At the Kennedy Center Honors in December of 2008, a slight, copper-colored woman wearing a red gown sang “Love Reign O’er Me,” by the Who, one of the evening’s honorees. As she walked on the stage, no one seemed to know who she was. The announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Bettye LaVette,” and the applause was so faint that it was embellished for the broadcast.
LaVette is the last great vernacular black singer that almost no one knows of. She is sixty-four years old, and her first record, “My Man—He’s a Lovin’ Man,” came out in 1962, when she was sixteen. “Over the years, she was one of the originators,” Booker T. Jones, of Booker T. and the MGs, says, “but she’s ageless.” The guitarist and producer Ry Cooder says, “Somehow she got lost in the tail end of the soul era—perhaps she was just too ferocious for mass white taste—but she certainly is and was the greatest female soul singer, in a hard-core vein.” LaVette says that buzzard luck, which is bad luck that won’t end, accounts for her decades of being overlooked. Eight or ten years ago, she told me, “I knew every one of my fans, as well as their addresses and phone numbers.” Her career appeared to have gone as far as it was going to go. She was singing three shows a night on Saturdays, at Bomacs Lounge, in Detroit, and she hung out at a place called the Locker Room. The bar in the Locker Room was divided into the big-shot end and the dirty end, for the ne’er-do-wells. “I sat at the dirty end and sent all my tabs to the big-shot end,” LaVette said.
The performance at the Kennedy Center was the first time that LaVette had been seen by millions of people. As she walked from the wings, she didn’t hear or feel anything until she reached the microphone. “I was terrified,” she said. “Everybody in the world I wanted to impress was out there, and I was singing a song I didn’t want to sing.”
The honorees also included George Jones and Barbra Streisand. Months earlier, when the names were announced, LaVette’s husband, an antique dealer and singer named Kevin Kiley, whom she married in 2003, asked LaVette’s agent to call whoever was in charge of the ceremony and suggest that LaVette sing “Choices,” a hit for Jones, which she had also recorded. The agent reached Michael Stevens, one of the producers. Stevens had never heard of LaVette, and when the agent made his request, Stevens told me, “I found a nice way to say, ‘That segment’s filling up. Nashville’s really turning out for George Jones.’ ”
A few weeks later, Stevens selected “Love Reign O’er Me,” a ballad, for part of the Who’s tribute. It is an affecting song but difficult to sing persuasively, because some of the words are insipid (“Only love can make it rain / the way the beach is kissed by the sea”) and because the melody is slight, and overshadowed by a blustery refrain. Roger Daltrey, the Who’s singer, had belted his way through. Stevens was watching videos on the Internet one day, trying to find someone to sing the song, when he thought, Who the hell is Bettye LaVette? He found a video of her at a festival in the Netherlands in 2006, singing “Little Sparrow,” by Dolly Parton. “She strolls out and you hear a little bass line and, boom, she goes, and I thought, Why is this person not better known?”
LaVette never really liked British rock and roll, except for songs by the Beatles. “Me and Wilson Pickett almost starved to death when those people came over here,” she told me. “Nowhere would play black music after that.” Moreover, she is choosy about what she will sing. Bringing her a song and expecting her to sing it, she has said, is like bringing her a man and telling her to go to bed with him. When she finally heard “Love Reign O’er Me,” she wept. “The biggest opportunity I’ve ever been offered in my life, and this is the song I’ve been given,” she said. “I felt completely defeated.”
Nevertheless, Stevens sent the video of “Little Sparrow” to Rob Mathes, the musical director of the Kennedy Center Honors, who immediately felt that he knew how to arrange the song to suit LaVette. Rather than reënact the faux-operatic manner of the Who’s version, she could sing it as a lament, and maybe make it “the song that Pete Townshend perhaps in his wildest dreams might want it to be.”
Standing in a circle of light, LaVette began in a confiding tone, and ended in a raspy, full-throated cry. The gestures she made—rolling her hands as if to gather momentum, letting her shoulders go slack in submission, slapping her hip as if to urge herself on, and raising her hands above her head to plead—were arresting, and her performance seemed startlingly authentic. Throughout, Daltrey and Townshend, and Streisand, seated beside them, nodded and shook their heads, as if listening to a galvanizing preacher. When LaVette finished, Streisand turned to Townshend and said, “Fantastic!” Later, she asked if he had really written the song.
