Child of the Seventies, Singer For All Times

If the tension between submission and self-assertion helps define soul music, the career of Bettye LaVette might stand as the genre’s quintessential anti-success story.  Thirty-five years ago, LaVette traveled to Alabama’s Muscle Shoals Sound Studios and recorded what she thought was going to be her breakthrough record.  It didn’t work out quite that way.  Never released, and unknown to all but the most obsessive soul aficionados, the collection now known as Child of the Seventies existed as rumor until 2000, when it was finally issued in Europe as Souvenirs.  It was validation, but the record’s unearthing was just the beginning of a remarkable comeback that continues to bear fruit.

LaVette’s new album The Scene of the Crime takes the 61-year-old Michigan native back to northwest Alabama, where she almost made history a generation ago. Recorded at Muscle Shoals’ FAME Studio with a crack band that includes the Drive-By Truckers along with bassist David Hood and keyboardist Spooner Oldham, The Scene of the Crime demonstrates LaVette’s flair for interpretation. She’s a masterful stylist, but her way with a song hasn’t always garnered her rewards commensurate with her talent.

Born Betty Haskins in Muskegon, Mich., in 1946, LaVette moved to Detroit when she was 18 months old.  She attended St. Agnes High School, and grew up in an era, and a city, overflowing with talent.  Now living in West Orange, N.J., LaVette remembers her early days with asperity.  “I was very, very jealous of all those people in Detroit,” she says.  “I mean, would you be jealous if everyone in your high-school class was successful?  Those people in Detroit, those are the people I went to school with.  Motown was my high-school class.”

On The Scene’s penultimate track, “Before the Money Came (The Battle of Bettye LaVette),” she sings, “I knew David Ruffin when he was sober/Sleeping on my floor, before he crossed over.”  In 1969, she recorded Stevie Wonder’s “Hey Love,” a marvelous track that became a minor hit. The Scene demonstrates how style fights time’s erosion.  As LaVette says, “I haven’t just been discovered.  I haven’t always wanted to be in this business and finally, now I am.  I started with these people, and I’ve always thought of myself as one of them.”

As Betty LaVett (she had changed her name to Betty LaVette by the time she recorded Child of the Seventies), the singer was a teenage star in 1962, when her Detroit-recorded single, “My Man — He’s a Lovin’ Man,” got leased to Atlantic Records and became a No. 7 R&B hit.  The song was co-written by Johnnie Mae Matthews, a Motor City entrepreneur who was one of the city’s first African-American women to own a record company.  Matthews, who died in 2002, was in important figure in the evolution of ‘60s soul music and recorded singles for such small labels as Big Hit and Blue Rock.

“A big, mean woman with cuts on her face, who beat me up and cheated the Temptations and everybody else out of their money,” LaVette remembers of Matthews.  “But she and my first manager, Robert West, got me involved with Atlantic.  She really could have been more than she was.”

Throughout the ‘60s LaVette recorded singles for the Calla, Karen and Silver Fox labels.  Some of these, such as the 1969 “He Made a Woman Out of Me” — cut at Sounds of Memphis Studio with the Dixie Flyers, a group of Bluff City aces led by pianist Jim Dickinson — made the R&B charts and demonstrated LaVette’s exquisitely tortured voice could communicate a wide range of emotions.

LaVette toured with some of soul’s biggest names but lacked the kind of easily marketable identity that might have guaranteed her the sort of stardom Aretha Franklin enjoyed during the same time.  “It was a great concern with record companies that I sounded more like Wilson Pickett than Diana Ross,” LaVette reflects.  “It was only later that I realized that I sound different from other people, and I have to work with what I’ve got.”

Without a recent hit record, LaVette entered a dark night of the soul singer, from which she wouldn’t emerge until nearly 30 years later.  “I had a wonderful manager [Jim Lewis] who found me in 1969,” she says.   “I’d had a couple of records on the charts, so he hit me in the ass with a red apple.  He knew everything, and I didn’t realize it.”  Lewis forced her to look outside soul music. (“He didn’t like any of my records and didn’t encourage me to make any more of them,” she says of Lewis.)

The result was LaVette took a crash course in pop standards, including the notoriously difficult “Lush Life.” The discipline proved invaluable.  “I thought I was hot shit,” she laughs.  “The songs that I’ve had to do to keep a gig, I’ve never heard Aretha do.  I’ve had to do gigs with just me and a piano for nights on end.”

In late 1972, LaVette went to Muscle Shoals Sound  (“a little garage-type dump,” she recalls of the studio, which ceased operation in 2005), where producer Brad Shapiro recorded the dozen songs that would compose Child of the Seventies.  Now highly regarded, it got reverent treatment when Rhino Handmade issued it in a 2006 limited edition.  For LaVette, it’s less mythical.

“I was in Muscle Shoals for a very short time,” she remembers.  “I know [Child] has become synonymous with me, merely because it was never released, but I had recorded before, and my earlier recordings weren’t legendary at the time.”  As for the reasons Atco shelved Child, LaVette remains unsure.

“We really don’t know why,” she says.  “No one ever gave me an explanation. It’s grown in reputation over the years, and now it’s the music from that period.  I think it has become great, but it still is not commercial.”

If she missed a chance at stardom on a large scale, LaVette worked steadily and developed her craft.  It wasn’t until 2003’s A Woman Like Me, which won her a 2004 W.C. Handy Award, that she began attracting a young, hip audience.  I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise appeared two years later, and listeners realized LaVette’s genius laid in her ability to reinterpret all kinds of material, including Lucinda Williams’ “Joy” and Cathy Majeski and John Scott Sherrill’s “Just Say So,”which had been recorded by Nashville singer Bobbie Cryner.

The Scene of the Crime might be LaVette’s finest record to date.  On Eddie Hinton’s “I Still Want to Be Your Baby (Take Me for What I Am),” LaVette sings, “So what if I drink a little bit/That’s all right/Daddy, didn’t tell me you like to hear me laugh.”  Like an actor, she’s able to create a character out of small gestures and inflections. “Choices” features Spooner Oldham’s electric-piano waterdrops, and Frankie Miller’s “Jealousy” is blues with a gash where its heart should be.

LaVette’s phrasing has a heroic quality that nonetheless sounds tactful almost to the point of Olympian indifference.  Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley’s guitars avoid blues cliches, yet the record is the work of a supreme blues musician.   It traffics in truths that in lesser hands would flirt with self-parody, as on LaVette’s scarifying version of Elton John’s “Talking Old Soldiers.”

“They really turned themselves over to me,” LaVette says of The Scene’s players.  “They’re such good musicians.  When you turn yourself over to me, I will make you love what you hear.”

It’s LaVette’s show all the way, and she seems satisfied with her long, hard road to success, relative financial security and artistic autonomy.  “I recently got my first royalty check ever,” she says.  “The great thing about this success is because they didn’t pay me for all that time, I don’t owe them anymore now.”

The Scene of the Crime is out Sept. 25 on Anti-, Child of the Seventies is available from Rhino Handmade/Atco.