Melissa Manchester performs Friday in Waikiki

She knows how you talk about her: Grammy Award-winner Melissa Manchester has long been praised for her emotive, powerful vocals and her long string of pop hits. But some don’t know the interesting footnotes to her career.

For instance, Manchester was one of the original Harlettes — the vocal trio that backed Bette Midler during Midler’s heyday in the early 1970s. And she’s a longtime collaborator with orchestral pop singer-songwriter and bandleader Barry Manilow.

“I was a jingle singer with Barry Manilow,” Manchester reminisced during a call from Los Angeles last week. “He was the new musical director for Bette Midler at the time. They worked in a club sort of diagonally across of where I was working on the upper west side of Manhattan, and they came to see me one night.”

Manilow helped her make the connection with Midler, just as the brassy, short singer was preparing her debut at Carnegie Hall.

“I said, ‘That’s great, are you planning on having any background singers?’ She said, ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Would you like to sing in back of me?’”

“I said, ‘Actually, I’d prefer to sing instead of you — but I’d be happy to sing in back of you,’ so Manilow and I created the Harlettes,” Manchester said. “I was the ‘toots in the middle’ for about six months.”

Manchester and the other two original Harlettes left Midler and toured with Manilow after the release of his breakthrough second album, “Barry Manilow II,” in 1974. From there she went solo, and that’s where her own years of owning a stage began.

Since striking out on her own, Manchester has recorded more than 20 albums (and released her “Greatest Hits”), appeared in two films and the “Blossom” television series, composed and performed music for film, and served as a long-term artist in residence at Citrus College in Los Angeles.

Manchester appears in concert Friday at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, backed by the Blue Note Orchestra, a big band fielded by Citrus College.

New York City shaped Manchester, born in the Bronx in 1951. Her father was a musician with the New York Metropolitan Opera; her mother designed clothing and ran her own company.

She began singing commercial jingles as a teen, while attending the Manhattan High School of Performing Arts.

Her first Billboard Top 10 hit was “Midnight Blue,” in 1975.

Manchester earned a Grammy nomination for her recording of “Don’t Cry Out Loud” in 1979. Four years later, she took home a Grammy for Best Pop Female Vocal Performance for “You Should Hear How She Talks About You,” her highest-charting song.

She reached the Top 10 again — this time on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart — in 1989, with a rendering of “Walk on By,” the ode to heartbreak made into a classic hit by Dionne Warwick. The song was part of the album “Tribute,” which honors “women singers who meant so much to me,” Manchester said.

Decades later, Manchester recorded with Warwick, blending voices for a song called “The Other End of the Phone” on 2015 album “You Gotta Love This Life.”

“I wrote it with the late Hal David. It turned out to be Hal David’s last lyric,” Manchester said. “And I reached out to Dionne Warwick because she had built her career on the lyrics of Hal David and the music of Burt Bacharach, and she agreed to perform on it. So I feel multiply blessed on that track for all those reasons.”

At the Royal Hawaiian, fans will be able to get advance copies of Manchester’s next album, “The Fellas,” which isn’t officially out until September. It is the second album she has funded through crowdfunding program Indiegogo.

“It was a comfortable fit,” she said.

“My previous album, ‘You Gotta Love This Life,’ was my first time doing a crowdfunding campaign. One of my former students from USC walked me through it so I could get comfortable with the concept, because it’s a new marketplace paradigm. For me it was a giant leap.”

Self-funding and self-producing isn’t for everyone. However, after more than 40 years as a recording artist — and a few years more that that as a studio singer — Manchester knows what she wants, she said, and doesn’t “need to have a corporate wonk insinuate their suggestions” in the process.

“The Fellas” is a conceptual follow-up to “Tribute” — the album including “Walk on By.”

She’d hoped for years to do a similar album celebrating male vocalists who inspired her, including Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis. At the behest of Citrus College Dean Bob Slack, Manchester and students she works with at the college found the resources. Manchester and the Citrus College Blue Note Orchestra recorded it in two weeks.

A highlight of the recording process was that it brought her together again, professionally, with Manilow.

“Barry is actually the only one singing a duet on ‘The Fellas,’ and so that’s very cool,” she said. “He came to Citrus College and he met the students and it just blew his mind to be there.”

At Friday’s event, a video of Manilow and Manchester singing together during the recording sessions will be screened.