Nothing in LaVette’s performance had been unintended. “I didn’t come there to try anything,” she said. “I just thought, Whoever else is on that show, they have to die tonight. I haven’t had the opportunity to be adored already when I walk out onstage. Still, when I walk out, I walk out to make a point. If I have to rise to the occasion of killing you, I will.”
At the dinner afterward, Daltrey knelt by her chair. Townshend told her that she had made him weep. In her five and a half minutes onstage, LaVette had made herself a singer other singers might be compared to. Of one of her CDs, the Times later wrote that LaVette “now rivals Aretha Franklin as her generation’s most vital soul singer.” In the days that followed, LaVette heard from many people but not from her best friend, Margaret Nell, who lives in Detroit, and whom she has known since childhood. LaVette finally called her and said, “You’re the only person who didn’t call me.” Nell said, “I didn’t have to call you. Sweetie, you took care of it.”
LaVette is small and vehement. The emotions that her face registers most emphatically are happiness and anger. Her quickness to assume that someone has said something impertinent to her makes her seem ornery. “She’s a powerful person with a lot of sorrow,” Rob Mathes said. “If she’s bugged with you, or if you said something and she misunderstood, she’s still going to get mad, while you’re saying, ‘Bettye, I didn’t mean it that way.’ ” Nearly everyone she scolds forgives her. Michael Stevens said, “She can be really affectionate, while coming out swinging, because her heart is so deep.”
Although LaVette is most often described as a soul singer, she doesn’t regard herself as one. “In my mind, ‘soul singer’ is a white euphemism,” she said recently. “Around the time of Sam and Dave, when ‘Soul Man’ was a hit, black musicians would say about someone, ‘He’s a soulful motherfucker,’ but we never said, ‘He’s a soul-singing motherfucker.’ I never heard anyone black say that, ever. I’m a rhythm-and-blues singer.” Soul has its antecedents in boisterous church singing, and especially in Baptist church singing, and LaVette was brought up a Catholic. People in her church sang in a muted and decorous way and in Latin. Rhythm and blues, being tavern and roadhouse music, is secular, which suits her. The politest thing she will say to someone who assumes that she comes from a gospel background or that she called on religion to help her through the fallow episodes of her career is “Jesus had nothing to do with it.”
LaVette lives in West Orange, New Jersey, about twenty miles from Manhattan, in a house on a leafy, middle-class street. On days when she is idle, she likes to sit by a window in her kitchen with a glass of champagne and look out at her back yard. The yard has a fountain and several shade trees and ornamental shrubs that she prunes herself. A flock of pigeons often sits in the trees, which annoys her. The kitchen, like the yard, is spotless. LaVette is known among her friends for her high standards of housekeeping and her cooking. She and Kiley have two shelter cats, Smokey and Otis, for Smokey Robinson and Otis Redding; when LaVette was young, she toured with Redding.
“I was the first person in my family to make a hundred dollars in a day,” LaVette said when I visited her in West Orange recently. She was born in Muskegon, Michigan, in January of 1946. Her father’s name was Frank Haskins—she was Betty Jo Haskins—and her mother was Pearl. Her mother had a daughter, Mattie, who was thirteen years older than LaVette, whom LaVette adored, and who died of a heart attack in her forties. The family followed relatives north from Louisiana not long before LaVette was born. Her mother, who died a few years ago, at ninety-one, told her that in Louisiana a white man had taken a bottle of whiskey from her father and that her father had gone to his car and got his tire iron, and after he used it to hit the man in the head they migrated north. He died in 1959.
Childhood was not precious to LaVette. “Being a child was just not anything I ever wanted to do,” she said. “I always wanted to smoke and stay up late and drink and cuss, and I did all of those things at a very little age. My mother told me I would never get my clothes dirty. I always wanted to look nice. I sang whole songs, not just the verse, and I sang them like an adult. She tried to make me talk and sing like a baby—she’d make funny sounds to me—and she said I would look at her like she was a fool. Whenever we went somewhere, I always wanted to be with the adults, and I treated the children like they were children. I cussed at them and beat them up.”
