"The lighter the load, the freer the journey." -Bethann Hardison, Stylelikeu interview
The video interview of Bethann Hardison for Stylelikeu's What's Underneath project has been shared thousands of times since being published on June 2, 2015. The legendary model, modeling agency owner and activist shared insight into living a meaningful life while getting undressed.
The video's popularity is due to Ms. Hardison's captivating presence. She is a thoughtful and curious woman who embraces herself without apology. Ms. Hardison is the essence of cool.
Bettye LaVette is a soul survivor. She is the greatest
living R&B singer most people have never heard. LaVette's deep, rapturous
voice excels at portraying the anger and pain of love gone wrong. She sings
with the passion of a woman who understands the tenderness of falling in love
and the bitterness of breaking up. LaVette released a hit single "My Man-
He's a Lovin' Man" in her teens and chased the fame of her first record
for the next forty years.
The moment before Bettye LaVette walked on the stage at the
2008 Kennedy Center Honors, she would have been remembered in the history of
R&B as a footnote. That night she sang "Reign Over Me" in
celebration of Kennedy Center honorees The Who. Her performance brought Pete
Townsend to tears. Roger Daltry was mesmerized. Fellow honoree Barbra Streisand
was engrossed by Bettye's re-defining rendition of The Who classic. The moment
the last note left her lips, Bettye LaVette's career was reborn.
The reversal of fortune decades in the making is the central
story of LaVette's memoir, "A Woman Like Me." With the help of David
Ritz, she recounts the experience of having an incredible voice that turned
heads with a career that went nowhere. The memoir is an honest remembrance of a
life full of bad luck, terrible choices and missed opportunities. She is not
shy. Bettye is open about her sexual exploits and fundamental enjoyment of weed
and booze. Her candor includes sharing her plain-spoken support of domestic
violence. "I realize it's politically incorrect to admit this, but the
sight of a man slapping a woman did not horrify me. Context is everything. In
the context of the Detroit showbiz culture of the sixties, men slapped their
women around. They just did. It may sound radical to say so, but some women
needed that. Some women even benefited from that." Her faulty logic on
domestic violence would be welcome in a conference of pimps and human
traffickers.
Bettye Jo Haskins became Bettye LaVette when she asked a
singer named Ginger LaVette if she could have her last name. With her new name,
Bettye LaVette took to the clubs of Detroit and fell in love with the music and
culture of the R&B scene. "In music-crazy Motor City, no one was
crazier for music than I was." Her encyclopedic memory provides an
invaluable history of Motown and those Motown adjacent that cannot be found
anywhere else.
LaVette's memoir is filled with fascinating and dramatic
encounters. The characters in her world rose to the level of cinematic
archetypes. She described her first singing mentor Johnnie Mae Matthews as
"looking like Humphrey Bogart after a bad fight. She had cuts up and down
her face, and forearms as big as Popeye's. Ugly as sin, but she had a voice
that could shatter glass." Her lifelong friend Marrie Early lived an
independent and sexually liberated lifestyle Bettye craved. "Marrie was
queen of Miami, a city that didn't even like blacks. But there was no man-
black, white, or orange- who didn't like Marrie. Of her many wonderful
qualities, the best was her freedom. She was free to fuck whomever she wanted,
and her lover was free to do the same. ...She was the first single woman I'd
met with her own house." The various men in her life also left a mark in
her prodigious memory. Some supported her financially. Robert Hodge "basically got me through the nineties," LaVette wrote. Others abused her. The
first line of "A Woman Like Me" provides a vivid illustration of the
terror Bettye LaVette endured at the hands of a pimp.
For those acquainted with LaVette in the 1960's the sight of
her at The Kennedy Center Honors must have been a shock. Bettye continued to
play small clubs in Detroit when Motown headed to Los Angeles. The remaining
R&B scene was busted. Every attempt she made to gain a foothold in the
music industry fell apart. LaVette had a decade’s long run of what she called
"buzzard luck.” Buzzard luck was an
unrelenting streak of misfortune. Her mother died, her sister died, recording
sessions didn't pan out and promised record deals never materialized. She was
shut out of royalties. Her career was a piecemeal collage of small club gigs, a
short-lived TV show in Detroit, a traveling production of the musical “Bubbling
Brown Sugar,” and help from her friends.
Bettye LaVette's resilience proved to be as powerful as her
voice. "Luck had never seemed to go my way, and I'm not sure it was luck
that turned the tables. I'd credit the change to pure tenacity. I was simply
too headstrong to quit." A lifetime of buzzard luck could not stop Bettye
LaVette. "A Woman Like Me" ends in triumph. There was no other
option.
