Big-voiced R&B singer Bettye LeVette making first Tucson appearance at 71

She’s loud, in a good way.

“One woman told me when she saw my concert that I frightened her,” the R&B singer said last week, then chuckled. “I have a huge attitude so people think I’m 6 feet tall.”

LeVette is happy that people think of her at all, a prospect that a few years ago seemed pretty much out of reach. She was on the comeback trail — nearly 50 years after she scored her first charted single. She calls this her fifth career, one that followed decades after her first career as a teen singer and 30 years after she flirted with a Broadway career.

“It was the most fun thing I’ve ever done, but they don’t make enough money and they rehearse far too hard,” the 71-year-old Detroit native said of working on Broadway. “We rehearsed a play for the whole year and it ran two weeks.”

LeVette admits she only rehearses when she’s putting out a new CD.

“My band has the easiest time in the world because ... we rehearse every two years, and if I think of something new I want to do,” she said during a phone call to chat about her first-ever Tucson show Wednesday, Feb. 8, with UA Presents.

“I don’t even go to sound check. (Bandleader Alan Hill) goes and tells the sound man, ‘She’s about this tall and she’s going to be much louder than you think she is because she’s so small.’”

LeVette was 16 when she started recording a handful of 45s beginning with her No. 7 hit “My Man — He’s a Lovin’ Man” in 1962. Through the 1960s, she landed another couple singles in the Top 40, but then her music career stalled and ebbed and stuttered through the 1980s. Sometimes it felt like it just bottomed out.

“All those times, the down times when the sugar would turn to (expletive) and fall apart, I then didn’t go and take little gigs and sing with bands or go on the road. Had I done that, I would be known from town to town now,” she said, wishing aloud that she had made it to small places like Tucson and created a grassroots following. But “every time it would fall apart and I would go back to Detroit and try to become a local singer, something else would happen. So I never got a chance to follow this groundswelling.”

Which is perhaps why the headlines following the release of her 2005 album, “I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise,” referred to her as an overnight success, despite that there was rarely a year or two that passed that LeVette wasn’t recording something.

“Hell to Raise,” covers of songs by female artists including Aimee Mann, Joan Armatrading, Sinéad O’Connor and Fiona Apple, made it to Amazon.com’s Top 100 Editor’s Picks.

Then came the chance to sing The Who classic “Love Reign O’er Me” at the 2008 Kennedy Center Honors followed by the invite to sing a duet with Jon Bon Jovi at Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009.

In 2015, LeVette hit an impressive milestone in her career: a best blues album Grammy nomination for her studio album “Worthy.”

Career No. 5 is clearly turning out to be LeVette’s best yet.

“This has been more successful than all the rest of them,” she said. “Before this one started I really thought I was going to die obscure and broke. Now I’m just gonna die broke; a lot of folks know me.”