“You can’t imagine how it felt on the road the very first time, on the road with Clyde McPhatter and Ben E. King and traveling down this two-lane highway going south and trying to get WLAC, which was playing all the hit records. To hear the deejay say, ‘Now we gonna listen to a little filly named Bettye La-Vitt,’ I was just, oh, honey, wow.”
Wow, indeed. Trouble is, “My Man” has had the distinction of being LaVette’s highest charting single, R&B or pop (#101), ever since. She churned out a series of terrific sides with a variety of producers and sessions players, and for various labels, as the ’60s progressed, all of them to little commercial avail. The most successful was “Let Me Down Easy”, a gloriously anguished record aggravated by nagging syncopation, astringent strings, and a stinging blues guitar break that went to #20 R&B in 1965.
LaVette recorded the hit version of “Let Me Down Easy” for New York’s Calla label, but her 1969 remake of the song for Karen, another New York indie, is a completely different yet equally enthralling record. The reconstituted take is an incantatory funk workout replete with “Cosmic Slop” guitar redolent of the sound that George Clinton and Funkadelic were honing in LaVette’s native Detroit at the time.
LaVette’s recording of “He Made A Woman Out Of Me” is another of her ’60s sides that did reasonably well, this one cut in Memphis for Shelby Singleton’s Nashville-based Silver Fox label. The single rose as high as #25 on the R&B chart in 1969, despite being banned from numerous radio stations, presumably for its exultant take on what amounted to statutory rape. LaVette’s unhinged performance likely prompted some of this censure as well. (Bobbie Gentry would reach a much wider audience with a steamy, somewhat more contained remake on Fancy, the terrific but largely forgotten LP she recorded for Capitol in 1970.)
Ironically perhaps, the man who robs the girl of her innocence in “He Made A Woman Out Of Me” was named Joe Henry, a coincidence not lost on LaVette. “I took that as an omen,” she said, alluding to her decision to have Joe Henry produce her current album. “I took it as a definite omen.”
LaVette toured throughout the ’60s, and with fabulous revues that included Otis Redding and Barbara Lynn, the criminally unsung singer and left-handed guitarist from Beaumont, Texas, among other luminaries. The small independents for which she recorded — evanescent imprints including Lupine, Scepter, Calla, Karen, and SSS — nevertheless lacked the promotional muscle or the confidence in LaVette to put her over beyond the era’s chitlin and supper-club circuits.
“No one ever did any promo,” LaVette said. “There was never enough faith in the front office, in any of the situations I was in, to have that extra push that [a record] needed.
“People now say how great those records were, but do you know the live CD that I did for the Dutch in 1999 called Let Me Down Easy? Before I did that show that night, I had never sung ‘You’ll Never Change’ live before. I had never done ‘Right In The Middle’, I had never done ‘Your Turn To Cry’. I had never done [a lot of my early singles] because all those things flopped so fast I didn’t realize they were good songs. I was convinced they weren’t any good, and I didn’t do any of them on my show.”
To get gigs back then, LaVette relied on her instincts, which meant performing the hits of some of the most successful pop, rock and soul singers of the day. “I’d sing whatever was selling,” she explained, “and I did those well, so I was able to work all the time, but my show was based on my interpretation of other people’s songs. I felt so bad that my records were not selling, I would try to do things to other people’s records. And that helped me. That helped me work all the time. I’ve worked [constantly throughout my career], sometimes for $50, sometimes for $50,000, but I’ve worked all the time.”
Singing other people’s songs did more than just secure LaVette work; it helped her become the bravura interpretive singer that she is today — and, for that matter, that she’s been for the better part of four decades. For every knockoff of a hit by Janis Joplin or Kenny Rogers & the First Edition that she’s recorded over the years, all of them worth hearing, there’s an astonishing remake of something like “With A Little Help From My Friends”. Her reinvention of that Beatles classic, a 1969 single for Karen, is an epiphany, a rampaging shuffle galvanized by wah-wah flourishes and quicksilver guitar runs that is utterly different from, but just as thrilling as, Joe Cocker’s gloriously histrionic performance of the song at Woodstock.
LaVette’s as-yet-unreleased retrieval of Morris Albert’s treacly 1975 smash “Feelings” is an even more dramatic case in point. Singing in an aggrieved wail, she transforms the bathos of the original into an expression of spiritual and emotional abandonment of seemingly cosmic proportions, something more akin to Robert Johnson’s harrowing “Stones In My Passway” than to any Top 40 hit. LaVette has worked similar, if less astonishing, wonders with the well-traveled likes of Joe South’s “Games People Play”, Charlie Rich’s “Behind Closed Doors”, and The Association’s “Never My Love”, among numerous others.
“It’s a very difficult thing to do,” LaVette said, referring to the art of interpretation. “I know what I can sing and what I can’t sing. All songs start off, for example, as Fiona Apple songs, as words on a piece of paper. But they can be anybody’s songs, anybody who feels a different way about them. If I sang [‘Sleep To Dream’] Fiona Apple’s way, then it would still be a Fiona Apple song. But when I say songs that I can sing, I mean songs that I can sing.
“It took me 30 years to learn to interpret songs. I think I could always sing, if you call what I do singing. I mean, I’ve always been able to attack rhythm & blues songs. But it took me 30 years to learn to interpret and learn to sing. Not only that, what I’ve had to do, to make things interesting, is to make my show entertaining as well.
