about just climbing the steps up to the platform,” she said. “And as I did it--very slowly--I was thinking, ‘It has taken me 42 years to climb eight steps,’ because that was the first time in my life that I won anything. No gold records, no Grammys, and then along comes this show on Broadway and I’m given this award. It was mind-boggling, but it was kind of sad at the same time that it was so exciting.”

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Brown’s career began in 1949, when she was signed to Atlantic Records on the strength of recommendations from Duke Ellington and disc jockey Willis Conover. Her initial release, a Russ Morgan ballad titled “So Long,” established her as a major R&B; star in 1949. Other hits--”Teardrops From My Eyes,” “(Mama), He Treats Your Daughter Mean” and “Oh, What a Dream” among them--followed in the ‘50s, before she fell into obscurity in the late ‘60s.

Yet despite the record sales and the fact that Atlantic Records, a tiny company when she joined in 1949, became known as “the house that Ruth built,” she never quite received the recognition she deserved outside the R&B; world.

Part of the problem was the practice, common in the ‘50s, of having white entertainers produce follow-up “cover” versions of potentially successful songs by black performers--a practice that still strikes sparks in Brown’s memories.

“Practically everything I did was covered,” she said. “Georgia Gibbs, Kay Starr, Tony Bennett, Patti Page . . . they all did my tunes. The funny thing is that it wasn’t unlike what’s happening today with somebody like Michael Bolton doing Percy Sledge, Ray Charles, Otis Redding.

“The difference is that some of those artists are dead. But when my songs were covered I was still around, and I was completely cut out from doing anything except playing the barns and the warehouses.

“I never got to do TV shows like the Ed Sullivan Show--never. And when I did an Alan Freed show, Georgia Gibbs was on it; they let her sing ‘Mambo, Baby’--my hit--and I had to sing something else. I’ll never forget it.”

Brown is pleased that her Hall of Fame recognition has come at a time when she is perhaps more creatively productive than at any time in her life.

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The comeback was triggered by a booking at the Cinegrill in 1988, followed by stage, screen and television roles as well as new recordings and regular nightclub appearances. Two years ago, the settlement of a royalties dispute with Atlantic was instrumental in the creation of the Rhythm & Blues Foundation.

In the immediate future is a performance at President-elect Bill Clinton’s inauguration party, the possibility of a television talk show, a sitcom and an autobiography.

In addition, with one more album owed Fantasy Records under her current contract, the still-vivacious Brown, her smooth, unlined complexion belying her years, would like nothing better than to bring her career full circle with a recording for Atlantic.

“I know there are different people over there now with different ideas,” she said. “It’s not the same as when Ahmet Ertegun was around, but it feels right--just once more for Atlantic. I just have a feeling in my gut that it would be good.”

And there’s another item on Brown’s 65th birthday wish list.

“Sometime, before I close my eyes,” she said, “I really would like to sing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ somewhere. Because, can you believe it, I’ve never been asked to sing it, not ever, anywhere.

“And I would love to do it, because music--all kinds of music--is what’s helped me survive.

“I don’t read music. I don’t play any instrument. But I can sing it, because it’s a gift. I was born with it. That’s why I never worried when I had to work as a domestic, or when the best I could do was to get paid $30 a night to sing. I knew the music would still be there when I came back. And I’ll always be most grateful for that.”