preserving old URIs with permalinks/htaccess?

I have been using WORDPRESS for about a year (since a move from BLOGGER) and I couldn’t be happier with it so far. So much so that I would like to incorporate more of my pre-existing website into the WordPress system. Initially I adapted my WordPress blog template to match the rest of my site, but now I would like to do the opposite and incorporate as many of my pages into the wordpress system. currently the exist OUTSIDE wordpress but use the same stylesheet so that there is some consistency.

My problem is this: from now on I need to force the pages to have addresses that correspond to the URI’s that I am using now (and have been using for several years). I believe that this should be possible using the .htaccess file for some variation on permalinks? (I am already using permalinks so that my current blog preserved all the URI’s of my earlier blog (on BLOGGER) But I do not know if that is so for sure, and in any case I am not sure of the way to do it.

Could someone point me in the right direction (and if a thread on this already exists I apologise for overlooking it when I searched; I may not have even known the right language to search for)

My current BLOG is at:
http://www.james-baker.com/news/

if I made a page called “about” it would appear like this:
http://www.james-baker.com/news/about/

But I want it to appear like this:
http://www.james-baker.com/about/

If I can figure out how to do that then I could move my whole site into the WordPress architecture and preserve my long-established URIs.