Bettye Lavette: Late Bloomer Gets Her Mojo On

After Atlantic Records shelved what singer Bettye LaVette had hoped would be her breakthrough album in 1972—an album recorded in soul-music hotbed Muscle Shoals, Ala.—the Detroit native spent more than three decades exiled on the farthest fringes of the music biz, singing for her supper in dives and lounges.

“I gave up every other week,” the 61-year-old artist says today, “but I’ve been fortunate enough to have this one little core of people who have always said, ‘This is gonna work, just hold on.’ When I got to be about 50 or 55, it was like, ‘Hold on to what?’” At that she explodes with rueful laughter.

But she got some unexpected and long-overdue R.E.S.P.E.C.T. in 2005, when she was signed by über-hip L.A. indie label Anti- Records, home to Tom Waits and Merle Haggard. Anti- released LaVette’s Joe Henry-produced album, I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, to universal accolades. “The reviews sounded as if my mother wrote them,” LaVette quips. After that validating experience, shshwhen she came to regard Anti- head Andy Kaulkin as her savior, but she was taken aback when he suggested that she return to Muscle Shoals to record the follow-up backed by scruffy Southern rock band the Drive-By Truckers.

“It was an extreme stretch to me,” LaVette admits. “But Andrew is very persuasive and very smart. I just had to say, like, ‘After all these years, here’s a record company—a young, hip record company—who thinks I rock.’ I just went with that. The Truckers said they were fans of mine, so I was just hoping they’d like me enough to lean my way.”

Meanwhile, at Muscle Shoals’ venerable Fame Studios, the Truckers, whose Patterson Hood was set to co-produce with engineer David Barbe, awaited LaVette’s arrival with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, wondering whether the strong-willed singer would accept them. They were somewhat reassured by the presence in their ranks of a pair of ringers—local heroes Spooner Oldham on Wurlitzer and piano, and Patterson’s father, David Hood, who'd been alternating on bass with the Truckers' Shonna Tucker.

The sparring that would characterize the recording of the aptly named Scene of the Crime began as soon as the players gathered in the main room to go over the arrangements, with LaVette smack in the middle, lording over the process. “We had original versions of the songs to learn before hooking up with Bettye,” Patterson Hood says, “but that all, rightly, went out the window, so we had to completely rework every song from the ground up. If Bettye was there when we tried to do that, she would stop us every few seconds and nitpick it to the point that we couldn’t get anything done. Most of our temperamental times came during these points. It got where we would sneak in the studio and work up songs when she wasn’t there; then we could iron out the kinks in private and she’d come in and everything would go great.”

LaVette soon realized she had an ally in Oldham. “When I sing a gonna defend my position,” LaVette says. “Spooner helped me pull the way that I was going, and he refused to go any other way.”

“Spooner was the link we needed to wed what we do to what Bettye does, and it worked even better than any of us could have imagined,” Hood confirms. “Beyond his playing, his personality and sense of humor really defused some tense moments. Everything just rolls off of Spooner, and that became contagious.”

But Oldham’s calming presence didn’t totally defuse the tension. “Sometimes it would be going great,” says Hood, “and suddenly something would make her mad—usually me—and it was the wrath of Bettye, which almost could have been the name of the album.” That gets a laugh out of him. “She’s been through so much that she has good reason to be naturally suspicious. Add to that, we have our own ways of doing things that didn’t always make sense to her, and I’m sure she thought that Andy had paired her with a bunch of lunatics, but as it progressed, I think she could see that there is actually a method to our madness, and things generally went smoother."