Bettye Lavette: Late Bloomer Gets Her Mojo On

Getting on the Good Foot

Little by little, LaVette bought into the program. “I said to Bradley [Brad Morgan], the drummer, ‘I can’t believe those licks you’re playing are so dead-on,’” she recalls. “And he told me that he’d altered his playing so that he could accommodate the movements I was making while we were all in the room putting the songs together.”

By then, LaVette was digging deep inside the songs, especially the sad ones: Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Talking Old Soldiers,” the George Jones hit “Choices” and Willie Nelson’s “Somebody Pick Up My Pieces.” “I’ve chosen the words because they’re poignant and they mean something to me,” she explains, “and I get swept up in the emotion, especially if it’s being played really well. It wasn’t like I was listening to someone else’s stories that were making me sad; they were true for me. Those are the saddest songs I’ve ever recorded; I don’t want it to be so sad that you can’t listen to it. I just hope the upbeat ones will be up enough to balance it out.”

LaVette needn’t worry. Her finger-wagging cover of Don Henley’s “You Don’t Know Me at All,” the band’s swampy romp through John Hiatt’s “The Last Time” and the Hood/LaVette co-write “Before the Money Came (Battle of Bettye LaVette)” totally smoke. “Watching her perform her vocal takes—and it was a performance—was like watching a great method actor make a film,” says Hood. “She got so worked up and in character, then it just exploded into the microphone. It was awe-inspiring and stunning; I had chills the entire time.”

If LaVette’s 2005 “comeback” album was a delightful surprise, Scene of the Crime is a smoldering revelation displaying an artist nearly a half century into her career who is only now approaching the peak of her considerable powers. “Goodness, I don’t know anybody else my age that this is happening to,” LaVette marvels. "I've got so many quick steps to make, and I really don't know how much time I gotta make 'em in, so I gotta make 'em fast and furious."