HAVERHILL - To people of a certain age, the songs need no introduction: "Little White Lies,""I Dreamed,""Little Blue Man."These were hits, big hits, during the 1950s, and singer Betty Johnson was a star: the toast of radio and television (she was the featured vocalist on The Jack Paar Show for four years), Broadway musicals, even a small movie role here and there.

In 1964, she gave it all up. In 1993, she started taking some of it back.

Born in Guilford County, N.C., in 1929 (in "an unpainted house with just a pot-belly stove") into a large, musical family that was renowned among radio listeners from Maine to New Orleans for their repertoire of gospel songs, Johnson spent many years on the gospel circuit. (A collection of the family's original recordings, We Sang for Our Supper, has been re-released on CD.)

"People would come from all over the countryside to hear us,"Johnson recalls of her childhood tenure as a member of The Johnson Family. "We were on the Ed Sullivan Show quite a few times."

By her late teens, she had set her sights higher. She told her father she planned to contact Percy Faith - a renowned producer at Columbia Records, for which the family had recorded, and who had told Betty she had the potential to be a star. Her father said, "Well, call him collect."

Betty Johnson became a star. She recorded album after album of hit after hit. She played the same Las Vegas rooms as Frank Sinatra and Nat "King" Cole. She sang in elegant lounges that are legendary among those who recall the great venues of another time: the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles, the Fairmont in San Francisco, the Roseville in New Orleans.

Then she met the man of her dreams, got married and walked away from it all.

"I really fell in love the minute I met him," Johnson recalls of her first encounter with her husband of 43 years, Arthur Gray. "But it took two years, because he was a playboy and all that, and I was on and off the road."

Married on May 1, 1961, Betty Johnson and Art Gray now live in quiet elegance in a former inn in Haverhill, where they raised two daughters, Lydia and Elisabeth -both professional singers in their own right. She studied at Dartmouth from 1975-80 and received a bachelor's degree in general studies in 1980 from the University of New Hampshire. An investment counselor, Art Johnson, 82, still reports for work daily at Carret and Co. in Hanover.

In 1993, Johnson launched a comeback of sorts. She began producing CDs of material old and new, including several recent collaborations with her daughters.

She releases them herself, managing her own career from a small, crowded office on the second floor of her home. Her latest release of new material is Make Yourself Comfortable, a collaboration with her daughter Elisabeth.

Johnson sat down with the Valley News recently to reflect on her careers, past and present. The following is an edited transcript of that conversation:

When you went out on your own in the early '50s, how did you begin your solo career?

I cried a lot. I went to New York City; the family had recorded there. I knew Columbia Records. And Percy Faith found me a place to stay and put me with Harms Music, and I would make demo records for writers; that paid my keep.

Then I went to CBS and auditioned. I got a program with them -I was paid $150 a week - so I was able to live and send a little money home. But it was frightening; I had to learn so much, I had to improve.

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