POP MUSIC : Everything’s Just Jim Dandy : R&B; veteran LaVern Baker has returned from two decades of obscurity to wind up on Broadway and in the Rock Hall of Fame. ‘I was able to keep my head up high and still be Miss Baker,’ she says

NEW YORK —  LaVern Baker is on the stage of the Village Gate nightclub singing “Jim Dandy,” and as the sax man takes a solo, she starts to do the twist, then playfully mimes a pain in her back. It’s been 35 years since Baker recorded “Jim Dandy” and decades since she’s performed a scheduled nightclub engagement in the United States, but rock ‘n’ roll doesn’t always forget. That’s why Baker, whose career flourished in the mid ‘50s, when nobody distinguished between R&B; and rock ‘n’ roll, was recently inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Linda Hopkins, 65, with whom Baker performed in the Broadway musical “Black and Blue,” sits at a ringside table and calls for the sound man to turn up the vocal. As Baker sings “St. Louis Blues” and ends one line in a ringing falsetto, Hopkins raises her hand in silent approval. When Baker’s voices settles back into the melody, Hopkins’ hand comes down and rests on the top of her head. No doubt about it, lady sings the blues, with a twinkle in her eye, and the savvy of a survivor.

“Friar LaVern Baker, telephone for Friar Baker.”

A few days later, it’s lunchtime at the Friars Club, a men’s-clubby show-biz hangout thought of more in terms of cigars than soul. Baker, who opens a two-week engagement at L.A.’s Cinegrill on Tuesday, excuses herself and squeezes out of her banquette seat. Funnyman Joey Adams, eating alone at the next table, looks up from his Variety. A nearby Henny Youngman searches for his next punch line.

But this is no joke--Baker, who has spent the last two decades in the Philippines booking acts and singing for Navy men, Marines and merchant seamen at the officers’ club on the Subic Bay base, joined the Friars Club the same week she joined the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Paul Shaffer, who led a band that included Bruce Springsteen and Bonnie Raitt as Baker sang “Tweedlee Dee” at the induction dinner, became a Friar at the same time.) But Baker denies that joining the Friars was a way to re-enter the entertainment mainstream.

“It didn’t bother me,” says Baker, 61, speaking of life far from the limelight, “because I was doing something I loved. I have no respect for performers who low-rent themselves, saying, ‘Well, I wasn’t making nothing, so I went to scrubbing floors, washing dishes.’ You can always get a job somewhere. I was still in show business, I earned a nice salary, I raised four kids, I have money in the bank and I bought a lot of jewelry. I was able to keep my head up high and still be Miss Baker.”

It’s fitting that Baker now lunches at the mid-town Manhattan club, for the neighborhood has seen her greatest triumphs. Her first trip to the United States in nearly 20 years was to play Atlantic Records’ 40th anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden in 1988. She returned for good last spring to join the recently closed Broadway revue of blues standards, “Black and Blue.”

Go back almost 40 years, and Baker was but a few blocks away cutting her first records for Atlantic Records.

“We thought ‘Tweedlee Dee’ was a very catchy song,” says Ahmet Ertegun, chairman of Atlantic, who co-produced that first hit and many of her subsequent sessions. “But it just wasn’t swinging. So I suggested introducing a samba beat, and that was finally the rhythm that propelled the song.”

Something else might have also helped. “LaVern made the best fried chicken I’ve ever eaten in my life,” Ertegun recalls. “She’d bring a huge batch into the studio, so the whole band really loved going to her sessions.”

“Ahmet, he’s my baby,” says Baker with a throaty chuckle. Indeed, only two people knew how to get hold of Baker in the Philippines: her mother and Ertegun. “With Ahmet,” she says, “when we’d go in the studio, he’d know what he wanted from you. He’s also the type of guy who won’t just tell you what to do over the microphone, but come right out there and whoop with you so you can feel what he wants.”

