Holiday Spirit : Inspired by the Jazz Legend, Etta James Crafts a Revealing Collection of Lady Day’s Music

In the notes to her new album, “Mystery Lady,” subtitled “Songs of Billie Holiday,” Etta James explains how, as a child, she would watch her mother, Dorothy, only 14 years her elder, prepare to go out for the evening.

“Billie Holiday would be singing ‘Fine and Mellow’ on the scratchy phonograph as Dorothy painted her full lips with fire-red lipstick, powdered her face, snapped on huge hoop earrings, slipped into an elegant black dress and splashed on her midnight cologne. I can still smell it, still see her.”

Inspired by these memories, James, now 56, has crafted a collection of Holiday’s music that reveals much about the three women. As she says elsewhere in the notes, “The mystery lady is my mother. The mystery lady is also Billie Holiday, who in so many ways reminds me of my mother. And I suppose the mystery lady is me.”

James is best known for her decidedly risque R&B; presentations since her 1955 hit “The Wallflower” (given that title when the record company felt that the song’s original name, “Roll With Me Henry,” was just too suggestive). But her latest album shows her off as a serious ballad singer while providing a glimpse of the influences that guided her course as a vocalist.

On the phone from her home in Riverside, James explains the effect Holiday’s music had on that preteen girl growing up in Los Angeles and what it means to her today.

“In those days, we could only listen to what she was talking about and say, ‘Yeah, right.’ It was like somebody saying, ‘Yeah, I hear you, but I don’t know what you’re saying.’

“But now as a grown-up, from firsthand experience, we know exactly what Billie was singing about, what she felt, why her songs are so sad, so melancholy, why there’s so much hurt in them.

“I think about that song ‘Don’t Explain,’ when she talks about lipstick on his collar”--here she breaks into song--” ’People will talk and you’ll cheat, but that don’t matter, dear, when you’re with me.’ When I was young, I thought, ‘Are you kidding? Don’t explain? Boy, she’s open-minded.’ But now I understand. I’ve walked in her moccasins.”

The path that James has followed to this point hasn’t always been straight and narrow. But her perseverance, from her teen-singer days in a trio known as the Peaches (“we were black, we were women, we were winning all the talent contests in town, but that wasn’t making us any money”) and her discovery by Johnny Otis to some two dozen crossover hits in the ‘60s and her battles with poverty and drug addiction, has finally had its rewards.

Her popularity soared again in the mid-’80s with the releases of “The Early Show” and “The Late Show” (now available on CD as “Blues in the Night,” Vols. 1 and 2) with the late saxophonist Eddie (Cleanhead) Vinson. A new audience discovered her work, and she became the darling of young jazz-R&B; fans, touring the world and recording new albums.

The last couple years have been particularly rewarding ones for James. She was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame last year. MCA has released “The Essential Etta James,” a collection of her Chess-label recordings of the ‘60s and ‘70s, joining “R&B; Dynamite” (Ace), a compilation that chronicles her earlier work, including “Wallflower.”

Etta James is big, again.

While the notes to “Mystery Lady” explain James’ motivation to do Holiday, they shed little light on that other aspect of her career: the raunchy, good-naturedly sexy way she handles most of her material.

“You mean the vulgar part?” she asked. “The vulgar part is my way of being defiant. It’s being a woman and having to make my way through life and dealing with a man’s world. I’m just singing a song, and this is the way I feel. If you don’t like it, you might as well go back into a closet with yourself.”

But the new album, minus the rollicking, bawdy numbers on which she’s staked her career, is a bit of a gamble.

“There’s going to be some controversy with this album,” she said, “because it’s more jazz. But I don’t care what anybody else says.”

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She’s doing a handful of numbers from the record on her current tour, which stops at the Coach House tonight and Friday at the Strand in Redondo Beach. She’ll be accompanied by her regular Roots Band, rather than the all-star jazz lineup from the “Mystery Lady” album, which includes pianist-arranger Cedar Walton and saxophonist Red Holloway.

A strong personality herself, James admires her strong predecessors.

“Women have always had to express themselves in a different way,” she said. “Back in the days of Bessie Smith, if a woman went into a bar, she was considered a floozy. If she cocked her dress over one knee and said something smart, people said, ‘How dare she?’ Well, those were the strong women, the women making statements.

“Bessie Smith was a woman who really made statements. She once sang her way out of jail, and she wasn’t afraid to sit in the middle of the floor and eat a pig’s foot and drink a beer. I’m a modern-day Bessie Smith, people say, because I’m outrageous.”

James said she’d like one of her future albums to reflect her admiration of strong women musicians: “I’d like to do a collage, do all the favorite ladies of my life: Billie, Dinah Washington, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey. I love all those women.”

The fact that such an album would cast a wide net over jazz, blues and pop doesn’t bother her.

“All of these women were blood sisters,” she said. “All of this music is from blood brothers. It doesn’t matter if it’s John Lee Hooker blues coming from Mississippi or some jazz cat saying, ‘Let’s take this thing uptown and be cool.’ Johnny Otis always said that Lightnin’ Hopkins and Miles Davis weren’t first cousins. They were blood brothers.”

Categories have always been a problem for James, as she says in the notes to “Mystery Lady”: “I felt I belonged in all of them.”

There is one category she still has yet to pursue: country music.

“I’ve always loved country,” she said. “I love Randy Travis and the Judds and George Jones and those people. And I’ve always wondered why there were no black singers in country, except for Charley Pride, and no women at all. I always wanted to be one of the first black women to go to the Grand Ole Opry.”

“Country music--all it is is the blues. And it tells some of the best stories, some of that same Billie Holiday type of stuff. You sit there, you’re going to hear a story. None of this ‘C’mon, baby, fly me to the moon, we’re going to swing among the stars.’ It’s let’s-get-down stuff. Everything they talk about is real. If they say their hog has cholera, I can understand that.”

James is telling her story as well, to biographer David Ritz, who wrote the liner notes for “Mystery Lady.”

“He’s sort of like a little therapist for me,” James said. “I’m remembering all these things.”

But James prefers that whatever else her life holds in store remain a mystery.

“I’ve never been the type to say, ‘Where am I going next?’ or ‘Will I win this Grammy or that?’ Even when we were first starting out, I never thought what I’d be doing 50 years from now.

“People ask me what was it like in the fabulous ‘50s--did you realize all the great things that were happening then? We didn’t think anything about it at the time. It was just like fixing a plain old pot of greens and some corn bread. We didn’t blow it out of proportion.”

* Etta James and the Roots Band appear tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano, (714) 496-8930, 8 p.m., $25 (Coco Montoya opens); and Friday at The Strand, 1700 S. Pacific Coast Highway, Redondo Beach, (310) 316-1700, 8:30 p.m., $25.