One of the cats jumped up on the table and sat in the window. LaVette said that her mother was impressed that in Detroit she could go to church with white people, and she sent LaVette to a Catholic school. In fourth grade, LaVette was expelled from the talent show because she sang “I’m a Hog for You Baby, Can’t Get Enough of Your Love,” by the Coasters. “My girlfriend sang the music. I sang, ‘I’m a hog for you, baby, can’t get enough of your love,’ and she went, ‘Dum-de-dum.’ I got to the second line, ‘When I go to sleep at night, that’s the only thing I’m dreaming of,’ and Mother Ernesta said, ‘Out. Out!’ ” For a while, LaVette thought of becoming a nun, because she liked the priest. “My thing was never holy,” she said. “I never had pure thoughts.”
LaVette excused herself to open the back door and yell at the pigeons, who made a racket taking off. She sat down again and said that she met her first husband, Alphonso Mathis, who was called Pinky, when she was thirteen. He was the best dancer she had ever seen, “which made him the perfect husband,” she said. “Everybody wanted to dance with Pinky, and I said, ‘Well, if I marry him, I can just dance with him all the time.’ ” When she was fifteen, she got pregnant. The school told her that it would devise a program so that she could continue to study, and she said, “What do you think I got pregnant for?” She convinced her mother that she wouldn’t be comfortable going to school pregnant, “but I was comfortable hanging out with my friends after school.” Once her daughter, Terry, was born, LaVette and the child lived with LaVette’s mother; Terry was brought up mostly by LaVette’s mother and Mattie.
“Then along came Ginger,” LaVette said, placing her palms on either side of her glass, as if composing a still-life. “Ginger’s real name was Sherma Lavett something. I thought it was the prettiest name I had heard, so I just took it. My mother hated her—she told me she couldn’t come into our house—but I loved her. Ginger’s parents were letting her go to the dances at the Greystone, which was where Berry Gordy was presenting the Miracles and the Distants, who were later the Temptations. I was fifteen, 1961, and, since I had the child, I was grown in the minds of everyone. This is all past Pinky now, and Ginger introduced me to everybody. She was brazen, as my mother said. She would go to the club door and say, ‘I’m Jackie Wilson’s wife.’ Key is that she introduced me to Timmy Shaw and Johnnie Mae Matthews. Johnnie Mae was a singer, and she was possibly the first female black producer in Detroit. They wrote ‘My Man—He’s a Lovin’ Man.’ Shaw said, more or less, ‘Little girl, do you want to be a star?’ It was a seduction, and he probably thought I couldn’t sing, but it turns out I could.”
What a band or a singer needed to make a record was two songs, one for each side of a 45. LaVette already had one, “Shut Your Mouth,” written for her by Willie Jones, who, with the Royal Jokers, had had a hit in the fifties with “You Tickle Me Baby.” She had met Jones in a hospital waiting room. “He had on a black mohair suit, black patent-leather shoes, and red socks—that was the fashion then—and he’s got his hair dyed, fried, and laid to the side, meaning it has waves. He wrote this song for me, and then he disappeared.”
Jones says that LaVette “was a shy little girl, and she didn’t like to sing that much in public, because she didn’t think she was that good. Her mother told me, ‘Keep pushing her, Willie.’ She was a young girl going out, and for the song I just imagined her coming home late and having to explain to her mother.” In the chorus, LaVette sings, “Mama, please,” while the backup singers say, “Shut your mouth, and don’t talk back.”
LaVette practiced “My Man” for a week in front of the mirror in her bedroom. She had never sung with a band, nor had she ever seen anyone sing with one. When groups came to the Greystone, they pantomimed their performances while their records played. The only people LaVette had heard sing for real were in church.
Recording “My Man,” and “Shut Your Mouth” took two hours. “It cost about a hundred and seventy-five dollars, and most of that was in Scotch,” LaVette said.
