Courtesy renemarie.com

Rene Marie

If you go

• Who: Rene Marie with Stephanie Rooker
• When: 8 p.m. Friday
• Where: Jefferson Center, 541 Luck Ave., Roanoke
• How much: $26; $22; $16; students, half-price
• Info: 345-2550, jeffcenter.org, renemarie.com, stephanierooker.com

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Jazz singer Rene Marie is considering her next potential controversy.

She's "researching the lyrics to 'Brown Sugar,' by the Rolling Stones," she said.

"Just like everybody else our age, I just love the song," said Marie, a onetime Roanoker who performs Friday night at Jefferson Center's Shaftman Hall. "And then my sister called me and said, 'You should do a very slow version of 'Brown Sugar.' I said, 'What? What are you talking about?' "

She hasn't decided yet whether she'll do it. But if she does work up a cover of the rock 'n' roll classic, with its lyrics about race, sex and plantation-era evil, it won't be the first time the acclaimed singer has taken what some would consider a risk.

Marie, who now lives near Denver, is still dealing with the fallout from her interpretation of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Denver's state of the city address last summer. She was scheduled to sing the national anthem, a cappella, but instead sang "Lift Every Voice and Sing," a century-old number often called "the black national anthem."

The song has its own melody, but Marie had decided on a mash-up of sorts. She sang such lines as "Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us/Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us" to "The Star-Spangled Banner" melody.

Soon afterward, protests began pouring into the inbox and voicemail at Denver City Hall. Mayor John Hickenlooper called the singer, telling her that city staff was overwhelmed with feedback.

"He's like, 'I wonder if you have any solutions of how we can work with this,' " she remembered. "And I know what he was really asking for was an apology."

She was unapologetic, and unafraid to assume the onus. She told Hickenlooper to give out her phone number, cell number and e-mail address, and she would take on the backlash.

Marie lost track of the number of phone calls, but reckons she received about 1,600 e-mails, running about 60/40 against her performance. She found herself crying. She found herself understanding the anger. Finally, she found herself "totally overwhelmed," and decided to post a statement on her Web site.

Marie posted the most common questions. Among them -- "Wasn't this just a self-centered and calculated publicity stunt?" and "Your 'artistic expression' offended many people. Why don't you apologize?" She answered them all in detail at renemarie.com/qa.htm.

So why did she agree to sing the national anthem and then not sing it?

"I am an artist. As such, if I wait until I am asked to express myself artistically, or if I must ask permission to do it, it would never get done," she wrote on her Web site. "I wanted to tell them what I was going to do, but I couldn't because I knew the answer would be 'no'. I knew that, even if I asked to do my version of the national anthem, the answer would be 'no'. There are times, artistically speaking, when an event chooses us, a door is opened to heal ourselves and others through our artistic expression, so to speak. When that happens we can trust our instincts and walk through it or we can shrink back in fear."

She has no regrets. Marie remembers that a couple of days before the event, she got a "very deep-seated unease" about her plans. The feeling grew worse as the moment approached.

Then, "I just thought about my dad, who has passed away. He was a World War II veteran," she said. "And I thought about my ancestors. And I thought, 'No, I'm not going to punk out. I'm not punking out. Just go ahead and sing it. Just go ahead. It's just a song.'

"And I'm so glad I did."

International tour

Otherwise, life has been a series of ups for the former Rene Stevens Croan. She moved to Denver in January 2005 and four months later met the man she would marry, Jesse Johnson.

They met by coincidence, sitting across from each other at a jazz radio station fundraiser. She said that when they met, he told her he had heard her music, and had a feeling they would meet someday.

"I'm so happy being married to him, I really am," she said. "He's an amazing man."

One of the few differences they have -- he loves to play jazz music around the house, but she likes silence, to focus on her own muse.

After the wedding, Marie decided to take two years off the road to enjoy being married. Two years have passed, and she's ready to head back out, with Johnson along for an international journey that starts in her old hometown. Spain, Brazil and Mexico are on a tour schedule that ends in June, at Charleston, S.C.'s Spoleto Festival USA.

She and her band -- pianist Kevin Bales, bassist Rodney Jordan and drummer Quentin Baxter -- recorded her most recent CD, 2007's "Experiment in Truth," in Charleston. Expect to hear a few numbers from that album as part of what she calls the "Voice of My Beautiful Country" tour.

That's also the name of her "love song to America," she writes on her Web site. It's "my latest attempt to express how I feel about living in this country as a person of color," she writes.

The entire night won't be so philosophically complicated. The 21-song set list includes Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," The Temptations' "Just My Imagination," the folk-blues standard "John Henry," "Oh Shenandoah" (which some Virginia lawmakers said should be the state song, after the state decided to drop the racist "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny"). She'll do two versions of Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me" -- Raitt's and her own.

Expect a couple of tunes from "Experiment in Truth," including "O Nina," Marie's tribute to the late singer/protest artist Nina Simone.

"She always sang exactly what she thought, and she didn't give a damn who she offended," Marie said. "She was driven to say through her music what was going on."

Sounds like a familiar modus operandi.