Maria Muldaur will always be known for her delightful, sultry rendition of “Midnight at the Oasis,” then an obscure tune written by a friend that was thrown onto her debut solo album as a last resort. Reaching No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart at the time, the playful tune has appeared repeatedly on compilation albums under categories such as “Greatest hits of the ’70s,” “Classic rock,” “Soft rock hits” and “Women of the ’70s.”

But Muldaur considers her specialty to be Americana, or roots music — folk, blues, bluegrass. She’d been doing it long before “Midnight,” and with considerable success. She’ll be bringing her passion for that music to Blue Note Hawaii on Wednesday and to the neighbor islands through May 27 with her group, the Red Hot Bluesiana Band.

It’s been quite a journey for Muldaur, whose talent, passion and bell-bottom-­wearing, flower-child-like presence propelled her through the best of times in American popular music. Born Maria Grazia Rosa Domenica D’Amato, she was born and raised in a village ­­— Greenwich Village, in New York City, which somehow turned out to be the perfect platform to get into the music that would become her life’s work.

“I just happened to be coming of age in the late ’50s and early ’60s, when there was what they called a folk revival, or what my old friend John Sebastian called ‘the folk scare’ of the ’60s,” she said, casually mentioning the first of a long list of stars — Dr. John, Aaron Neville, Hoagie Carmichael, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, Pheobe Snow, Taj Mahal, Jerry Garcia — that she’s made music with. “People in the urban North were starting to discover and explore all kinds of American roots music. They called it folk music at that time, but I like the term ‘American roots music’ better.

“We were hearing a lot of these original artists, like bluegrass artists and Appalachian artists and blues artists and gospel artists on scratchy old 78s and compilation albums that were being made at the time, and to us it sounded so exotic and these people seemed like these mystical, mythical figures who were coming to us from beyond the mists of time.”

Coming out of the ’50s, when AM radio stations would play “tunes like ‘How Much is that Doggie in the Window?’” the music seemed soulful and authentic to the young New Yorker. When she and her friends discovered that many of those artists — Doc Watson, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James — were still alive and performing, “the whole thing intrigued me, grabbed me and became my lifelong passion,” she said.

Muldaur would have an epiphany hearing Bessie Smith singing “Empty Bed Blues,” and soon afterward she and her boyfriend traveled to the Appalachian region of North Carolina to work with Doc Watson. With a youthful spirit and open mind, she immediately and unconsciously caught on to the lyrical local language.

“My boyfriend took me aside and said, ‘Stop making fun of them,’” she said with a laugh. “He had observed that I was saying ‘Waal, I rightly don’t know.’ … After about a week I had completely picked up their inflection without even wanting to at all.”

The experience has been helpful in her musical interpretations. While her speaking voice has a hint of her New York roots, she slips into a Southern drawl when singing roots music.

“To my musical ear, that’s part of the tonality of that music,” she said. “What possible good would it be to try to sing bluegrass with a New York accent?”

The singer’s most famous tune is not a blues song at all and was totally a product of happenstance. The jazzy, easy-listening “Midnight at the Oasis” was composed by friend David Nichtern, who had come out to Los Angeles to work on her debut solo album.

Muldaur would not have even been making the album had she not split with her husband Geoff Muldaur, a bandmate in the popular Jim Kweskin Jug Band. She was then offered a chance to leave the “freezing” winter of Woodstock, N.Y., for Southern California to work on a solo project. The album was to feature songs like the classic country melody “My Tennessee Mountain Home” and the naughty blues tune “Don’t You Feel My Leg.”

“We’re almost done with the project and the producer comes in and goes, ‘I’ve been listening to the rough tracks and I think we’re in pretty good shape. We have some ballads and we have some nice uptempo songs. I think if we just had one more medium-tempo song it would really round out the album,’” Muldaur said. “I looked at David and thought of this goofy song that he had written months earlier after spending a lost weekend on a waterbed with a buxom blonde.”

Neither Muldaur nor the producer was particularly fond of the song, but they put it on album anyway, cutting it in one day.

Fueled by “Midnight at the Oasis,” Muldaur’s sweet vocals and a backup band that included stellar session musicians Ry Cooder, Dr. John, David Lindley, David Grisman and Ray Brown — all of whom would be headliners in their own right — the album “Maria Muldaur” went gold in May 1974, just nine months after its release.

Muldaur, now 73, has made albums in a variety of genres, from the love songs of Bob Dylan to the jazzier stylings of Peggy Lee, but has focused mostly on American roots music.

She’s put out nearly an album a year since “Maria Muldaur,” many of them self-produced and recorded at her Mill Valley, Calif., home. Three of them — “Richland Woman Blues,” “Sweet Lovin’ Ol’ Soul” and “Maria Muldaur and her Garden of Joy” — have been nominated for Grammys.

She’s pleased that the light, lilting singing voice of her earlier days has developed an appropriate growl.

“I had to wait 50 years to get that voice,” she said. “As you get older everything goes south, but luckily my voice went south too, and so now I’ve grown into someone with an instrument that can deliver the blues the way I always wanted.”

She’ll comb through hundreds of songs to find “timeless” tunes that speak to her.

“I can do a Memphis Minnie song that was written over 100 years ago, and it still moves people,” she said. “It’s still relevant because that kind of music was not created with an eye to being a pop hit or being popular for 20 minutes. Those songs addressed the basic concerns of the human heart and soul.”