“My Man—He’s a Lovin’ Man” was supposed to come out in Detroit, on a label owned by Johnnie Mae Matthews, but someone at Atlantic Records—LaVette says it was Jerry Wexler, one of the company’s partners—heard a pressing and bought the rights. In slightly more than a week, LaVette went from singing in her bedroom to having a record that eventually went to No. 7 on the rhythm-and-blues charts. She was assigned to tour with singers she and Pinky had danced to at the Greystone—Ben E. King, Clyde McPhatter, the Drifters, and Clarence (Frogman) Henry.
The tour started in Texas or Florida, LaVette isn’t sure, and, following the Chitlin Circuit, worked north to the Howard Theatre, in Washington, D.C. “Only the stars went on to the Town Hall in Brooklyn and the Apollo in Harlem,” she said. “Me and Otis Redding turned around and went back home. It was 1962, and he was still trying to break through, too.”
LaVette’s second record was called “You’ll Never Change.” The Michigan Chronicle wrote that it “promises to surpass sales of her first big hit.” (It didn’t.) Her third record, “Witchcraft in the Air,” did even less well.
In 1964, when LaVette was eighteen, she was singing in clubs around Detroit and being managed by a man named Robert West, whose wife made her stage gowns. West went to New York on business, and got shot during an argument. Mrs. West received the news that her husband was in the hospital while she was fitting LaVette for a gown, and when she went to New York LaVette followed her. “I used to read Jet magazine, and they had a whole little feature that showed what was going on in Harlem—‘Jackie Wilson just got a new apartment on Riverside Drive,’ or something,” LaVette said. “And I thought, I want to be with those people so bad. I took West being shot as an excuse.” Just before she left, she met a man named Jim Lewis, a former musician who worked for the musicians’ union. “He gave me his card and offered me help when I came back from New York, and I said I wasn’t coming back.”
LaVette’s friends in Detroit had persuaded her that Atlantic Records wasn’t doing enough for her, and almost immediately on arriving in New York she went to the company’s offices, on West Fifty-seventh Street, and demanded to be released from her contract. Jerry Wexler tried to talk her out of it. “He said, ‘Baby don’t do this, we’ll get it together,’ ” she said. He told her that they would record something soon, and that the company had a new producer, named Burt Bacharach, whom they wanted her to work with. When Wexler saw that she was determined, he wrote her a check for five hundred dollars. “You’re going to need this,” he said.
LaVette put her head down on the kitchen table and held a finger in the air. “Mistake No. 1,” she said.
Soon after leaving Atlantic, LaVette went into a club in Harlem called Small’s Paradise, where musicians named Don Gardner and Dee Dee Ford were playing with their six-piece band. LaVette struck Gardner as “a young lady who would do anything to get into show business as long as it was legal,” he told me. She asked to sing with the band, and Gardner said, “She tore the place up. I said, ‘Bettye, you want a job?,’ and she said, ‘Yeah,’ and I said, ‘You got it.’ ” The band played three sets a night, and LaVette generally sang four songs a set. “She did things that people don’t usually do onstage,” Gardner said. “One night, she wore a wig, and she was singing and she pulled it up, and the house went off. I told her, ‘Keep that in.’ She didn’t mind making a fool of herself as long as she pleased the people.”
In 1965, LaVette recorded a dark, brooding song by Dee Dee Ford called “Let Me Down Easy,” and, a few weeks later, wearing a satin gown so binding she could hardly move her feet, she sang it on the television show “Shindig.” “Let Me Down Easy” was a hit, and LaVette spent two years working it. Then, without a new song or any other prospects, she went back to Detroit. “I was completely broken and needed help,” she said, and she called Jim Lewis, who became her manager and mentor. Lewis, she said, made her the woman she is. “He added the lady elements,” she said, but what he really did was insist that she learn to sing. Lewis thought that LaVette had a strong and unusual voice and should know how to use it. He derided her ambitions to be a pop star, and the simple songs she sang on her records. The craft of singing, he believed, wasn’t so much about singing as it was about learning a melody. “He wanted me to control the song, so I could go anywhere I wanted with it,” she said. She might never be a star, he said, but it would allow her to make a living.