An old acquaintance, Phoebe Jacobs, drops by the Friars Club table to say hello to Baker. “You know who was her greatest fan?” Jacobs offers. “Louis Armstrong.” Jacobs should know--she’s the executor of the Armstrong estate. “He dug her, he dug her the most. When Louis would watch her, forget about it. ‘That (woman) can really wail,’ that’s what he’d say.”

Baker, born Delores Williams on the eve of the Depression, grew up in Chicago singing gospel. But the blues were in her bones--her aunt, Merline Baker, sang under the name Memphis Minnie--and she debuted at the Club De Lisa at age 17. Billed as Little Miss Sharecropper, she played the country cousin with a ribbon in her hair and a basket draped around her arm.

“I was never happy doing it,” Baker says of the vaudevillian theatrics, “but to get my foot in the door, I accepted it.”

She took the act to Detroit and soon cut songs for RCA, Columbia and the Columbia subsidiary Okeh. None clicked. By the early ‘50s, she was singing with the Todd Rhodes Orchestra and calling herself LaVern Baker.

Baker was the second woman signed to Atlantic, and it wouldn’t be the last time that she’d follow in the footsteps of Ruth Brown. The women have lived oddly synchronized, yet dramatically different, lives. After early successes, both disappeared for decades, although, unlike Baker, Brown gave up on show business altogether and never left the New York area. Her comeback in the ‘80s was capped by winning a Tony Award for her performance in “Black and Blue.” Baker later replaced Brown in the musical revue.

“The fact that LaVern is mainly remembered for what was a novelty song, ‘Tweedlee Dee,’ puts the wrong emphasis on her real qualities as a singer,” Ertegun contends. “She was really a down-the-middle jazz singer who could sing the blues beautifully. But even though I grew up as a jazz and blues fan, we didn’t have the luxury of doing only what we liked. We were trying to make hit records, and all of our artists wanted to become big stars.”

And so she did.

“Tweedlee Dee” was a huge R&B; hit and reached No. 14 on the pop charts in 1955. But, as was often the case, the song was an even bigger hit when it was covered by a white artist, in this case Georgia Gibbs. Baker justifiably railed against the practice--she once named Gibbs the beneficiary of her flight insurance in case an accident prevented Baker from recording new material for Gibbs to cover. Baker now takes grim satisfaction in the fact that Gibbs had a later hit with Baker’s “Tra, La, La” but ignored its more successful flip-side, “Jim Dandy.”

Ertegun said that his pleas to pop radio stations fell on deaf ears. “If they had a choice between the black original and the white cover,” he says, “they’d always play the white cover.” When Ertegun is asked if he ever spoke with label executives about the ethics of cover records, he answers with a snort. “At that point,” he says, “we were a tiny independent, and they would have liked nothing more than for us to disappear.”

Georgia Gibbs, reached in New York, still smarts from Baker’s flight insurance gibe. “It was a tragic thing that happened to black artists in the ‘50s,” concedes Gibbs, “but I don’t think I should be personally held responsible for it, because I had nothing at all to do with it. At that time, artists had no right to pick their own songs. I came into the studio and had no say at all about the background or the arrangement. To this day, I’ve never even heard her version of ‘Tweedlee Dee.’ ”

One deejay who spun Baker instead of Gibbs was Alan Freed, and Baker’s place in history is due in no small part to an association with this barrier-busting broadcaster that included appearances in his famous live shows and in the movie “Rock, Rock, Rock.” If one image swept Baker into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it was of the singer in the skin-tight dress rocking out on “Jim Dandy” on the big screen.

Baker was a staple of mid-’50s package tours, traveling with everybody from Chuck Berry and Count Basie to Bill Haley & the Comets and Buddy Holly. The tours, like the cover records, revealed two Americas. For when the shows were over, black artists scrambled for food and lodging that was readily available to the white acts.

