When Bettye LaVette started in the music business as a teenager in the 1960s, she had never been to see a live show.
“I always knew I could sing, but being a singer wasn’t a life-long dream,” she told KNKX.
Her exposure to people in show business came at her family home in Muskegon, Michigan.
“In the 1940s during that time it was segregation, and a Black person couldn’t go to a bar or a restaurant. So, many of the Black artists on tour during that time came to my house," she said.
"Groups like The Blind Boys of Alabama and Sam Cooke. My family sold corn liquor and fish sandwiches and chicken sandwiches. We had a juke box in the living room and I knew every song on there.”
One of the blessings of that jukebox is that young Bettye LaVette didn’t differentiate between the gospel of Mahalia Jackson, the blues of B.B. King and the country of George Jones. They were all musically equal in her mind. That attitude has served her well throughout her career, as she covered songs from virtually every corner of the music industry.
LaVette scored her first hit single in 1962 at age 16, “My Man—He’s a Lovin’ Man.” Although she had some more hits in the next decades, her career did not take off as she might have hoped. There were some successes, to be sure, including a six year stint in the Broadway musical Bubbling Brown Sugar, appearing with Honi Coles and Cab Calloway.
But in 2003, her first real breakthrough came with her highly rated album A Woman Like Me, including a review from NPR that called it “the finest comeback set in recent memory.”
LaVette followed up with more well-reviewed albums, including I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise in 2005 and The Scene of the Crime in 2007 with The Drive-By Truckers. After more than four decades in the music business, she was finally getting the attention she deserved.
LaVette capitalized on the attention with some surprising releases, including Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook in 2010 that featured covers of songs by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton. Her 2018 album Things Have Changed featured songs written by Bob Dylan and was nominated for two Grammy Awards.
Her most recent release LaVette! from 2023 contained all songs written by another underappreciated artist, Randall Bramblett, and gets considerable airplay on KNKX. Asked about whether he wrote the songs for her, LaVette said he didn’t but they still sparked a connection.
“But when I heard them I feel like he wrote them for me. He writes the way I feel,” she said.
Bettye LaVette will be in the Northwest for a sold-out show at the Mount Baker Theatre in Bellingham on Nov. 21 and at the Vashon Center for the Arts on Nov. 22.