LaVette thought that the records she made proved that she knew how to sing. “What I was trying to do was stylize a song,” she said, and threw her arms to the side, as if onstage. “I just wanted to jump in and do it.” Lewis would have her listen to version upon version of a show song or a jazz song, and she would think that he was doing it to demonstrate how she should sound. “He would take me to hear countless people, and I would feel just lower and lower,” she said.
LaVette made us a lunch of sausages and roasted peppers. When she sat down, she said that her sister, Mattie, taught her to appreciate Ginger Rogers and Doris Day, and that when she was young she wanted to sound the way they did. Along with Fred Astaire, they personified her impression of show business. “I thought you woke up in this fabulous gown—everybody’s been waiting for you all night, drinking champagne and having dinner—and you sing one song like you do in church, then you go off to another fancy part of the world to do it again.” Her voice wasn’t suited, though, to show tunes. “People would say, ‘Damn, this little woman is frightening,’ ” she said. “No one wanted to hear those songs in that voice. It was like the songs were getting beat up or something.”
LaVette describes her voice as “very harsh and very gruff.” It doesn’t have all that much range. “I just dicker around in the middle,” she said. David Hood, who played on one of her records, described it to me as a “fingerprint voice,” meaning that it doesn’t sound like anyone else’s. “It brings the emotion out of you,” Hood said. “You hear years of heartbreak.” Its signal characteristic is a prominent catch, which singers call a tear, because ballad singers use it to emphasize sadness. That catch produces many effects in LaVette’s singing, including sadness, but also rawness, weariness, resignation, anger, resentment, contempt, and desperation. Because of the asperity of her voice, the tear sounds sometimes as if her breath had caught, and as if she were reluctant to sing what she is about to but feels compelled to disclose it. She commonly phrases far behind the beat, so her singing is innately suspenseful. Dennis Walker, who produced “A Woman Like Me,” one of her recent records, told me that LaVette sometimes waited so long to sing a lyric that, if you had your back to her, you’d think for a moment that she’d stopped singing.
For years, LaVette said, she wanted to sound like the women whose records were selling, singers with breathy, delicate voices, like Diana Ross and Dionne Warwick. “It was an embarrassment to me that I did not sound like those women who were doing well,” she said. “In my head, I heard how I wanted the song to be, but when I started singing I turned into me and messed the whole thing up.”
When LaVette was younger, she mostly sang loud. Gradually, she realized, she said, “I couldn’t do the songs like the singers who were famous, but I could do them softer like me. While I couldn’t sing pretty, I learned to sing softly.”
LaVette spent part of this past summer opening for Robert Plant. There were eight performances, and at each one she sang the same eight songs, which took forty minutes. She began with “The Word,” by the Beatles, from her most recent CD, “Interpretations,” which features work by British rock musicians of her generation. (“These songs were the nemesis of my youth,” she said, and she rewrote lines to suit herself.) When she ended, with “Love Reign O’er Me,” so many people in the audience had seen the video of her Kennedy Center performance that a kind of mild thrill passed among them, like the thrill in a Broadway theatre when the scene from the commercials is enacted.
Toward the end of July, the tour stopped in Clearwater, Florida. I left the show after LaVette finished her set and drove back to the hotel, because I knew that LaVette doesn’t hang around after she’s done, no matter whose bill she’s on. She walked into the lobby, with her tour manager Robert Hodge, an old friend from Detroit, and the three of us went up to her room, where she looked at a menu from a takeout place. “When I’m on the road, I want bou-zhee food,” she said. “I’m not looking for greens and beans, I’m looking for pheasants and lobsters.” She had ordered soup from the place the night before, but hadn’t liked it. “Honestly, based upon y’alls soup, y’all shouldn’t even advertise soup,” she said. “You should just put that by request only.” She shook her head and said, “Keep talking to me.”
