I first heard of Bettye LaVette in the most serendipitous way...reading a UK magazine called Blues & Soul that I found in Kano, Nigeria, where I was living in the mid-Seventies. The article hailed her as a quintessential "deep soul" singer, so naturally I sought her music out...and it did not disappoint. But her music was mostly available on hard-to-find 45's until Motown released her first full album release in 1980...which I bought in a bargain rack for $1.98 or something. I fell in love with one of the tracks, "Right In The Middle( Of Falling In Love)", a slice of Memphis-style R & B that should have been a hit but wasn't. One day in 1999 or so, I happened to see a bootleg CD of Bettye LaVette recordings...most of her best stuff from the Sixties, which I grabbed right away because the music was just not readily available otherwise. As I listened to the CD, I remember thinking: "wow...Bettye LaVette is the best unrecognized soul singer of the past forty years! (I later found out that she rejects the term "soul singer"). I had known she was good but hearing a bunch of her recordings all at once showed me just how great she really was.Here's a clip from the 80's of her recording one of her Sixties classics; the original is slower and more dramatic but this version is good:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFpFxB4Wqcg
I called up David Nathan, ironcially the writer whose piece about Bettye I had originally read in Blues 'n' Soul magazine so many years prior; I had come to know David much later. I expressed to him my amazement that a singer as great as Bettye could be living in relative obscurity; I asked him if he knew where she was. He answered, "sure, she's in Detroit, I talk to her all the time!" I asked him for her number and called out of the blue, just to tell her how much I appreciated her music. She asked me what I did in life; I said I worked for a record company. She said it so happened that she was looking for a record company and on top of that she was coming to New York and couldn't we meet? A couple weeks later I was escorting her across a snowy street, she in her fur coat as we made our way to my office on a wintry day. As we talked, her aura led me to visualize her in a Detroit nightclub amongst the night people doing that night-life thing--champagne flowing, music playing, reefer in the air and sexy clothes on the people, party time. Anyway, it turned out that she was looking for a label but was without a booking agent or any quantifiable sales history. My heart sank as I realized I could not in good conscience get my company to sign off on offering a deal. That bothered me profoundly since my whole reason for being in the music business was to help bring to public awareness extraoardinary artists such as Bettye (ironically, if I had seen her perform before that moment, I might have gone on a kamikaze mission to try to make it happen anyway; as good as Bettye is as a recording artist she's even better as a performer!). But I said I would try to help her. It took a while but I finally was able to hook her up with Dennis Walker, who had produced and written a number of Robert Cray's breakthrough recordings, among others. He scored a deal with a small label to produce an album on Bettye and that started the ball rolling. The story is too convoluted to tell completely here but one thing led to another and by and by Bettye was playing major festivals, getting major critical acclaim, recording some of the most amazing performances one could ever hear and eventually performing at Barack Obama's inauguration. In shrot, in middle age, forty-plus years after her first hit record, which she made when she was 16, Bettye LaVette was getting the recognition she deserved. And I had the pleasure of becoming a friend of hers and her husband Kevin.
The occasion of all the reminiscence is the simultaneous release this week of Bettye's new album THANKFUL AND THOUGHTFUL and the publication of her autobiography, A WOMAN LIKE ME. The album delivers a number of the powerful, radical intepretations of rock, folk, and R & B songs that have been the hallmark of Bettye's re-emergence. For instance, on the new album she takes a folk standard, Wean MccColl's "Dirty Old Town" , and re-makes it into a stark portrait of contemporary Detroit. She makes a nasty blues of "I'm Not The One", a song by the rock group The Black Keys. Other songs by Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Sly Stone, Tom Waits, Gnarls Barkley etc, get the full Bettye LaVette treatment--dramatic re-imaginings delivered by a master of phrasing; they really become short plays, with Bettye deploying an actresses' techniques. It is my favorite recording by her out of all of her "re-emergence" albums, except possible the Dennis Walker set, also called A WOMAN LIKE ME, which has sentimental appeal and is very much in a Southern R & B vein which I have a weakness for. So that's the new record--get it without delay, it is hot out the oven this week.
Now about the book. One reviewer said it is was as if Bettye is telling stories with a glass of champagne in one hand and a joint in the other. That's spot on because I have heard her tell many tales in exactly that posture--funny, serious, ironic, sobering tales, delivered with Bettye's ever-colorful flair for vivid language and her sly delight delivering shocking statements deadpan. She's the sort of person who delivers the unvarnished truth as she sees it if you ask her something--don't ask her if you're not ready for the stone cold truth--or even if you don't ask! As she said recently, she knew everyone in Detroit coming up--whether it was Berry Gordy, the Tempts, The Supremes, Aretha Franklin, and a vast array of producers, musicians, pimps, hustlers, scenesters, politicians, groupies and so on. And as Bettye said recently about Motown folk: "I've seen them all drunk, broke or naked--sometimes all three." The book opens with Bettye being dangled out a hotel window by her angry boyfriend/pimp. Obviously she lived to tell the tale..but that sets the tone. The book shows her to be a quintessential survivior, a fearsomely talented woman who at 16 thought she was breaking through to stardom only to wander in a forty-year wilderness of near-misses, bitter disapointments, wrong turns and tantalizing opporunities. And along the way she's seen the ones she came up with soar to great heights--and more often than not crash and burn. Now, at long last, she's soaring. She is recognized for the great artist she is. Simply put, this book is a great read and you don't have to know a lot about her music to enjoy it. It is a gritty slice of music history. Most likely after reading it, you'll be motivated to seek out Bettye's music...and you'll be glad you did. Here's a clip of her performance on Leno this week:
http://www.freep.com/article/20120926/ENT04/120926052/Bettye-LaVette-performs-Dylan-song-on-the-Tonight-Show
Life is funny, you never know where it will lead. I'm sure glad I picked out that Blues & Soul magazine from amongst the many magazines spread on that woven mat on a Kano, Nigeria street. Who knew that I would come to know the singer who first captivated me forty years ago? And who knew that Bettye LaVette would, after so many near misses and bitter disappointments, would triumph in the end?