Rita Coolidge has a voice for the ages. The stylish singer had pop hits remaking soulful tracks “Higher and Higher” and “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” was half of a country powerhouse team with then-husband Kris Kristofferson and has sung for movie soundtracks and with symphony orchestras.

“I don’t know if it’s consciously or unconsciously, but … as I came to learn, the woman I admired so much, Peggy Lee, was the same kind of singer,” Coolidge said in a phone call from her new home base in Florida, where she lived awhile as a teenager and later attended college.

Like Coolidge, Lee “refused to be categorized. … If she wanted to try a new style of music and her label would say, ‘That’s not what you do,’ she would just jump labels and do it.”

Perhaps her openness to diverse styles of music — and willingness to buck the system — came from the Tennessee-born Coolidge’s upbringing as the daughter of a preacher who promoted equality and respect among all races and ethnicities. Her father was primarily of Cherokee ancestry, which made him a target of prejudice early in his life; but he faced the issue head on from the pulpit.

Her mother was also part Cherokee, and Coolidge has actively embraced her Cherokee heritage.

The singer formed the group Walela (Cherokee for “hummingbird”) in 1997 with one of her sisters, Priscilla Coolidge, and niece Laura Satterfield. The group has released five albums, the last in 2007.

“Every year, at least once my father would go to a black church in Nashville and preach,” she said. “This was way before civil rights, and he would invite a black preacher to come to our church and preach. It took a lot of courage to do that.”

There was always music in the family, with her mother at the piano and the children singing at home, church or at local talent contests.

Both of her parents composed music to perform in her church, but it was her older sister Priscilla who provided special inspiration.

“She was a little bitty kid with a huge voice. You just couldn’t believe what was coming out,” Coolidge said.

(Priscilla Coolidge would go on to get training in opera and become a successful performer, songwriter and music producer before her tragic death at age 73, three years ago; she was killed by her husband in a murder-suicide.)

“I was the youngest child, so there was always a lot going on around me,” said Coolidge, who was born in 1945.

“I felt like the first part of my life, I just sat back and watched, and then when it was my turn, I was pretty well versed in what I wanted to do and what I could do. So I wasn’t afraid to jump right in when I got to Los Angeles with (folk-rock duo) Delaney and Bonnie, and it was like, ‘Wow, they want me to sing with them, it must be OK,’ so I started to do everything.”

IT WAS a defining era in popular music. Coolidge remembers it as “the golden age of rock ’n’ roll in California,” with the Laurel Canyon region of West Hollywood a “cacophony of music any given night that you drove up those streets.”

“Everybody lived up there and wrote music and sang music with each other,” she said. “There was not that competitive edge that came later. Everyone just embraced each other. … Some days I would go to work at 8 in the morning and work at five studios in one day and get home at 2 in the morning, just singing all day. There was a studio on every other corner in Hollywood, and they were busy all the time.”

Her solo recording career came about after working with Delaney and Bonnie producer David Anderle, who promised to promote her, and gigging with Leon Russell and Joe Cocker on the “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” tour.

Over 10 years, starting in 1971, Coolidge recorded nine solo albums that reached the Billboard pop charts, including her platinum-selling 1977 record “Anytime … Anywhere,” which reached No. 6. “It was the breakthrough album,” she said.

Meantime, she and Kristofferson were recording together, including the No. 1 album on the country charts in 1973, “Full Moon.”

Songs like the lush, romantic “We’re All Alone,” a remake of Boz Scaggs’ silky song that was a Top 10 single in 1977, and the energetic “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher,” which reached No. 2 on the singles chart that year, are classics from that era.

It’s less well known, though, that Coolidge also claims recognition for a significant portion of “Layla,” Eric Clapton’s hit with Derek and the Dominos.

Coolidge said that she wrote the famous anthemic piano part in the song’s middle section, and Clapton heard it when she was visiting England with Delaney and Bonnie.

“Jim Gordon, who was the drummer in that band, and I had written a song called ‘Don’t Let the World Get in Our Way.’ The changes and the melody were all mine on that. We played the song for Eric, left the cassette with him and went home.”

Coolidge was at a photo shoot when she heard “Layla” and was shocked. She complained to her own producer and to Clapton’s, she said, but was told that “it wouldn’t do any good. What are you going to do? You’re just a girl.”

Coolidge wrote about the incident in her 2016 autobiography, “Delta Lady: A Memoir.”

NOW 72, Coolidge has recently finished a new recording, due out next spring. It is being kept under the tightest wraps for now, although she said might “sneak” some of it into her performance here. (Producers are said to be worried about the YouTube phenomenon, so if everyone puts their phone away, that might provide some incentive.)

Making the album, her first since a Christmas album in 2012, has brought back a lot of good memories.

“It’s real organic music, having people in the studio playing music together and off of each other and rising to the level of excellence of the best guy in the room,” she said. “It’s really like a dream record. I’ve got nothing but joy in this record. And another thing: I’ve worked harder than I ever have on this album.”