I asked if it was true that she didn’t listen to music. “I am not a music enthusiast,” she said. “I’m not a fan of music. I’m the music. I don’t know another way to phrase that. I don’t mean to sound arrogant. When you talk to my husband, you can see his love for music on his face, but for me it’s like living with a man for forty-eight years, and y’all don’t get along, but you’ve got used to each other. My husband when he wakes up in the morning starts singing, and I say, ‘It’s too early in the morning for music. Turn on MSNBC.’ I’m a television enthusiast. First ten years, I watched soap operas, and then I got involved in politics. I was the first black in Michigan to be with Ross Perot, because Robert here had worked for his company. I used to sing the national anthem at his appearances. We liked what he was saying, then we met him. We just didn’t know he was crazy. You know who else was crazy? Benjamin Franklin! You know who else? Me. I hold these long conversations with myself, but I know it’s not old age because I’ve done it all my life. ”
After a while, I asked if she wanted to be alone to relax and she said, “After I turn into Bettye LaVette, I’m here for the duration.” She paused and went on, “I’ve never been this tired in my life. My show is such that I don’t get much sympathy—they look at me and say, ‘She doesn’t look that old and she doesn’t seem that tired’—but, when you see me holding the microphone stand, I’m holding it for balance. If I was younger and tired, I’d just be tired. When I’m tired now, I feel like death. I really thought I could just adapt to this struggle, but I’m a grandmother. How do you think your grandmother would do if someone showed up and said, ‘Let’s go on the road with Robert Plant.’ I really don’t have a lot of talents.” She went on, “I can cook, and I can fuck, and I can sing. And I’m proud of all of them.”
After the final night of the tour, in Miami, LaVette came back to the hotel with a paper place mat signed by Plant and members of his band and a plastic dinner box that had four shrimp and a chicken leg in it. She extended the dinner box toward me and said, “You hold this,” then she went up to her room and changed and came back to the bar and ordered champagne.
“This is an auspicious occasion,” she said. “What does ‘auspicious’ mean?”
“Favorable,” Hodge said.
“ ’Cause we did this,” she said. “I ain’t got to sing no more this week.” The waitress put a menu on the table. LaVette seemed to slump. “I want to go home,” she said. “I don’t want any crab, I don’t want any lobster legs, I just want to go home and cook in my own kitchen and sleep in my own bed.” Counting performances she had given in Europe, she had been away for eight weeks.
A young man came up to her and said that hearing her that evening had meant a great deal to him. He said that he used to be a musician.
“Why do you white guys have to study it so much?” she asked.
“Yeah, well, I know,” he said bashfully. “You have to live it.”
“But why do you study it so hard?”
“I guess I do it for the love,” he said.
“I don’t like it no more,” she said decisively. “It’s music. It never saved nobody’s life. We still don’t have a cure for cancer. Honey, if I’m dying of cancer I don’t want you to sing to me by my bedside.”
The young man left, looking baffled.
“I feel ashamed about the levels that I’m not pleased on,” she said. “It’s because I’m all so old. I didn’t grow tired of doing this—they just never let me do it. I’m resentful, but I don’t have any real resentments. I’m glad for everything that’s happened to everybody—I just wish that it happened to me, too. I don’t know that I’d like to be recognized by virtually every living human being. I don’t know that I’d like it to be Beatlesque. I’d like it to be more Billy Eckstine-ish.”
She sipped her drink. “When I am on that stage, I really enjoy it,” she said. “Everybody’s looking at me, I’m dressed in cute clothes, looking younger than I am, but when I go upstairs in my room right now, I will not be thinking about singing another song.”
Hodge said that he would call her at five in the morning so that they could leave for the airport at five-thirty. “When I get up, I’ll be hung over and mad,” she said. Then she seemed to have a thought. “Are you on my flight?” she asked me. “In my egomaniacal thing, it would be great if I was to sit next to someone who wants to talk about me.”
In 1972, LaVette went to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to make an album for Atlantic which she hoped would make her a star. Muscle Shoals had a highly admired house band, which became known as the Swampers, and which included David Hood. They recorded with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Wilson Pickett, and Aretha Franklin, and they were very efficient. Their habit with an artist was to start a record on Monday and finish by Friday. LaVette’s record took four days. It was produced by Brad Shapiro, who remembers LaVette as “a little skinny girl with a very quick ear,” whose sense of time was “very, very peculiar,” he said. “I was really funk-music oriented, and her singing wasn’t something I was used to. She was almost a jazz-type singer in how she would feel a song.” All he knew of her was “Let Me Down Easy,” but he said, “When we started picking material, we didn’t have anything that sounded like that.”
