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.
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.
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