Child Of The Seventies, the omnivorous album she made for Atlantic’s Atco subsidiary with producer Brad Shapiro in 1972, might have done so, though. The record, which after three decades has yet to be issued in the United States, is a wondrous amalgamation of southern-style pop, rock and soul akin to those that Howard Tate, Delaney & Bonnie, and Arthur Alexander were making at the time. Inexplicably, the otherwise perspicacious Jerry Wexler, who at that point was overseeing operations for Atlantic, shelved the project.
Child Of The Seventies would have marked LaVette’s debut on LP — and after a decade of extensive touring and recording, no less. “It liked to kill me,” she told me, speaking by telephone this summer from her home in West Orange, New Jersey, where her husband Kevin has an antique business. “I’m not sure, but I may not be over that yet. I had many days when all I did was sit and drink and cry. But if I wanted it eventually to work, I couldn’t keep doing that.”
As one might expect, given LaVette’s place in the northern soul pantheon, Child Of The Seventies has been out in England and the rest of Europe for several years now, and to overwhelming critical acclaim. “It’s been so well received,” she said. “I just wish, even now, that it were on a really big label.”
Meanwhile, LaVette is selling copies out of the trunk of the car at shows as fast as she can.
Unusual perhaps for a soul singer who summons such a vast well of emotion, LaVette, who was born Betty Haskin in 1946, didn’t grow up singing in church like so many of her postwar counterparts did. LaVette’s parents sold corn liquor out of their home in Muskegon, Michigan, and Saturday night, as the well-worn cliche would have it, typically bled over into Sunday morning, precluding any real chance of getting to church. As if to compensate, LaVette’s mother, a Louisiana-born Catholic whom Bettye describes as mulatto, was forever making her sing the rosary.
More than anything else, the blues and boogie that blared from LaVette’s parents’ home-turned-roadhouse is what nurtured their daughter’s gifts as a singer and entertainer. “There was a jukebox in my living room where there was a couch in other people’s living rooms,” LaVette recalled with a husky laugh. “They would stand me on top of the jukebox and I could roll my stomach over into three rolls going down and three coming back up. I have no idea how I did that. I wish I could do it now, it would make my stomach muscles so tight. But I did that and people would give me dollars and 50-cent pieces.
“I was like 18 months old then, so I’ve just always done this. I’ve always been willing to pull my dress up and sing songs,” she went on, revealing herself not only to be a child who had her own, but one who, as the title of her new record puts it, had plenty of hell to raise as well. Indeed, LaVette’s comment is reminiscent, of all things, of Kathleen Hanna’s declaration of grrrl power in Bikini Kill’s 1993 single “New Radio”: “I’m the little girl at the picnic who won’t stop pulling up her dress/It doesn’t matter who’s in control now, it doesn’t matter ’cause this is the new radio.”
Among the patrons who frequented the Haskin home were electrifying gospel quartets such as the Soul Stirrers, the Pilgrim Travelers, and the Blind Boys Of Mississippi. “They came to my house on Sundays after their ‘singings,’ as they used to call them,” LaVette said. “That’s where they ate barbecue sandwiches and drank and just got up and challenged each other. Maybe the whole group wouldn’t be there. Maybe it’d be one person [from a group] and three from another, but they always sang.”
LaVette’s exposure to the pressing gospel of these vaunted quartets, though, didn’t make much of impression on her, at least not on any conscious level. “Young people weren’t into that,” she explained. “As I got older I never even mentioned or thought about the fact that I met those people. It’s only since they have become popular again that it’s come to my mind, ‘Well, gosh, I knew them as a child!”
Making a much deeper mark were a couple of female R&B stars LaVette heard on the radio and saw on television in the mid-to-late 1950s. “There were only two women, Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker — black women — who sang songs that people who were my age — kids, I mean, pre-teens — could dance to,” she said. “There was Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald and that whole group, but we didn’t like their music because it was too slow. The only two women who sung songs that I liked were LaVern Baker and Ruth Brown. Then later, when 1960 came, there was Baby Washington and Etta James. But before that there was just Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker.
“Of course everybody had a local TV show, you know, a dance-party type show, and I saw them on those,” LaVette continued, adding that she also has vivid memories of tuning in to see Jackie Wilson and Little Willie John, both of whom still lived in Detroit at the time.
“But you didn’t see a lot of women doing a lot, period. As far as black women were concerned, Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker were the only two that I ever saw stand up and sing in a gown or whatever. That was who I wanted to be exactly like when I thought in terms of singing.”
The influence of self-possessed black women like Baker and Brown, and especially the brassy attitude and pinched, keening wail of the latter, certainly is evident in LaVette’s earliest recordings. Foremost among them was the single “My Man — He’s A Lovin’ Man”, LaVette made the record for Detroit’s small Lupine label in 1962; Atlantic soon snatched it up and began distributing it nationally. LaVette was barely 16 at the time, but her ravaged vocals, along with the track’s serpentine groove and spiky guitar lines, conveyed enough adult sensuality to land the single at #7 on the R&B chart.
“When ‘My Man’ came out in 1962, there were not any black stations that went all over the country,” LaVette recalled. “WLAC in Nashville wasn’t a black station, but it had that black program that came on at night and we could get it, even in Muskegon, Michigan, because it came on so late.
