Bettye LaVette – Transcendental Blues
“It’s awful,” LaVette went on, “but a Sarah Vaughan probably could not make it now, because you would have to be still and listen to her. I have to tell jokes and stand on my head and then interpret a song. But I’m glad in a way. The things that happened to me in this 44-year struggle made me a more rounded entertainer. I could not rely on a hit record, or I did not have a hit record to rely on, or anything else to lean on, so I had to do what the situation called for.”
In some respects, LaVette, who turned 59 this year, still feels like she’s trying to prove herself as a singer and entertainer. “I’m still introducing myself,” she said without hesitation. “Hopefully, this new record will cause people to go back and listen to A Woman Like Me, and then listen to the earlier stuff I did and see how I got to where I am now.”
A Woman Like Me certainly set that process of discovery in motion. Produced by Robert Cray collaborator Dennis Walker, the album, which compares favorably to Cray’s Strong Persuader, is an out-and-out wonder, a witness to the blues as lived — and, with it, to the possibility of transcending them.
With raves in papers ranging from The New York Times to the Village Voice, A Woman Like Me also exposed LaVette to rock and pop audiences, or at least to discerning segments among them who likely didn’t know she existed. (A perennial singles artist — the only other album she released prior to A Woman Like Me was a fine disco-soul set titled Tell Me A Lie that came out on Motown in 1982 — LaVette’s name is nowhere to be found in the album-oriented rock and pop guides published over the past quarter-century.)
Fred Wilhelms, LaVette’s Nashville-based attorney, recounts a particularly vivid epiphany from a fete in Mill Valley toward the end of 2002, just as A Woman Like Me was about to come out. The celebration, which took place at the famous Sweetwater club the night before LaVette’s first date in San Francisco in 30 years, was held by John Goddard, the owner of Village Music in Mill Valley. Goddard’s guest list drew heavily from his hip and celebrity-rich customer list, which for this occasion included Elvis Costello, Huey Lewis, Maria Muldaur, the eminent pop and soul producer Jerry Ragovoy, and Bonnie Raitt.
“Bonnie, who had never heard Bettye before, spent a lot of the show with her head on the table, just moaning in delight,” Wilhelms recalled. “The rest of the time, she was shouting for more.
“Watching Bonnie in the audience is almost as good as watching her onstage,” Wilhelms continued. “After Bettye did ‘Let Me Down Easy’, Bonnie grabbed me by the neck and asked, ‘Where the fuck has she been?'” At the club to see the renascent Howard Tate, Raitt didn’t even know LaVette would be performing.
A Woman Like Me forged other propitious connections for LaVette as well, including the chance to renew ties with some of the musicians with whom she’d worked earlier in her career. “When I was down [in Memphis] for the Handys,” she began, referring to the 2004 blues awards ceremony, “Jim Dickinson came up to me and said, ‘I just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Jim Dickinson and I played [piano] on “You Made A Woman Out Of Me”.’
“I just broke into more tears,” LaVette added, alluding to the upwelling of emotion she’d felt after accepting the award for the Best Blues Comeback Album at the Handy Awards that year. “That was a wonderful night. All of those guys have done so much better than I have. The Memphis Horns were just the guys who played the horns on my records. None of those people were names then and they’ve all just gone on to be so much bigger than I have. But I’m so glad that I’m being acknowledged by them now. I was just so, so grateful to Jim for coming over and telling me that.”
All of which does nothing to gainsay the deep sense of abandonment, the palpable grief over what might have been that pervades the version of Lucinda Williams’ “Joy” which galvanizes the opening six minutes of I’ve Got My Own Hell To Raise. LaVette nevertheless has recovered a measure of the joy of which she’s been robbed over the years, as well as a good bit of the satisfaction that goes with it. Best of all, perhaps, she still has the vision and chops as a performer to enjoy it — in fact, to exult in it.
LaVette has taken astonishingly good care of her gruff, powerful alto, especially when you consider that she’s been shouting over crowds in loud, smoky rooms since she was a teenager. A Woman Like Me and I’ve Got My Own Hell reveal that she’s singing with as much nuance and command as ever, roaring like a lioness one minute and weeping in the midnight hour the next.
“I’ve had to learn to take care of my voice, and to be very conscious of everything I do,” she said. “But because of my size [LaVette is maybe 5’3″ and weighs a hundred pounds, tops], it’s as much my body as it is my voice. It takes every muscle in my frame to sing that loud, and so I have to take care of my body. I know that I can’t sing drunk, and I know that if I were up on cocaine, I’m subject to have my heart burst, like Philippe Wynne’s [of the Spinners] did. And I know that if I were on heroin I’d go into a deep nod and never come out. So I have to do things in a certain way.”