'Sometimes you can take something that's a negative and turn it into a positive. I've been that kind of person my whole life," Candye Kane was saying. "I have this transformative ability to take lemons and make lemonade."

No kidding.

The fortyish Kane overcame a childhood of poverty in East L.A., teen motherhood, and a career in the sex industry to become a blues belter with a personality and talent that are as big as the body she inhabits - and loves to celebrate.

Her seventh album, White Trash Girl, is quintessential Candye. It swings and jumps with irrepressible spirit, from originals like the defiantly proud title track and "Work What You Got" to apropos outside material like Bull Moose Jackson's "Big Fat Mamas Are Back in Style." The white trash girl also proves she can go uptown with the elegant supper-club ballad "I Could Fall For You."

Even when she was a sex worker - stripping, doing porn videos, posing for men's magazines - Kane also was immersing herself in the fertile Los Angeles music scene of the early '80s, mixing with bands like Social Distortion and the Blasters and country singer Dwight Yoakam.

"Dwight Yoakam said, 'Look, Candye, be yourself; the best thing about you is you're unique,' " Kane recalls over the phone while en route to Buffalo from Columbus, Ohio, speaking of a time when record companies were pressuring her to clean up her act.

Armed with that advice, and her discovery of "bold, provocative blueswomen like Memphis Minnie, Big Maybelle, Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton," Kane found her musical calling. She fits neatly into the tradition of those pioneering blues females while bringing her own audaciously frank and often funny perspective, especially about her size and sexuality (she's openly bisexual).

Despite incessant touring and the undeniable quality of her music, Kane still fights the perception that she is a novelty act. But she's starting to see her hard work pay off.

"I've forged ahead with my own audience of the disenfranchised - fat chicks, queers, porn fans, rockabilly kids and bikers - and I've done that without the support of the mainstream blues community," she says. "But... I think that's changing. I feel like the blues people are finally taking a second look and saying, 'Well, she's a bad rash that won't go away; maybe we should be paying attention.'