Hood thought that the record was very good. Shortly before it was to come out, LaVette got a call from Atlantic telling her that the company wasn’t going to release it and asking her to return the plane tickets for the tour that had been arranged to promote it. No one seems to know who made the decision or why. Ahmet Ertegun and his brother Nesuhi and Jerry Wexler, the headmen, who would have known, are dead. The album has several notable songs—“It Ain’t Easy,” “If I Can’t Be Your Woman,” “Souvenirs,” “Fortune Teller” among them—and it is not difficult to imagine that one of them might have found a following. LaVette said that after she hung up she spent four days under her dining-room table, crying and draining bottles of wine.
A French fan named Gilles Pétard, who has a small record company called Body and Soul, persuaded Atlantic to allow him to release the record in Europe. It came out in 2000, and was later released in America, as “Child of the Seventies.” In 2007, LaVette’s label, ANTI-, had the idea that LaVette should make a record with the Drive-By Truckers, one of whose members, Patterson Hood, is the son of David Hood. Kiley thought that they should make it in Muscle Shoals, where she hadn’t been since 1972—the album was called “The Scene of the Crime.” David Hood was skeptical. “My son’s group is described as alternative country, but there ain’t a lot of country in it,” he told me. “When I first heard it, I thought, Oh, Lord, get a job. It was raucous and out of tune, and there was some punk in it. When I learned that he was going to be working with Bettye, I thought, What a disaster that’s going to be. I remembered her as a rhythm-and-blues singer, and I thought, It’s going to be a clash of cultures.”
Patterson Hood picked up LaVette at her hotel for the first day. She was in the bar, which was decorated with photographs of the famous musicians who had been through Muscle Shoals. “She was having a cocktail, looking at all the pictures of her peers on the walls, knowing she’s better than them,” he told me. “She gets into the van to drive to the studio, and she says, ‘If you think you’re going to bury my voice beneath a bunch of guitars and make me sound like the motherfucking Rolling Stones, you better think again.’ ”
Hood and his band are accustomed to rehearsing a song until they have a version they like. LaVette doesn’t like to rehearse. She is a first-take singer. Listening to the Drive-By Truckers refine their arrangements made her think that they hadn’t prepared properly. To avoid getting yelled at, when they finished recording a day’s material they would congratulate each other and begin to stretch and say it was time to quit. “Then we would all leave and drive around the block a few times and come back and go to work on the songs for the next day,” Hood said. “If we didn’t get yelled at, that was doing good, and sometimes, even when we were doing good, we’d get yelled at.”
Nevertheless, Hood is fond of LaVette, and persuaded her to write a song with him. Ordinarily, she thinks there is no point in writing songs, because there are plenty of good songs already, but she agreed. He got her to do it by writing down all the things she had been talking about since she arrived. The song is called “Before the Money Came (The Battle of Bettye LaVette).” One of the lines is “All the years I kept my style / I wouldn’t cross over / so it took me a while.” In the studio were more photographs of famous musicians, and before LaVette left she told Hood that she wanted her face inserted into every one of them.
For four years, beginning in 1978, LaVette toured with the national company of the musical “Bubbling Brown Sugar.” She sang “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “God Bless the Child,” and, according to the Atlanta Daily World, she looked “like a dream boat in a white tuxedo and top hat.” In 1982, with Steve Buckingham, who had produced “I Love the Nightlife,” she made a pop-influenced album called “Tell Me a Lie” for Motown, which didn’t do well.
For years then, LaVette played casuals—gigs where you sing one night and go home. Sometimes months passed between them. Friends gave her money and paid her car note and her rent and bought her clothes and tried to keep her from quitting.
“It was hard to understand what she was going through,” her daughter, Terry, who is a schoolteacher, told me. “Being a child, I would think, If it’s causing so much pain and strife, why don’t you just stop?”
