There are singers who interpret a song, and then there are singers who repossess it — who take something you thought you knew and make it clear you never understood it at all.
Bettye LaVette is the second kind. Has been since 1962, when she cut “My Man — He’s a Loving Man” at sixteen years old in Detroit and sounded forty-five. The record business spent the next four decades doing its level best to ignore her. They very nearly succeeded.
What Got Lost
LaVette made records throughout the sixties and seventies that should have made her a household name. A finished Atlantic album shelved without release. A 1982 record called Tell Me a Lie that barely registered. Gigs on the chitlin circuit. Gigs in regional theaters. She kept working because what else do you do when the voice won’t quit, when you’re constitutionally unable to fake it.
Then in 2003, a small label called Anti- put out A Woman Like Me, her first real shot at the audience she’d always deserved. It was good. I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, two years later, was the one that made people stop talking.
The Room It Was Made In
Joe Henry produced it, which is already most of the explanation. Henry has a gift for finding the room around a voice — for making a record feel like it was made at one in the morning with a small number of people who all knew this was something. He cut it at Garfield House in South Pasadena, his home studio, with a core band that included his brother-in-law, a young guitarist named David Immerglück, and the drummer Jay Bellerose — a percussionist so attuned to space and restraint that engineers talk about recording him the way photographers talk about available light.
The whole thing breathes. There is no production furniture. Nothing is there to impress you.
The concept sounds like it shouldn’t work: a sixty-year-old Detroit soul survivor reinterpreting songs written by women a generation her junior. Fiona Apple’s “Sleep to Dream.” Aimee Mann’s “Stupid Thing.” Dolly Parton’s “Little Sparrow.” Lucinda Williams. Sinéad O’Connor. On paper it reads like a career retrospective gimmick, the kind of thing labels greenlight when they’ve run out of ideas.
What LaVette does to these songs is not interpretation. It’s more like excavation.
She finds the bottom of “Sleep to Dream” — the actual anger in it, the part Fiona Apple wrote but maybe couldn’t fully inhabit at nineteen — and she lives there. When she gets to Dolly Parton’s “Little Sparrow,” she strips it of its mountain sweetness and makes it a blues, a lament, something with grit in the wound. You will not go back to the original the same way.
There’s a moment in “Before the Money Came (The Ballad of Jean and Jimbo)” — an Aimee Mann song nobody talks about — where LaVette drops her voice to something barely above a murmur and the whole track just holds its breath around her. Bellerose stops playing. The guitar becomes a suggestion. It is one of the great vocal moments in any record from that decade, and almost nobody has heard it.
I say almost nobody because the people who have heard it tend to mention it in a specific tone of voice. The tone of someone who is slightly annoyed the rest of the world hasn’t caught up.
The Amy Winehouse comparison isn’t unfair — Back to Black came out a year later and drew from some of the same emotional well — but it is incomplete. Winehouse was channeling vintage soul with tremendous technique and genuine feeling. LaVette is vintage soul. She’s not channeling anything. She’s the source.
Put this on after the kid is in bed and the house gets quiet. Pour something modest. Give it the good speakers or the good headphones, because Henry mixed this record to reward a proper playback chain — the low end is warm and present, the room tone is real, there’s nothing thin about it.
Track one will do the convincing. By track three you’ll be annoyed at yourself for waiting this long.