“I’M DRIVIN’ in my car, I turn on the radio,” Bruce Springsteen’s famous song “Fire” begins, and I’m hearing over the phone that US singer Ruth Pointer spends much of her time driving in her car and turning on the radio.

We’ll be seeing her at the Canberra Southern Cross Club when she appears with The Pointer Sisters, the R&B singing group who made “Fire” even more famous when it hit the Top 10 in 1977.

Frankly, anything we can turn on in the way of weather will beat what Ruth’s experiencing in Hopedale, Massachusetts, where she moved 20 years ago with her husband Michael Sayles and their twin children to be near his extended family.

“I am so over this weather… even in spring we’ve had some very cold days”, she tells me by phone from Hopedale. “I’m a California girl.”

She is, indeed, starting out in the junior choir in her father’s church, the Church of God in West Oakland.

Ruth, the eldest, joined sisters Bonnie, Anita and the late June in an onslaught on the music industry during the 1970s and 1980s that resulted in three Grammys and 13 US top 20 hits, such as “Slow Hand”, “I’m So Excited”, “Automatic”, “Neutron Dance” and “Baby, Come And Get It”. These days the Pointer Sisters span three generations, with Ruth still at the helm and daughter Issa and granddaughter Sadako making up the three “sisters”.

So how does the California girl cope living on the east coast?

“I get myself moving,” Ruth says. “I read a lot in my car and I listen to music there – I’ve mastered the art of listening in the car and I can get all the songs I want, it’s great.”

Although Ruth’s recently released autobiography, “Still So Excited: My Life as a Pointer Sister”, touches on down times and drug use, she prefers to be on the up and up and is a ball of energy, travelling as far as Budapest, Hungary, Bosnia, Bahrain and Italy as a spokesperson for the United Service Organizations Inc.

Back in the day, Ruth helped write hits such as “I’m So Excited” and “Only Sisters Can Do That”, but these days she’s not doing new numbers. While here they’ll give audiences all the old favourites and entertain them.

“That’s why audiences seem to relate to us, we do what we do and we sing the songs people like,” she says.

“We are so blessed to have the audiences we do night after night; you gotta love it and if you don’t, you can’t do it.”

The Pointer Sisters, Canberra Southern Cross Club, Woden, Tuesday, May 31. Bookings to ticketek.com.au