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LaVette Returns To Scene Of Crime

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By CURTIS ROSS, The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 21, 2008

Ask Bettye LaVette if her first-ever Grammy nomination this year felt like vindication and she agrees heartily.

"You don't have to search for another word," she says by telephone from her home in West Orange, N.J. "That's exactly what it is."

LaVette's latest release, "The Scene of the Crime," was nominated for Best Contemporary Blues Album, and even though she didn't win, it's still more recognition than she's received for most of her career.

LaVette - born Betty Haskin in 1946 - began recording in 1962, hitting the Top 10 of Billboard's Black Singles chart the next year with "My Man - He's a Lovin' Man."

The early success was short-lived, though. She charted infrequently over the next two decades, bouncing from label to label. She toured in a production of the Broadway musical "Bubbling Brown Sugar" and kept her chops up with plenty of live performances. She sang everything from pop standards to rock to country.

No matter what style though, LaVette says when she sings it, "It's R&B because I'm an R&B singer."

Her versatility was instilled early.

Unlike so many R&B singers, she didn't grow up singing in the church. But her Michigan home didn't lack for music. Her parents made and sold corn liquor, making their home a de facto nightspot on the weekends and a popular spot for touring musicians.

"The gospel groups like The Pilgrim Travelers and the Blind Boys of Mississippi would come by," LaVette remembers. "Those people, they get drunk and they sing."

She also knew country music since her mother was a fan.

"We were the only black people selling corn liquor listening to Red Foley," she says.

"I can sing anything," LaVette says. Getting record companies to hear that, she says, was another matter.

"Thank God I had 46 years of struggle to master so many venues of song," LaVette says. "I'm an entertainer and that gives me a feeling of solace. With or without a record, I can survive."

There's a special kind of frustration, though, when a record is made and no one gets to hear it.

That happened to LaVette in 1972, when she recorded "Child of the Seventies" in Muscle Shoals, Ala., only to have her then label, Atlantic, shelve it. (A French label licensed and released the album in 2000, and Rhino Handmade brought out a limited edition in the United States in 2006.)

The title of "The Scene of the Crime" was inspired by LaVette returning to Muscle Shoals to record.

Some of the same musicians - such as bassist David Hood - played on both the 1972 and 2007 sessions. But it was a crew led by Hood's son Patterson that served as LaVette's primary backing.

The younger Hood's band, Drive-By Truckers, is known for rowdy Southern rock, not gritty R&B, and LaVette was clear on whose sound would change.

"I knew I wasn't going to do their kind of music," LaVette says. "The Truckers were very gracious about adapting their sound for me."

She would like to clear up a misperception, though.

"Patterson Hood, that bad Patterson, said the first thing I said to him was, 'I don't want to hear any guitars.' I didn't say that!" LaVette says, laughing.

"I might have said in the course of the conversation that I didn't want to hear a lot of twangy guitars but I didn't get in the car and say, 'I'm Bettye LaVette and I don't want to hear any guitars!'"

MUSIC FESTIVAL

Clearwater Sea-Blues Festival

WITH: Derek Trucks Band, Bettye LaVette, Eric Lindell, Sack O Woe and Rent Money (Saturday); Coco Montoya, Chris Thomas King, Sue Foley, Angel for Blues and Al "Coffee" McDaniel (Sunday)

WHEN: Noon Saturday, 11:30 a.m. Sunday

WHERE: Coachman Park, on Osceola Avenue off Drew Street, Clearwater

COST: Free

Curtis Ross can be reached at (813) 259-7568 or cross@tampatrib.com.

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