Bettye LaVette
Jan. 23 at the Iron Horse
This year the Grammy Awards are turning up the heat with blast-furnace-voiced Bettye LaVette. At 62, LaVette performs with the energy today’s 20-something wishes for. Her nightly theatrics erupt into a high energy 90-minute aerobic workout combined with supple yoga postures. This is not your grandmother’s lullabies.
LaVette comes from a musical era when you grew up entertaining parents and relatives around the dinner table. When she moved from her living room into the studio 46 years ago in Detroit, LaVette was hailed as a bright young voice in the city’s soul scene. In 1962, at 16, she recorded “My Man—He’s a Loving Man” which was picked up by Atlantic Records and climbed to number seven on the R&B charts. The subsequent failure of her follow-up led to her removal from the roster. That’s when LaVette’s personal trials began.
“If they had told me then to take a whole bunch of humiliation and anguish for 46 years,” says LaVette, “and then we’ll do this for you, I don’t think I would have made that kind of conscious decision. Because the opportunities weren’t coming my way, I certainly thought that I wasn’t talented.”
This year, LaVette’s Scene of the Crime CD, her third record since her stunning 2002 comeback, has been nominated for a Grammy for album of the year. And it has the music world talking clichés about her successful comeback. However, LaVette quickly dismisses those worn-out labels with no optimistic hindsight.
“I don’t think I ever thought this was going to happen,” says LaVette. “I don’t think while I was working, I got up every morning thinking I had to work on an inner hope. If there is any lesson, it is that you have to be prepared if and when they do call.”
*
LaVette’s preparation began atop a jukebox in her parents’ living room. With her father selling homemade corn liquor, LaVette remembers being 18 months old, standing on the juke box performing to a hail of quarters from friends and relatives. But after many failed singles, it was her lessons from manager and coach Jim Lewis that remain in every LaVette performance.
“Jim Lewis made the artist that we’re all talking about,” she says. “He respected what I did, and he knew that I was talented. He taught me to be a singer first. He told me, ‘I can’t guarantee you’ll be a star, but if you do what it takes to be a singer, I can guarantee you’ll always make a living.’ I had to learn a whole lot of songs and be able to sing them. Because I was a good singer, I was always able to keep some kind of gig.”
Lewis’s tough-love approach forced LaVette to remain humble. “He used to lock me in rooms and make me listen to Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett for hours.”
LaVette’s journey from the ’70s to today reads like a testament to personal strength. Failed record deals, financial help from friends and family, and a starring role in the touring company of the Broadway musical Bubbling Brown Sugar have molded LaVette into the artist you hear now.
“I was taught to do the very same show for 50 dollars as for 50,000 dollars. I still feel the same way when I do a performance today that I felt when I performed in my parents’ living room.”
Yet, through it all, she has never lost the powerful connective intimacy she learned with Lewis. When you witness a Bettye LaVette performance, you are under the spell of a woman expressing real human emotion and drama. Today her voice has bits of Aretha, Tina, even Sarah Vaughan, yet the tear hidden within and the sage maturity is all LaVette.
“I also think there’s an ache in my voice and there is one in my heart too. It will always remain there. If they suddenly gave me the full Tina Turner treatment, the hurt that has been there would still be there. You can’t take that away. It’s almost like my hair color.”