Margaret Nell, her friend from childhood, said LaVette would often call her and cry. “And many’s the night she rang my doorbell at midnight and said they had broke her confidence down,” Nell said. “She would say, ‘They won’t let me sing. Maybe I should just quit and go to Burger King.’ ‘You can’t quit,’ I would say. ‘You got to hold on. It will work itself out.’ All those years, when she sang, the house was never full. There was never a line to come and see her. I was always wondering if everyone else was hearing the same thing that I heard.”
Looking out at her yard, in New Jersey, LaVette said, “I like to sit here and regret all this,” starting with insisting to be cut loose from Atlantic when she might have made records with Burt Bacharach instead. One reason she thinks her career took so long to mature is that she wasn’t ever promoted properly. That is possibly true, but she isn’t a simple case to promote. Commerce likes categories, and LaVette is not easily classified. She is a rough-singing woman who sounds Southern and rural but whose attitude, manner, and technique are those of a Northern big-city musician. Some people think that the two companies that might have established her—Motown and Atlantic—had already committed themselves to other singers and had no room for new ones.
By 1972, when LaVette got back to Atlantic, the company was turning away from black music and toward British and West Coast bands such as Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, which made the label money like never before. Motown, with its pop sensibility, was never properly a home for her, even though she was from Detroit. The company’s business plan was to produce music that appealed to white people. The Supremes were groomed like débutantes. What’s more, she spent years without a prominent manager. Jerry Greenberg, who became the president of Atlantic in 1974, told me, “If you don’t have someone really good with a lot of power, it’s very hard to get to the tippy, tippy top.” And not having an alliance with Motown or Atlantic or, say, Stax, in Memphis, she lacked the advantage of the house songwriting teams that produced streams of hits for so many singers and groups. No matter what explanation you supply for LaVette’s slow ascent, everyone agrees that, except intermittently, she never got the songs.
A few nights after the tour with Robert Plant ended, I went with LaVette and Kiley to the Franklin Tavern, in West Orange, where Kiley plays with his band and organizes a weekly blues jam. The Franklin is a small, eight-stool bar. The musicians set up in a corner by the door. Hanging from the frame of a mirror behind the bar were two black T-shirts. On the front of one was written “Bettye LaVette,” and below the writing was an image of LaVette in sunglasses. On the back of the other was “She Will F*ck You Up.”
LaVette took a seat at the bar, and the bartender, who was the owner, and who had gone to high school with Kiley, poured her a glass of white wine and asked, “How did everything go?”
“I’m back,” LaVette said. “I did it.”
Kiley and his band played “Ticket to Ride,” with Kiley singing the words from a sheet in his hand. LaVette faced him, and he sang with his eyes closed or sometimes fixed on her. Then he sang a song called “The Stealer,” by the band Free, and when it was finished she clapped loudly, and he said, “Thank you, that’s for you, baby,” because she had recorded it in 1972, on her Atlantic album, and still uses it in her shows.
After about an hour, LaVette stepped up to the microphone, accompanied by the guitar player in Kiley’s band, a portly man in shorts and a polo shirt. “I had the distinct pleasure here recently to sing at the Hollywood Bowl,” she said. Everyone got quiet. Then, with her hands on her hips as if she were supporting her back, and looking at the floor, she sang, “Blackbird singing in the dead of night . . .” When she finished, she turned and clapped for the guitar player.
LaVette came back to her seat, and Kiley stood behind her and rubbed her shoulders. A young man who was a children’s-book illustrator took the mike. He stood sideways to the audience, and sang with an anxious expression. “Don’t it look like ‘If you sing these songs, we’ll let you go?’ ” LaVette said. Then Kiley sang a Merle Haggard song, and LaVette left her stool and sang the choruses with him.
The musicians began leaving. LaVette stood on the sidewalk while Kiley took care of some matters in the bar. When he came out, he continued to fall into conversation. “Kevin Kiley, we have got to get out of Dodge,” LaVette called. He held up his hand to say that he was nearly done. “He’s like he’s drunk, he’s so happy,” she said. She shook her head. Then she said mournfully, “That’s what I want music to do for me.” ♦
