The great American soul singer talks about her time as a sex worker, understanding Ike Turner, and why Bob Dylan owes her more than a kiss
Bettye LaVette has an explosive, filthy laugh. It comes bursting out of her – like hot rocks from a volcano – as she recalls growing up on the same Detroit block as “rich gospel girl” Aretha Franklin, the nights she spent with “wonderful country boy” Otis Redding and her “unexpected excitement” at recording a new album at 77.The gritty lava flow halts, abruptly, when she moves on to the pimp boyfriend who dangled her from a 20th floor Manhattan balcony. And it cools to icy hiss when she describes the “contempt” she reserves for “that motherf-r” Bob Dylan.
One of soul’s most under-appreciated talents, LaVette was signed to Atlantic Records aged 16, but struggles with the label meant her career stalled while Franklin and Diana Ross became stars. Despite scoring a hit with Let Me Down Easy in 1965, she has said she thought she was going to “die in obscurity”.
But thanks to a new label, an “aggressive” new manager and three, critically-acclaimed new albums in the 2000s, a long-overdue reappreciation led to her performing A Change is Gonna Come at President Obama’s inauguration in 2009, and in 2012 The New York Times acknowledged that she rivalled Franklin as “her generation’s most vital soul singer”. On her new album, LaVette! – 11 songs written by 75-year-old songwriter Randall Bramblett, featuring John Mayer and Ray Parker Jnr – her voice is so forceful you can feel her knuckles tightening around the mic.
LaVette has always blamed her stop-start career on her “buzzard luck”. But I’d also put it down to fiercely resisting presenting the acceptable face of black womanhood at the start of her career. “Other black girl singers in my area came up through the gospel church,” she says when I call her at the New Jersey home she shares with her mild mannered, antique glass-dealing husband, Kevin Kiley. While her peers’ passions were directed towards heaven, LaVette was wild and sexual, with a raw, commanding voice “that was never beautiful. I wanted to sound like Doris Day and it took me almost 20 years to accept I sounded more like James Brown and Ray Charles. I might not be mellifluous, but you never doubt that I mean what I sing.”