When singer Ruth Brown appears at the Star Plaza Theatre in Merrillville, Ind., Friday and Saturday she will not be giving just another performance.
Rather, Brown will be launching an incredible third comeback in a career marked as much by tragedy as triumph.
Even now, Brown can`t say for sure whether she`ll have to be brought onstage in a wheelchair, or whether she`ll be able to get there on her own.
Once before the footlights, she doesn`t know if she`ll be able to stand in front of the microphone, as she always has, or whether she`ll have to be perched on a stool. Several months ago, she had surgery to replace both knees. But to Brown, and probably to her fans as well, all that really matters is that she will be onstage, sharing one of the most alluring voices in jazz or blues.
”I`ll tell you this-even if I have to be tied into a wheelchair, you can bet I will be there,” says Brown.
”Because in show business, the truth still is: `Out of sight, out of mind.` It took me so many years to build this career, I just can`t let it slip away.
”My problem is, I don`t know that I can stand up for 40 minutes. And I never sat on a stool during a performance in my entire career,” adds the 64- year-old Brown.
”No matter what happens, though, I`ll be there.”
It`s that kind of determination that has kept Brown before the public since the late `40s, despite personal hardships that would have stopped anyone less courageous.
For Brown, the trouble began just as she was hitting the big time.
After years of working the road with obscure bands, and toiling briefly for bandleader Lucky Millinder (who fired her after a month), Brown finally got lucky playing the Crystal Caverns club in Washington, D.C., in 1948.
Blanche Calloway, Cab Calloway`s sister and the manager of the room, knew talent when she heard it, immediately taking Brown under her wing and securing for her a date at the fabled Apollo Theatre in Harlem-the same stage that had launched Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne and Billie Holiday.
But en route to the Apollo, Brown got into an auto crash that put her in the hospital ”for about nine months and 21 days,” she recalls.
”By the time I finally did get to the Apollo (about a year later than planned), I came on with crutches.
”But even through the whole time at the hospital, I only got a little depressed, because I always felt that I had been given a gift. My voice was never trained, I don`t read music.
”It was really like a gift handed down to me, so I had patience that everything would work out fine.
”And when I was in the hospital, as soon I could come down out of traction and was in just a half-body cast, they would take me out to sing for the other patients and the orderlies in the sun rooms. I`d sing and cheer them up.”
Brown`s patience was rewarded. On May 25, 1949, she created a sensation at the Apollo singing ”So Long,” her subsequent record of the old Russ Morgan ballad rocketing to number six on Billboard`s R&B chart.
The string of hits that followed-”Teardrops from My Eyes,” ”(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” ”Oh What a Dream”-established Brown as one of the biggest singing stars of the `50s. No less than Frankie Laine, himself a pop icon of the era, dubbed Brown ”Miss Rhythm,” a reference to the hard-hitting rhythmic power of a larger-than-life voice that, somehow, still sounds sweet even at full force.
By the `60s, though, Brown confounded her fans by disappearing from the stage.
”The main thing was that I wanted to be there for my children,” says Brown, who had settled on Long Island.
”But another thing was that, musically, there just wasn`t a niche for me anymore.
”The Beatles and those kinds of acts had come in, and there wasn`t room for Ruth Brown. So I just sang on occasion in small joints and in the schools.”
By the time Brown was ready to come back, in the late `70s, the music industry couldn`t have cared less.
”It was hard, real hard,” says Brown. ”I was financially on my butt, but Redd Fox bought me a ticket to get back to California. And my other friend was Nipsy Russell; he paid my rent many days.
”Those two helped to feed me, because I had to take a lot of (singing)
jobs that weren`t good paying, not the best rooms, but just anything to stay visible.”
Talent has a way of being heard, however, and by the late `70s Brown`s second comeback was under way.
She raised the roof in Los Angeles playing Mahalia Jackson in a civil rights musical called ”Selma,” she won dates in Las Vegas and a role on the TV sitcom ”Hello, Larry,” opposite Maclean Stevenson.
Then came ”Black and Blue,” the jazz musical that opened in Paris in 1985 and won Brown a Tony Award for best actress in 1989.
”I had no idea I was going to get that Tony, because I didn`t think I was really acting in `Black and Blue,` I was singing,” says Brown, who tore up the show every night with a song that since has become her signature, ”If I Can`t Sell It, I`ll Keep Sittin` On It.”
”That Tony Awards night was very emotional for me, because in the past years my legs had started to give me terrible pain. They literally had to bring me to my seat in a wheelchair.
”And my self-esteem was so low by then that I never thought I would get the award.
”So when Tommy Tune called my name, I couldn`t believe it. When I got over the shock, I started to try to climb out of my seat, and the TV cameramen were kind not to show people anything but my face.
”And all the way walking down the aisle to the stage, I was just asking God to give me the right words.
”It took me 42 years to get up those eight steps, but once I got up there, I forgot I was crippled, and the words just flowed.”
After that, the pain in Brown`s legs became so bad that, ”Sometimes I just prayed to the Lord to let me die,” she says.
”And after eight or nine years of being constantly in pain, and taking injections to kill the pain, I finally got to the place that I could hardly walk.
”It became almost impossible for me to even stand. But I realized that if I wanted to perform at all anymore, I had to have the surgery done.”