Baker, sitting in a private club that until recently didn’t accept women, smarts from the memories. “Do you think,” she says, “that any rap artist out there now, any of them, could work under the kind of conditions that we did back then? ‘You can’t sleep here, you can’t sleep there, you can drink from this water, you can’t go to this bathroom, you can eat at the greasy restaurants across the railroad tracks.’ You think they could hold up under that and live to be as old as I am? Hell no.”

Through it all, Baker remembered every slight--”Scorpios don’t forget anything,” she says. “We’re like elephants.” But she also kept her sense of humor. “We’d moved into new offices on 57th Street,” Ertegun recalls, “and on her first visit, she pointed to one room and said, ‘Bobby Darin built that room,’ and pointed to another and said, ‘Clyde McPhatter built that room.’ Finally, she pointed to the toilet and said, ‘I guess I built that room.’ ”

Baker enjoyed her biggest pop hit (No. 6) with a 1958 ballad, “I Cried a Tear,” a song that most closely matched the blues style that had been her original forte. Baker’s only active recording in the Atlantic catalogue, except for selections in various anthologies, is “LaVern Baker Sings Bessie Smith.” A 10-track best-of is available from JCI; Atlantic promises a more thorough collection in the fall.

Though she continued to make the R&B; charts with tunes like “See See Rider” and “Saved,” the latter Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s cheeky take on divine salvation, Baker’s star was on the wane, and she left Atlantic in 1964 to record for Brunswick. (In addition to her Cinegrill engagement, Baker will appear April 29 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the annual “Singers Salute to the Songwriter,” helping honor the Leiber & Stoller team.)

In a few years, Atlantic would have a new queen--Aretha Franklin. Baker’s traditional instincts were overwhelmed by the soul music of the ‘60s, a style that she had anticipated with her jumped-up R&B.;

By the late ‘60s, Baker’s marriage (her second) to comic Slappy White was on the ropes. The legacy of the union is the humor that runs through her nightclub act. “He and Redd Foxx always said that I was funny on stage,” says Baker, “but that I didn’t know how to be a comedian. So he started writing me things, and giving me little lines, and after (we split up), I just took his whole act.”

Took it, of all places, to the Far East. In 1969, entertaining the troops in Vietnam, Baker fell deathly ill--her heart had become enlarged, and a lung was collapsing. Recuperating in the Philippines, Baker liked what she calls the “island effect” and found a second career far from the star-maker machinery. There was virtually no communication between Baker and White until he sent a congratulatory telegram upon her induction into the Hall of Fame 31 years later. It remains unanswered.

“I live in the Orient,” quipped Baker during a recent performance at New York’s Village Gate, “and they respect the dead. My husband is good and dead.”

Baker doesn’t like to talk about her personal life, but she is one proud mother. Her house in the Philippines is home to four children and four dogs. She’s the natural mother of one daughter, the adopted mom of another and the legal guardian to a boy and a girl. She’s peeved at her adopted daughter for letting a man distract her from college but still plans to give the couple a plot of land complete with mango trees, a fishery and a couple of pigs. Baker’s natural daughter will soon join her in the States.

As for reviving her career, Baker is counting on nothing. She was happy to play Broadway in “Black and Blue,” especially as it allowed her to perform alongside her old friend Hopkins. (Baker says that the only time the friends let their sense of humor get the better of them was the night Hopkins’ false teeth popped out during the opening number.) She also made her first recordings since the ‘60s for a pair of recent soundtracks, “Dick Tracy” and “Shag.” But this woman who’s seen it all remains decidedly low-key.

“I’m not easily excited,” she says. “The Hall of Fame is probably the most excited I’ve ever been. And once I knew a guy in Hong Kong who gave me a mink stole. Nobody ever gave me nothing; I always worked for it. So I was never one to get excited, because I always thought that I deserved it, that I earned it.”

While Baker is happy to step back into the spotlight to sing her hits and to luxuriate in the blues, she’s also ready to drop out when the time seems right. Not to retire, but to assume her next post. The military has already offered Miss Baker a gig in Hawaii.